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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Dystopian Short Stories

19:07 / 25.03.07

Hey I am looking for suggestions of various short stories that are dystopias for a high school lit class I am putting together.

Any help would be appreciated, thanks!

19:34 / 25.03.07

'After King Kong Fell' by Phillip Farmer.

'Johnny Mnemonic' by William Gibson.

Most anything from Harlan Ellison's 'Strange Wine' probably. (Alternately, most anything from Ellison.)

"Over the Rainbow --" by Robert Heinlein.

I think it depends on how you define 'dystopian'. DeTocqueville's 'Democracy in America' may be one of the most horribly dystopian pieces of fiction ever filthed into print, but I somehow doubt he intended it as such. Contrariwise, the fifteen minute dramatic reading of 'Crisco Kid' that was on NPR a few months ago... Who knows? Maybe we're supposed to feel bad for the protagonist and live in mortal fear of leatherdaddies BBQing in a row at identical porches, or the massive spontaneous poolside orgies, but... Well, somebody was having fun.

Janean Patience

07:03 / 26.03.07

Ellison's Repent, Harlequin is probably his best-known dystopian short but I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream is the most horrible. The ultimate in dystopias; a future created specifically to torture anyone left alive...

Ray Bradbury had a decent line in them, too. Pillar of Fire about the last dead man on Earth, ending with a line from Poe, is a dystopia from the protagonist's perspective. Frost and Fire takes the very simple idea of time speeded up, an entire lifetime passed in seven days, and makes you feel it.

And, special mention because it's essentially a Bradbury story stretched over 400 pages and because I was talking about it just last night, Stephen King/Richard Bachman's The Long Walk gives you only a glimpse of the future it's set in but goes in full on the horror of it. That a world could exist where this happens, where death is a spectator sport... worth reading if you can bear King.

Wasn't Rollerball a short story originally? I've never read it.

Janean Patience

07:22 / 26.03.07

A pair of Kurt Vonnegut short stories also come to mind, though evidently slightly late. They're also an example of dystopias treated humorously. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is a future where everyone's immortal thanks to a cure for aging made of dandelions and mud and follows one family crammed into a tiny apartment, couples sleeping on the floor outside the bathroom when deposed in Grandfather's affections. The mundane problems of an overpopulated world. Harrison Bergeron is slightly more famous and presents a future where everyone who is exceptional to the norm is artificially handicapped to bring them down to a state-set lowest common denominator. It's been used in court I'm sure a few years ago but can't remember why or where.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

14:38 / 26.03.07

Here's a link to a previous dystopian thread, although it tends to cover novels in it more, there's a link to some wikipedia listings.

I'd recommend "Repent Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman, a story by Harlan Ellison as a particularly good dystopian future. I still think it's worth drawing a distinction between the Harlequin and V for Vendetta in relation to their methods for undermining the social order, and violence versus non-violence in the face of horrible futures.

You could also read Ray Bradbury's The Veldt or one of the other stories in The Illustrated Man (Actually, the story in there called The Other Foot, while being extremely dated, might be useful as well).

19:38 / 26.03.07

Joe Lansdale: 'Tiny Little Stitches in a Dead Man's Back' is a good one. Mostly because it also doubles as a horribly sweet family-get-together story if you're terminally fucked in the braincase. I recall that this may be mildly inappropriate - not for highschool students, but - for in a highschool presentation. (This highschool teaching this is part of my new upcoming deal in life, so I'm training myself to be exceptionally paranoid about what to suggest/present inside the actual schools.)

Anybody remember how long 'I am Legend' (the Matheson one, made as films with Vincent Price, then Moses widda Guns, and soon probably with the Fresh Prince himself) was? I recall it as a longer short-story, or passibly a novella, but if it's longer than that, discount the suggestion.

Also, look for the short version of H.G. Wells' 'When the Sleeper Wakes' as the novel is superior, but novel-length, and it was deliberately published as semi-paradisical, and marketed as horrible dystopian nightmare stuff where people have multi-sensory dirty movies in their hotel rooms and white people don't rule the Earth but have to live on it with the rest of us savages. Naked.

It's not nearly as explicit or blatant as the above summary/pitch may make it seem. I mean, this was a mainstream fiction around early 20th Cent.

Will vouch freely for 'I Have No Mouth...' as it is horrifying and excellent and hits the hopelessness of proper dystopic.

19:43 / 26.03.07

Thanks for the suggestions, some I had some I didn't.

Janean Patience

08:09 / 27.03.07

Also, pretty much every short story JG Ballard ever wrote. I can't remember the names of any. There's a massive comprehensive collection which I covet, and there's one in the Malcolm Bradbury-edited collection of Modern English Short Stories.

Though be warned, Ballard likes his dystopias. For Ballard a dystopia is an ideal state.

Mysterious Transfer Student

18:05 / 27.03.07

(Random Ballard bite) "Billenium" is one of his from 1962, a population explosion quickie in which the legal occupancy per person is three square feet. Like a lot of his earlier short stuff it's weirdly upbeat, the characters coping in a quintessentially British way with having permanently to live in the pockets of total strangers, or being stuck in immovable masses of pedestrian traffic for days at a time. A good companion piece for the Vonnegut story mentioned above.

16:54 / 18.05.07

"The Diary of the Rose", Ursula Le Guin. But it's a bit anti-psychiatry.

02:29 / 19.05.07

Robert Silverberg had a couple, but there's one that stuck with me... based around the same ecological-collapse-leads-to-cannibalism plot as Soylent Green. I remember a scene with a scholar eating his own books by making a stew out of the leather binding. I can't remember its name, though. It was in Nightfall. Ah, the story was called "The Road to Nightfall," Google tells me.