My thesis is about twentieth-century dystopian novels. Interested in some dystopian titles? Here are some you've heard of and some you haven't (in chronological order):

Jack London, The Iron Heel (1907)

London, a socialist, sees a dystopia operated by capitalists begin to form in 1908. Not a "modern" dystopian novel; it still seems to be grounded in the 19th century.

Yevgeny Zamyatin, We (1920)

The first modern dystopian novel, We sets the stage for the kind of cold, sterile future that appears in 1984 and Brave New World.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)

Huxley's dystopia is the opposite of Orwell's: it predicts a future in which people are given everything they could ever want, numbing them to thought.

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

The seminal dystopian novel, 1984 is set in a world where the state controls what people say, what they do, and even what they think. Orwell's dystopia is significant for its explanation of how language can be manipulated to control people.

Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano (1952)

Vonnegut predicts that human beings will be replaced almost entirely by machines, with even skilled artisans being put out of work by machines that can perfectly mimic them.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

Named for the temperature at which paper burns, Bradbury predicts a future in which books are prohibited and "firemen" start fires instead of stopping them.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1963)

The government goes to extreme lengths to curb crime -- even to the point of brainwashing. Burgess said that he had to write this book in a state of near-drunkenness because the material upset him so.

Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)

The basis for the film Blade Runner, Dick follows the story of a bunch of renegade replicants who are trying to self-actualize and the man who's after them.

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1986)

Set only about ten years into the future, Atwood predicts a future in which the USA is taken over by religious crazies who turn the country into a theocracy and take rights away from women.

Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993)

Another entry in her "parable" series, this one finds the heroine in the year 2025 as she attempts to get out of California, now a god-forsaken Mad Max-type place.