People like to say that there are no original ideas in Hollywood, and to an extent that’s true, just not exactly in the way many think, at least when it comes to genre entertainment. Every few years, it seems like one specific genre or another has its moment across all forms of entertainment and that includes dystopias. Generally considered a subgenre of sic-fi, dystopian fiction has seen some major popularity, particularly in the 2010s when franchises like Divergent and The Hunger Games were not only big box office draws, but huge in the world of books as well. The Hunger Games franchise continues to be a juggernaut, with another installment—Sunrise on the Reaping—hitting theaters this fall.
But while some books and stories are huge, popular hits, there are other stories that get a little less notice despite being great stories in their own right. These five books all fall into the dystopia genre and take on different, dark ideas of society and culture, presenting thought-provoking questions and serious challenges not only for the main characters, but for the readers themselves—and as dystopian stories go, while they all deserve a movie, there’s one on this list that we really want to see on the screen.
Kim Liggett’s The Grace Year has been described as what you would get if you mashed up The Handmaid’s Tale and Lord of the Flies and while that to an extent oversimplifies things, it’s also a great jumping off point for this book that sees girls forced to survive a brutal rite of passage before they can be accepted into an even more bleak society. In the book, 16-year-old girls are sent banished from society for one year with the purpose of the banishment being to purge their “magic” as the harsh, patriarchal society in which these girls live believe that women possessed magic that not only will eventually drive them “mad” but lure and tempt men. The story follows Tierney, a girl sent away for her “grace year” that is, in actuality, an exile in the wilderness where they are all forced to survive not only the environment and other dangers but each other.
What makes The Grace Year a particularly great book is that it doesn’t easily fall into the “one young girl fights the system and saves the world” trope. Instead, the book is much more realistic with the idea that change is incremental and something that requires more than just one plucky teen to make happen.
Published in 2006, Life As We Knew It isn’t a dystopia in the sense that the characters are dealing with an oppressive government or society. Instead, Life As We Knew It sees the characters dealing with an earth-altering event that makes everything very different and infinitely more dangerous. The book follows a teen named Miranda and her family as they struggle to survive following an improbable disaster: an asteroid hits the moon, altering its orbit which in turn wreaks havoc on just about every environmental aspect of life on Earth. The first book in the series, Life As We Knew It is told through Miranda’s journal entries and gives us a glimpse into the challenges and changes the world is going through which are chilling enough. As the series progresses, the story becomes more directly dystopian, with the final book The Shade of the Moon taking things to a particularly grim place.
As we noted, genres seem to go in and out of fashion to an extent. Right now, romantasy (romance and fantasy) has been having its moment but even within romantasy you can have dystopia and that puts Defy the Night by Brigid Kemmerer on the list. The story is set in a fictional kingdom where a mysterious illness is tearing through the population. There is one known cure for the illness, something called Moonflower Elixir, but the wealthy, privileged class are hoarding and controlling it, going so far as to create and enforce extreme laws to keep the cure in their control and the population at their mercy. However, a rogue apothecary apprentice, Tessa, steals Moonflower petals nightly to create medicine for the sick and poor bringing her into conflict with the authorities.
While the book definitely falls into romantasy tropes (there’s a ruthless prince that serves as a love interest) the exploration of have and have not and the power imbalance in the society makes for a story that brings up a lot of questions and themes that resonate in a real-world setting.
We could easily put just about any Neal Shusterman book on this list—his Arc of a Scythe series is particularly great—but All Better Now is a particularly interesting and unique sort of dystopian tale because it’s not about a world that is overtly miserable goes a different route: radical happiness. In the book, a virus called Crown Royale emerges that leaves those who survive it with permanent happiness. Literally, in this world, happiness is contagious and while one would assume that is a good thing, it turns out that there are people who actually take issue with the idea of a world without sadness, stress, and greed, putting at odds those who want to continue to spread this happiness and those who want to find a way to restore negativity to keep society productive.
While dystopian fiction frequently encourages audiences to examine what it means to be human, the human experience, and how we interact with our environments, the idea of happiness being a problem or having a negative impact on society is particularly interesting—and the reader has to decide for themselves where they fall on the issue.
While we would love to see any of the books on this list get a movie, the one we’ve probably gotten the closest to getting on the screen is M.T. Anderson’s Feed, as an adaptation was announced back in 2022 but has thus far not materialized. Feed is set in a near future America where everything is connected—literally. Almost all Americans have t heir brain connected to the massive computer network called feednet. It has some benefits, like being able to mentally access huge databases and communicate telepathically, but it also has some dark sides—such as corporations intruding and even running the school system leading to even larger issues.
There is a lot to unpack about Feed, but there are some serious themes and questions about consumerism, the intrusion of corporations in every aspect of our lives, deterioration of the environment, deliberate anti-intellectualism, and human identity. It’s not a happy read or a cheerful story, but it’s an interesting setting and a fascinating, if not eerily timely, tale.
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