Least favourite dystopian novel?

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Princess Frances

Active member
My least favourite dystopian stories are those where, for shock value, an "our history" master criminal becomes an alternate history important politician.

Such published novels have featured:

U.S. President Jim Jones (Jonestown)

California Governor Charles Manson

Soviet General Secretary of the CPSU Andrei Chikatilo
 
I'm kind of tired of badly written YA dystopian novels. The Divergent series really went downhill after the first book, and that's definitely not the worst example out there. (Though the Unwound series is a major exception to this. Very good, and also very disturbing.)
 
Of the 2 series I've read in this genre (:D), the Divergent series was my least favorite. Especially since I felt like it was a rip off of Hunger Games (and Hunger Games was better, IMHO).
 
Yeah, I agree. I thought the Hunger Games books went gradually downhill after the first one, but they were definitely way better than Divergent. I really am not a fan of YA books that make a teen able to save their society when no one else can because they are so genetically (or magically, or otherwise) special--it's an extremely overused trope.
 
Like AravisK and Glenny I did not care for the Divergent novels that much, but I don't remember enough about them to explain why, except that I tend to forget books I don't like. But Aldous Huxley's Brave New World put me to sleep and I don't remember anything about that one at all. Maybe I was too young to appreciate it when I read it though...
 
Yeah, I actually liked Brave New World when I read it as a college junior or senior. But I'd read 1984 not long before, and BNW seemed a lot more interesting in comparison. Also it did not involve anyone threatening to have rats eat anyone else's face, so there's that. :p
 
Jack Vance wins my disgust prize for excessive existential exhaustion of entropy in the desperate desperation of desperate despair. Compared to his no-way-out gloom-doomfest, the Dune series is a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

Gene Wolfe's "New Sun" series offered hope for far-future people. But in "The Dying Earth," hopelessness is the very point. Magicians living under an irreversibly waning sun can't prevent the extinction, and can't escape to any newer star system. So all that remains for them is to fritter away time by devising new magic spells which won't change anything.

NO thank you.
 
My Little Ponies may be DYS-TOY-PIAN, but _even_ they offer more hopefulness than Mister Vance's work. Anything entertaining about "The Dying Earth" fits the old simile about repositioning deck chairs on board the Titanic.
 
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