Dystopian Novels for Each Political Extreme
Feared Futures Map to the Political Compass Quadrants
Overview of the Framework
If you are unfamiliar with this framework, start here to understand how a Pew Research Center survey resulted in political clusters that map to the political compass.
These placements of novels in the quadrants below depict what the world would look like if each of these philosophies dominated and the current trends were carried to an extreme (as imagined by those outside that quadrant). Those that involve effective coercive control are in the establishment (top) quadrants, while those that imagine a world in chaos are in the anti-establishment, which is wary of being overly controlled.
See a similar post in Reddit’s Political Compass Memes. This Reddit author’s take is that these dystopias are acceptable outcomes for the quadrant in which they are placed.
In some cases, such as with Huxley’s Brave New World, the feared future is far from what he would wish. In the case of Ayn Rand, in her heroes, individualism triumphs over a decadent world, so the outcome is in line with the preferences of that quadrant. Her heroes escape into a secluded deserved paradise. The novel is only dystopian in the sense that the rest of the world descends into chaos. It’s not typically considered dystopian because the author doesn’t focus on the plight of the masses, which in Rand’s novel is seen as inevitable and self-inflicted. In that sense, the plight of the masses is similar to The Departure, but Rand’s intellectual elites do not exert power to exploit the masses after abandoning them.
It would be a fair critique of this presentation of novels to say serious philosophical works shouldn’t be presented alongside thrillers at a teen reading level. Yet the teen-level reading has potential philosophical richness behind it. It simply is meant for a different audience, so it doesn’t include the depth of the philosophical traditions that it represents. Even Mad Max (with the novel written after the movie), action-packed and not meant for an intellectual crowd, could relate to philosophical traditions that support living with focus in the present experience, not living for the future.
Themes in other dystopian futuristic novels include the following: book burning in Farenheit 451, right to body autonomy in Unwind, economic class and totalitarian rule in To Paradise, ecological crisis in The End We Start From and Ministry for the Future, pandemic and a chaotic future in Station Eleven.
Thanks for reading. Here’s a related post.
Repeat of Quadrants Content
This section repeats the writing in the quadrants, for any who have difficulty reading in that format. Groups are presented in order of political party size.
Auth-Left Quadrant
Pew type: Democratic mainstays
• 1984: “The Party” known as Big Brother wields total control and oversight of all classes, even a marginalized subclass, with assigned job and breeding partner.
Pew type: Establishment liberals
• Brave New World: World Controllers have created the ideal society in which all are happy consumers, kept docile with a mix of genetic engineering, ideological capture, recreational sex, and drugs. This might fit with progressive left but has totalitarianism.
• The Departure: The Committee rules from the safety of a Space Station. On earth, people fight over few resources amid corruption, starvation, & policing by mechanized overseers and identity-reader guns. The elite believe there are still 12 billion too many on the earth.
Auth-Right Quadrant
Pew type: Committed conservatives
• The Hunger Games: Themes of total government control; defined caste system; the spectacle of skill, hunger, loyalty tests, and romance as entertainment for privileged classes while gaining of rich sponsorship can influence life or death for the underclass.
Pew type: Faith and flag conservatives
• The Handmaid’s Tale: Under a military dictatorship that overthrew the U.S. government utilizing patriarchal religious ideology, women are stripped of rights and power; lower castes of a strict hierarchy bear children for the elite.
• The Women Could Fly: Women’s life choices are policed; supernatural power.
• The Marriage Act: A Sanctity of Marriage Act mandates marriage; non-compliant women are monitored electronically.
Lib-Right Quadrant
Pew type: Populist right
• The Road: Themes of survival after an extinction event, threat from cannibals, striving to maintain a sense of decency and hope.
• Mad Max: “Hardened man rediscovers his humanity”; themes of revenge and survival after societal collapse due to war, resource shortages, and ecocide.
Pew type: Ambivalent right
• Atlas Shrugged: themes of property rights, individualism, libertarianism, over-regulated capitalism; “looters” exploit businesses’ productivity; chaos ensues as the last heroic producers flee the pending economic collapse to safety.
Lib-left (Green) Quadrant
Pew type: Progressive left
• Brown Girl in the Ring: The privileged fled, leaving the citizens under corrupt rule of a criminal “posse;” they barter, farm, use herbal medicine and magic.
• The Giver: Forced equity brings order, erasure of historical record brings peace, emotions are blunted.
Pew type: Outsider left
• American War: Theme of climate refugees and war over the use of fossil fuels; no unifying totalitarian control, only fighting or seceding factions among a disintegrated United States.
• Not Alone: A mother fights for survival of herself and her son in a world of environmental disaster and scarcity.