Take a look in any major bookshop, and you’ll see dystopias. For some reason, tales of horrible futures have been popular for much of the twenty-first century, not least in the Young Adult section. Dystopia, however, is not limited to modern bookshelves. If you were exposed to science fiction through a school-approved reading list, there’s a good chance that you’ll recognise one of three texts. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) are all cornerstones of dystopian fiction, and are also noteworthy for having broken out of science fiction and into the literary mainstream.

Dystopias, along with utopias and future histories, form three parts of one of science fiction’s oldest recognisable roots. Put simply, dystopias present the future as bad, utopias posit an idealised world, and future histories take a more neutral outlook at the passage of time.

The word ‘Utopia’ first appears in the science fiction family tree as the title of Thomas Moore’s 1516 text. In it, Moore describes the fictional island of Utopia, which is markedly different from the Europe familiar to his readers. This Utopia is described as a near-perfect society, though it would not appear as such to modern readers due to elements such as the ready acceptance of slavery. Crucially, Moore’s text is presented as a story heard from another intellectual, and written in a style that, if published today, would be recognisable as non-fiction.

Following on from the success of Frankenstein, in 1826 Mary Shelley published The Last Man. Set at the end of the twenty-first century, the novel is largely a tribute to Shelley’s friends and colleagues, with future events neatly mapping onto historical ones. The more successfully speculative elements feature a plague which destroys mankind, save for one wandering narrator.

Later in the nineteenth century, utopian fiction saw a resurgence. 1871’s The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer Lytton proposed the existence of a subterranean culture of superhumans, whereas the following year’s Erewhon by Samuel Butler moved the utopian ideal to a remote island (perhaps located somewhere near New Zealand. Each of these introduced recognisable science fiction elements. The Coming Race featured a powerful substance named Vril (which would inspire the first ever science fiction convention), while Erewhon introduces mechanical constructs that predate robotics by almost half a century. A final unifying trait is that, as was common for speculative works of the nineteenth century, there are strong satirical elements directed at mainstream Victorian society.

1885’s After London by Richard Jeffries is an early future history that opens with a lengthy exploration of British ecology following an unspecified disaster. Though the latter half is a more traditional novel, After London‘s opening stages reinvent Britain both geographically and politically in a way rarely seen. Five years later, William Morris’ News from Nowhere took a more optimistic view of London’s future. The novel is heavily infused with explicitly communist ideology, presenting a utopian world in which people choose to work because they enjoy it, and live long, healthy lives as a result of their joy.

In 1901, M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud returned to the themes of Shelley’s The Last Man, this time with an infusion of Christian mythos. A similar use of Christianity can be found in Robert Hughes Benson’s The Lord of the World, published in 1907, which depicts Christianity as the only obstacle to a satanic dystopian regime. Though the religious aspects of these books were soon abandoned by most science fiction stories, The Lord of the World‘s dystopian worldview served as a template for many to follow.

1909’s The Machine Stops by E. M. Foster is only a short story, but it does mark an interesting turning point. In building a dystopia, Foster looks not simply at social issues, but at technological ones. Here, advanced technology is seen as an obstacle to human interaction, and a threat to sensible society.

Published on the cusp of the First World War, 1914’s The World Set Free saw H.G. Wells turn from scientific romance to socialist fiction. Wells sees technology as a great opportunity, including the somewhat prophetic look at atomic power, but is more interested in exploring social issues. Perhaps the most notable societal change here is the abdication of numerous royal houses, and the establishment of a socialist world state.

If any book can be set to be the first modern dystopia, it is Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1924 novel We. Here we have people reduced to numbers, absolute control over the population, and the snuffing out of any hope. It is an unrelentingly bleak novel that has influenced, in some form or another, almost every dystopian novel that has come since.

The 1930s saw the rising tide of science fiction sweep aside many of the older forms of speculative fiction. As the US turned increasingly towards space opera, Europe saw a darker future on the horizon. Out of the spread of fascism came two significant future histories. 1930’s Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon projects the future of humanity through millions of years, recalling elements of Wells’ The Time Machine while thoroughly being its own distinct work. 1933’s The Shape of Things to Come by H.G. Wells is perhaps the most famous future history. Recalling earlier works of utopian fiction, it is framed as a man’s vision of the future (a man named Raven, much as Isaac Asimov’s Hari Seldon will also be nicknamed in the later Foundation series). Though Wells only looks a century ahead, his prophetic work feels more plausible as a result, particularly in the very near future of the time in which it was written.

In the wake of the Second World War, American and European science fiction fell along similar lines, and the age of social thought experiments and utopias largely fell away. Bradbury and Orwell offered rare exceptions, but these were literary novels largely distinct from the overall science fiction movement. Only in the twenty-first century did dystopias re-emerge as a leader in the Young Adult field, while utopian fiction and future histories remain almost non-existent in modern SF literature.