50 Fun Facts About Dystopian Fiction

Which Newspeak word from Nineteen Eighty-Four means holding two conflicting beliefs as true at once?

Doublethink is Oceania's discipline of simultaneously accepting two conflicting beliefs, summed up in the Party slogans 'War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength'.

Which playground game, overseen by a giant doll named Young-hee, opens the deadly contest in Squid Game?

Red Light, Green Light opens the games; the giant doll was modelled on Young-hee, a character from the covers of the South Korean textbooks Chul-soo and Young-hee in the 1970s and 1980s.

Which effect did The Matrix popularise, freezing the action while the camera appears to swing around it?

Bullet time represents a character's heightened perception by letting a shot play in slow motion while the camera appears to move through it at normal speed; Morpheus recruits the hacker Neo into the rebellion.

In which 1997 film does Ethan Hawke's Vincent borrow Jude Law's blood, urine and hair to pass as genetically 'valid'?

Gattaca is built from G, A, T and C, the letters of guanine, adenine, thymine and cytosine, the four nucleobases of DNA. Ethan Hawke's Vincent passes as a 'valid' using samples from Jude Law's character.

Which 2006 Alfonso Cuarón film, from a P. D. James novel, is set in a 2027 Britain after 18 years of infertility?

Children of Men adapts P. D. James's 1992 novel; Clive Owen's reluctant escort protects Kee, the first pregnant woman in eighteen years, as infertility pushes civilisation toward collapse.

Which 2015 George Miller film, with Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa, won six Academy Awards from ten nominations?

Mad Max: Fury Road won Best Film Editing, Best Production Design and Best Costume Design among its six, and its wasteland plot has Tom Hardy's Max join Furiosa against the warlord Immortan Joe.

Which 1982 Ridley Scott film sends Rick Deckard to 'retire' four Nexus-6 replicants in a Los Angeles of 2019?

Blade Runner's replicants are bio-engineered by the Tyrell Corporation for off-world colonies, and the Voight-Kampff test spots them through their emotional responses to questions.

Which Alan Moore and David Lloyd comic supplied the Guy Fawkes mask later popularised at protests by Anonymous?

V for Vendetta's masked anarchist V wages a theatrical campaign against a fascist Britain; the 2005 film cast Hugo Weaving as V and Natalie Portman as Evey Hammond, from a Wachowskis screenplay.

Which 1994 Newbery winner by Lois Lowry makes Jonas the Receiver of Memory in a community that has surrendered colour?

The Giver's Jonas shares unusual pale eyes with the current Receiver; Jeff Bridges wanted to film it for nearly twenty years, at first with his father Lloyd in the title role, before the 2014 film with Meryl Streep.

In Zamyatin's We, the One State builds its citizens' homes almost entirely from what material?

Glass lets the state watch everyone; the narrator, D-503, is the engineer building the spaceship Integral, and the nation is run by a power known as the Benefactor.

Banned at home, Zamyatin's We first appeared in 1924 in which language, decades before Soviet readers could buy it?

English came first, in Gregory Zilboorg's translation for E. P. Dutton in New York; the Russian text was not printed until 1952, also in New York, and reached Soviet bookshops only in 1988.

In H. G. Wells's 1895 novella, the underground Morlocks emerge at night to eat which childlike surface-dwellers?

The Eloi are the small, childlike humanoids the Time Traveller meets when he stops in AD 802,701, and the Morlocks abduct them after dark; the book is credited with popularising the very idea of a time-travel vehicle.

Which Anthony Burgess novel is narrated in Nadsat, a teen slang mixing Russian words with Cockney rhyming slang?

A Clockwork Orange was published on 17 March 1962, and American editions dropped its 21st and final chapter until 1986, ending the book on Alex's relapse rather than his growing up.

Which aversion therapy leaves Burgess's droog Alex sickened by the thought of violence after drugged film screenings?

The Ludovico Technique is sold by the Minister of the Interior as a way to rehabilitate criminals in just two weeks: Alex is strapped to a chair, his eyes clamped open, and injected with drugs while violent films play.

Golding got the plot of Lord of the Flies from which R. M. Ballantyne boys' adventure novel he thought unrealistic?

The Coral Island, with its focus on Christianity and the civilising influence of British colonialism, prompted Golding to ask his wife whether he should write instead about castaway boys behaving as real ones would.

Which Kazuo Ishiguro novel follows Kathy, Ruth and Tommy, Hailsham pupils raised as clones to donate their organs?

Never Let Me Go was shortlisted for the 2005 Booker Prize, and Mark Romanek's 2010 film cast Carey Mulligan as Kathy, Andrew Garfield as Tommy and Keira Knightley as Ruth.

Who won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Road, a father and son's trek across an ash-covered America?

Cormac McCarthy told Oprah Winfrey his young son John Francis was his co-author, since some of the book's conversations were ones they had really had; John Hillcoat's 2009 film starred Viggo Mortensen.

Which Emily St. John Mandel novel is named after a comic drawn by Miranda Carroll, clung to by a pandemic survivor?

Station Eleven follows the Traveling Symphony, a troupe performing Shakespeare around the Great Lakes twenty years after the Georgia Flu, and it won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in May 2015.

Which Octavia Butler novel, beginning in a collapsing 2024, has teenager Lauren Olamina found the religion Earthseed?

Parable of the Sower's creed holds that 'God is Change' and that believers can 'shape God', with humanity destined to spread the seeds of Earth to other planets; Butler published it in 1993.

Which John Brunner novel, set in an overpopulated 2010, won the 1969 Hugo with a collage style taken from Dos Passos?

Stand on Zanzibar first appeared in part in New Worlds magazine in 1967, and besides the Hugo it took the 1969 BSFA Award and the 1973 Prix Tour-Apollo.

Which Scott Westerfeld novel has Tally Youngblood awaiting the operation that turns every 16-year-old into a 'Pretty'?

Uglies grew out of Westerfeld's email exchanges with Ted Chiang about his story 'Liking What You See: A Documentary', and from a friend whose new Los Angeles dentist suggested cosmetic surgery.

Which 1999 Koushun Takami novel, filmed a year later, makes a Japanese school class kill one another until one remains?

Battle Royale was Takami's first and only novel, completed in 1996 but unpublished until 1999, when it became a surprise bestseller; the students wake in a classroom, surrounded by troops, wearing metal collars.

Which 1962 J. G. Ballard novel turns London into a tropical lagoon after solar radiation melts the polar ice caps?

The Drowned World follows biologist Robert Kerans, who is drawn toward the swamp rather than the old order; Ballard linked its drowned-city imagery to memories of Shanghai and called it a return toward a second Triassic age.

Which 1984 novel is the only one to take the 'triple crown' of the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick awards?

Neuromancer popularised cyberspace and 'jacking in', ideas Gibson had introduced in his short story 'Burning Chrome', and its sequels Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive completed the Sprawl trilogy.

Which Kurt Vonnegut story, set in 2081, has the Handicapper General fit the gifted with weights, masks and ear radios?

Harrison Bergeron ends with Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, shooting the escaped Harrison and his ballerina mid-kiss on live television; a 2009 short film retold it as 2081.

Under which pen name did Stephen King publish The Running Man, set in a 2025 where a game show hunts its contestants?

Richard Bachman was meant to be King's long-term alias, but he was outed shortly after the fifth Bachman novel, Thinner; Arnold Schwarzenegger's 1987 film changed Ben Richards almost beyond recognition.

Which Hugo-winning Philip K. Dick novel has Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany ruling a partitioned United States in 1962?

The Man in the High Castle contains its own banned novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, in which the Allies won; Amazon adapted Dick's book for television in 2015.

Which 1908 Jack London novel about an American oligarchy is called the earliest of modern dystopian fiction?

The Iron Heel's Oligarchy holds North America for three centuries before a revolution ushers in the Brotherhood of Man, and its publisher asked only that one footnote he thought libellous be cut.

In which Ayn Rand novella has the word 'I' been abolished, leaving the hero known only as Equality 7-2521?

Anthem was first published in Britain by Cassell in 1938; the hero rediscovers the word 'I' in the books of an abandoned house and renames himself Prometheus.

Which Ursula K. Le Guin novel has George Orr's 'effective' dreams rewrite reality, exploited by his psychiatrist?

The Lathe of Heaven takes its title from a mistranslated passage of Chuang Tzu, and the hero's name is read as a nod to George Orwell; Dr Haber's Augmentor pushes Orr into ever more intolerable worlds.

Which 1909 E. M. Forster story, set in humanity's underground cells, is credited with predicting the internet?

The Machine Stops was Forster's rebuttal to the optimistic futures of H. G. Wells; it first ran in The Oxford and Cambridge Review in November 1909, and Vashti's son Kuno is threatened with 'Homelessness' for reaching the surface.

Hugh Howey's Silo saga, now an Apple TV+ series, began in 2011 as which self-published short story?

Wool was sold through Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing, then grew with four sequel novellas into a novel of the same name, followed by Shift and Dust; the TV series reached Apple TV+ on 5 May 2023.

Which Ernest Cline novel sends Wade Watts hunting James Halliday's Easter egg through the virtual world OASIS in 2045?

Ready Player One was Cline's 2011 debut, sold in a bidding war to Crown; Steven Spielberg's film followed in 2018, and the final gate is cleared in Adventure, the game with the first ever Easter egg.

Which numbered chamber in the Ministry of Love, holding each prisoner's worst fear, is named after a BBC meeting space?

Room 101 is the basement torture chamber where Winston Smith meets a cage of rats; Orwell took the number from a conference room at Broadcasting House where he sat through tedious meetings.

What early title did Orwell weigh against Nineteen Eighty-Four shortly before completing the second draft?

The Last Man in Europe lost out, and Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final completed book, with the author predicting earnings of around £500.

Ridley Scott's 1982 replicant-hunting film borrowed its title from a screen treatment by which Beat Generation writer?

William S. Burroughs had written a cinema treatment of a 1974 Alan E. Nourse novel; screenwriter Hampton Fancher found it, Scott liked the name, and producer Michael Deeley bought the rights to both titles.

Which 1985 Terry Gilliam film about a daydreaming bureaucrat takes its title from a 1939 Ary Barroso song?

Brazil takes its name from Ary Barroso's 'Aquarela do Brasil', hummed by Sam Lowry as the film ends; Sid Sheinberg's 94-minute 'Love Conquers All' recut sits beside Gilliam's 142-minute 'fifth and final cut' on Criterion.

In Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer, what do the tail-section rebels discover their protein bars have been made from?

Cockroaches are what Curtis and his fellow revolutionaries find the bars were made of; the film adapts Le Transperceneige, a French graphic novel by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand and Jean-Marc Rochette.

In the 1976 film Logan's Run, the Carrousel ritual kills every citizen of the domed city on reaching what age?

30 was the screenplay's choice: the source novel killed citizens at 21, and David Zelag Goodman raised the age so that more actors could be considered for casting.

In Pixar's WALL-E, humans evacuated by the Buy n Large corporation 700 years earlier live aboard which starliner?

The Axiom's autopilot, AUTO, hides directive A113, recorded in 2110 by Buy n Large's CEO Shelby Forthright, ordering the ship never to return to a toxic Earth that is in fact starting to recover.

Which 2002 Spielberg film, from a Philip K. Dick story, has 'precogs' foresee murders for a PreCrime unit in 2054?

Minority Report was first optioned in 1992 as a sequel to another Dick adaptation, Total Recall, with Arnold Schwarzenegger set to reprise his role; the finished film is set in the Washington area.

Which 1981 John Carpenter film turns Manhattan into a prison that Snake Plissken enters to rescue the President?

Escape from New York is set in 1997, after a 400% rise in crime led to Manhattan's conversion in 1988; Kurt Russell's Snake, a Special Forces hero turned robber, gets 24 hours to bring the President out.

Which 1987 Paul Verhoeven film lets Omni Consumer Products run the Detroit police and rebuild a murdered officer?

RoboCop's OCP unveils the ED-209 enforcement robot to supplant police altogether, and Peter Weller's Alex Murphy is revived as a cyborg after a gang murders him in a near-future Detroit on the brink of collapse.

Which lawman of Mega-City One, empowered to convict and sentence on the spot, debuted in the second issue of 2000 AD?

Judge Dredd was created by writer John Wagner and artist Carlos Ezquerra, and his Mega-City One covers most of the east coast of North America; Street Judges there can instantly convict, sentence and sometimes execute offenders.

Which 2006 satire wakes army librarian Joe Bauers from a forgotten hibernation experiment 500 years later?

Idiocracy stars Luke Wilson as Joe Bauers, whose experiment was forgotten after a sex scandal closed the base; he and Maya Rudolph's Rita wake in a devolved, anti-intellectual America, in a script co-written by Etan Cohen.

In the 2013 film The Purge, set in 2022, all crime is legal for how many hours once a year?

12 hours, from 7 p.m. on 22 March to 7 a.m. the next morning, is the window in which emergency services shut down; by 2022 unemployment has fallen to 1% and crime to an all-time low.

Which Guardian TV critic and Screenwipe presenter created Black Mirror, opening it with a prime minister and a pig?

Charlie Brooker wrote the opening episode, aired on Channel 4 on 4 December 2011, in which a kidnapper will free a royal only if the prime minister has sex with a pig on live television.

Which director asked Warner Bros. to pull the 1971 film of Burgess's novel from British cinemas over copycat violence?

Stanley Kubrick's film stayed off British screens until it was passed uncut for cinemas on 13 December 1999 and released on 17 March 2000; it had also been banned in several other countries.

Which 1971 film, George Lucas's feature debut grown from his student short, has a drugged populace policed by androids?

THX 1138 was produced by Francis Ford Coppola and co-written by Walter Murch, with Robert Duvall in the title role; it grew from Lucas's 1967 short Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB.

Which 1988 Katsuhiro Otomo anime, set in a 2019 Neo-Tokyo, has biker Kaneda's friend Tetsuo gain telekinetic powers?

Akira opens after Tokyo's sudden destruction on 16 July 1988 triggers a world war, leaving Neo-Tokyo riddled with corruption, protests and gang violence; Otomo adapted his own 1982 manga.