100 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, and its doll is a childhood memory turned killer: she was modelled on Young-hee, a girl drawn in the school textbooks older Koreans grew up with.

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

Bullet time was shot with a rig of still cameras fired a fraction of a second apart, so playing the stills in order sweeps the viewpoint around action that barely moves.

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

Children of Men's director, Alfonso Cuarón, invented its mother-to-be: Kee, the first woman pregnant in eighteen years, is not in the original novel, where a woman named Julian carries the child.

Which Mad Max film won six Academy Awards, the most at its ceremony?

Mad Max: Fury Road won six Oscars from ten nominations, all for crafts such as editing and costume design: more than any other film that night, though Best Picture went to Spotlight.

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

Blade Runner cost Philip K. Dick a payday by his own choice: he turned down about $400,000 to write a novelization, so that his original novel was reissued instead.

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

V for Vendetta's mask carries an irony: Warner Bros., the studio behind the film version, owns the rights to the design and earns a fee on every official mask sold, so the protesters who wear it add to a media giant's profits.

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

The Giver was a long labour of love for Jeff Bridges, who first wanted the title role for his father, Lloyd; by the time the film came out in 2014 he was old enough to play it himself.

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

Glass walls keep every citizen in sight of the Guardians, the secret police; curtains may be lowered only on appointed 'sexual days', after handing in a pink ticket.

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

English, because the banned manuscript was sent abroad and translated for a New York publisher; a Russian edition followed only in 1952, and Soviet readers waited until 1988.

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

The Eloi are the far-future heirs of the idle rich, and Wells's twist is that the Morlocks, descended from their workers, now fatten them like cattle.

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

A Clockwork Orange lost its ending in America: US editions cut the 21st and final chapter until 1986, closing 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 has a cruel side effect: one of the films is scored with Beethoven, so the music Alex loves now sickens him just as the violence does.

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 is also a song on Kathy's treasured cassette: she dances to it alone at school, unaware that one of the adults is watching her in tears.

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

Cormac McCarthy called his young son John the book's co-author: many of the boy's lines, he said, were things his own son had really said to him.

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

Station Eleven's TV adaptation ran into its own subject: filming of the pandemic story was paused by COVID-19, and when it resumed it had moved from Chicago to the Toronto area.

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

Parable of the Sower finally put Octavia Butler on the New York Times best-seller list in September 2020, twenty-seven years after it came out and fourteen years after her death.

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

Stand on Zanzibar takes its title from a sum: by 2010, Brunner reckoned, everyone on Earth standing shoulder to shoulder would cover an island the size of Zanzibar.

Which young-adult novel has Tally Youngblood awaiting the operation every citizen receives at 16?

Uglies hides a second cut: the operation that makes everyone beautiful also leaves lesions on the brain, which keep the new Pretties placid.

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 British author flooded London into a tropical lagoon in his 1962 novel The Drowned World?

J. G. Ballard turned the disaster novel upside down: his hero, the biologist Kerans, sides with the heat and ends by heading south, deeper into the flooded tropics, instead of north to safety.

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

Neuromancer popularised 'cyberspace', yet William Gibson said he had never so much as touched a PC when he wrote it, and he rewrote the first two-thirds twelve times.

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 existed because publishers then believed readers would accept only one book a year from an author, and King was writing faster than that.

Which Hugo-winning 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 author foresaw an American oligarchy crushing a workers' revolt in his novel The Iron Heel?

Jack London told it as a rebel's manuscript that breaks off in mid-sentence, footnoted by a scholar writing seven centuries later, after the Oligarchy has finally fallen.

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 an old translation of Chuang Tzu that Le Guin later learned was wrong: a scholar wrote to tell her that ancient China had no lathes.

Which novelist imagined people living alone underground and talking through screens in his 1909 story The Machine Stops?

E. M. Forster, better known for Howards End, wrote it to answer the bright futures imagined by Wells: his people sit alone in cells while a worldwide Machine brings them everything, even their friends.

Hugh Howey's Silo saga began in 2011 as which self-published short story?

Wool first went on sale on Amazon for 99 cents; when publishers came calling, Howey sold Simon & Schuster the print rights only and kept the e-book rights for himself.

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

Ready Player One ends its hunt inside Adventure, the 1980 Atari game whose programmer, denied a credit, hid his own name inside it: one of the earliest video-game Easter eggs.

Which numbered chamber in the Ministry of Love confronts each prisoner with their own worst fear?

Room 101 is where Winston Smith faces a cage of rats; Orwell is said to have taken the number from a BBC conference room where he had 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 on his publisher's advice: Fredric Warburg thought Nineteen Eighty-Four the more commercial title, though in October 1948 Orwell was still inclined to either.

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

Burroughs, the author of Naked Lunch, had adapted a 1974 Alan Nourse novel that has nothing to do with the film's story: Scott simply liked its name and got permission to use it.

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

Brazil takes its name from Ary Barroso's 'Aquarela do Brasil', the tune Sam Lowry is left humming to himself in the torture chair as the film ends.

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

Cockroaches are still an improvement on the train's first days: Curtis later confesses that before the bars arrived, the starving tail passengers had turned to eating each other.

In which 1976 film does the Carrousel ritual kill every citizen of a domed city at the age of 30?

Logan's Run is gentler than the 1967 novel it adapts: the book kills everyone at 21, and the film-makers raised the age to 30.

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, turns out to be the villain: it is obeying an old secret order never to bring the ship home, even though plants have begun to grow on Earth again.

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

Minority Report began life as a planned sequel to Total Recall, another film from a Philip K. Dick story, before Steven Spielberg made it a stand-alone thriller.

Which Kurt Russell antihero is sent into prison-island Manhattan to rescue the President in Escape from New York?

Snake Plissken is given no choice in the matter: tiny explosives are planted in his neck arteries, set to go off in under a day unless he brings the President out.

In the 1987 film RoboCop, the corporation Omni Consumer Products runs the police force of which crime-ridden American city?

Detroit's mayor once said the city had no plans for a RoboCop statue, so backers raised more than $67,000 online and had one cast in bronze anyway.

Which 2000 AD comic character patrols Mega-City One, having debuted in the anthology's second issue in 1977?

Judge Dredd has never fully shown his face in the comic: the helmet stays on, a rule the 1995 film broke by unmasking Sylvester Stallone.

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

Idiocracy picks Joe Bauers for the experiment because he tests as the most average man in the army; five centuries on, that makes him the smartest person alive.

In which 2013 film is all crime, murder included, legal across America for 12 hours each year?

The Purge grew partly out of a road-rage scare: after another driver nearly killed them, its creator's wife said in anger that she wished for one legal murder a year, and the idea stayed with him.

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

Charlie Brooker has explained the title himself: the black mirror is 'the cold, shiny screen of a TV, a monitor, a smartphone' that sits on every wall, every desk and in every palm.

Which director had Warner Bros. withdraw his 1971 film of Burgess's novel from British cinemas after it was blamed for copycat crimes?

Stanley Kubrick's film then stayed out of British cinemas for 27 years, returning only in 2000, the year after his death; his wife has said the family had received threats.

Which 1971 film, expanded from a student short, has a drugged populace policed by androids?

THX 1138 was the first feature by George Lucas, expanded from a short he made at film school, six years before he released Star Wars.

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

Akira is not one of the bikers: he is a being of terrible psychic power whose remains are kept frozen beneath Neo-Tokyo's Olympic stadium, where Tetsuo goes hunting for him.

Which moustached Party leader watches from every poster in Nineteen Eighty-Four, though he may not even exist?

Big Brother lent his name to the reality TV show in which cameras watch housemates around the clock, turning a symbol of state surveillance into entertainment.

Which American industrialist is revered as a deity in Brave New World, where people make the sign of the T?

Henry Ford's assembly line is so sacred to the World State that its calendar starts in 1908, when the first Model T was built, and crosses have had their tops cut off to make a T.

Which theocratic republic replaces the United States in The Handmaid's Tale after a coup kills the president?

Gilead borrows a place name from the Bible, and its rulers, the Commanders, force the few fertile women to bear children for them as Handmaids.

Which nation, risen from the ruins of North America, forces its districts to send children to The Hunger Games?

Panem is Latin for bread, taken from a Roman phrase about rulers keeping the masses quiet with food and entertainment.

Which word spread around the world from Karel Čapek's 1920 play R.U.R., about factory-made workers who rebel?

Robot comes from the Czech robota, the forced labour serfs owed their masters, and the playwright said Josef Čapek, a painter in the family, thought of it.

Which half-buried landmark shows Charlton Heston's astronaut that the Planet of the Apes was Earth all along?

The Statue of Liberty twist is the film's own invention: in Pierre Boulle's novel the apes live on a planet orbiting the star Betelgeuse.

Which company launched a computer with a Ridley Scott advert, based on Nineteen Eighty-Four, during a Super Bowl?

Apple's board hated the Macintosh advert and its chief executive tried to sell the airtime back, yet its single national broadcast made advertising history.

In George Orwell's Animal Farm, which pig drives out his rival Snowball and ends up ruling as a dictator?

Napoleon stands for Joseph Stalin, while the banished Snowball mirrors Leon Trotsky, the rival Stalin forced into exile.

Which happiness-producing drug does the World State hand out to keep its citizens calm in Brave New World?

Soma was named after a ritual drink of ancient India, a borrowing that grew out of the author's interest in Indian mysticism.

The title of Fahrenheit 451 names the temperature at which what material is said to catch fire and burn?

Paper was the answer its author was given when he asked, though tests put the real figure anywhere from about 424 to 475 °F depending on the type.

Which author wrote Fahrenheit 451 on a rented typewriter at a UCLA library, paying by the half-hour?

Ray Bradbury fed the machine ten cents per half-hour, and nine days and $9.80 in dimes gave him the first draft, a novella called The Fireman.

Which Brave New World author had taught French at Eton to the schoolboy who became George Orwell?

Aldous Huxley spent a year at Eton with the young Eric Blair among his pupils, and was remembered there as a schoolmaster who could not keep order in class.

Which Canadian author began The Handmaid's Tale in West Berlin in 1984 and returned to its world in The Testaments?

Margaret Atwood has said she put nothing into the book that people had not already done somewhere, and its sequel shared the 2019 Booker Prize.

Which Mad Men actress won an Emmy as June Osborne in the television version of The Handmaid's Tale?

Elisabeth Moss led the first streaming series ever to win the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series, a prize the show took for its opening season in 2017.

Veronica Roth's Divergent takes place in a post-apocalyptic, faction-ruled version of which American city?

Chicago was not the plan at first: the author realised her invented city of constant trains, marshland and rivers already matched the place she knew best.

Which heroine of The Hunger Games volunteers for the arena in place of her younger sister Primrose?

Katniss Everdeen takes her first name from an edible arrowhead plant, a fitting source for an archer who keeps her family fed by hunting.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Britain has been renamed Airstrip One, a mere province of which totalitarian superstate?

Oceania is permanently at war with one of its two rival superstates, and the Party rewrites every record each time the enemy changes.

Which Shirley Jackson short story, ending in a village stoning, drew a torrent of angry mail to The New Yorker?

The Lottery brought its author about three hundred letters in the summer of 1948, and by her own count only thirteen were kind, most of those from friends.

In Lord of the Flies, which object must a boy be holding before he is allowed to speak at an assembly?

A conch shell stands for order among the boys, so when it is smashed by the same boulder that kills Piggy, their fragile rule of law dies with him.

Which workplace thriller series has Lumon Industries surgically divide its staff's office selves from their home lives?

Severance was created by Dan Erickson, and its first season was mostly directed by Ben Stiller, an actor far better known for comedies such as Zoolander.

Which video game series, set after a nuclear war in 2077, shelters survivors in Vault-Tec's underground bunkers?

Fallout hides a cruel joke in its shelters: most were secret social experiments on the people sealed inside, and only seventeen were built to work as advertised.

Which underwater city, built by tycoon Andrew Ryan as a refuge for the elite, is the setting of BioShock?

Rapture was built in the 1940s as a paradise beyond the reach of any government, and the game shows the leaking ruin left behind once its citizens turned on each other.

Which 1927 Fritz Lang silent film splits a future city between rich rulers in towers and workers toiling underground?

Metropolis was seen for decades with nearly a quarter of its length missing, until a copy of the original cut turned up in a Buenos Aires film museum in 2008.

Which two-way device in Nineteen Eighty-Four pours out propaganda while watching Party members in their own homes?

The telescreen was dreamt up when television was still a novelty, and America's first commercial closed-circuit camera system went on sale only in 1949, the year the novel came out.

Which California megacity, ruled in all but name by the Arasaka Corporation, is the setting of Cyberpunk 2077?

Night City dates back to the Cyberpunk tabletop role-playing game that Mike Pondsmith first published in 1988, more than thirty years before the video game.

Which 1973 film, set in a starving, overcrowded New York of 2022, hides a grim secret about a new food ration?

Soylent Green added its famous twist itself: the 1966 novel it adapts is a story of overcrowding and hunger with no cannibalism in it at all.

Which Shakespeare play gave Brave New World its title, in words spoken by the sheltered Miranda?

The Tempest has Miranda marvel at the first strangers she has ever seen, and in the novel John the Savage repeats her words with growing bitterness.

On which remote Scottish island did George Orwell write Nineteen Eighty-Four at a farmhouse called Barnhill?

Jura offered a farmhouse with no electricity or hot water, and he finished the first draft there in bed before doctors confirmed he had tuberculosis.

Which David Bowie album grew from a Nineteen Eighty-Four musical that George Orwell's widow refused to allow?

Diamond Dogs kept songs written for the abandoned show, among them one named after the novel's title year and another after its dictator.

Which Neal Stephenson novel coined the term 'Metaverse' and stars a pizza-delivering hacker called Hiro Protagonist?

Snow Crash takes its title from the author's name for a computer failure that filled the screen with something like television static.

Which cyberpunk novelist coined the word 'cyberspace' in his 1982 short story Burning Chrome?

William Gibson moved to Canada in 1967 with a vague idea of avoiding the Vietnam draft, though by his own account he was never actually called up.

Which Stephen King novel has a hundred boys march at four miles an hour until only one is left alive?

The Long Walk was the first novel he ever wrote, begun as a university freshman some eight years before Carrie made his name.

Which Philip K. Dick novel has undercover narcotics agent Bob Arctor addicted to Substance D and spying on himself?

A Scanner Darkly ends with an afterword dedicating the book to the author's friends who were damaged or killed by drugs, and he puts himself on the list.

Which Nobel laureate imagined demagogue Buzz Windrip winning the White House in the 1935 novel It Can't Happen Here?

Sinclair Lewis's dictator was widely read as a portrait of Louisiana's Huey Long, who was preparing a run for president when he was shot dead shortly before the book appeared.

Which debut novel by Kurt Vonnegut imagines an automated America where engineers rule and machines do the work?

Player Piano grew out of the author's job at General Electric, where he watched a machine take over the skilled work of cutting jet-engine rotors.

Dmitry Glukhovsky's Metro 2033 has survivors of nuclear war sheltering in the underground railway of which city?

Moscow's metro stops become rival mini-states in the story, which first appeared online in 2002 and drew in thousands of readers as it grew.

Which Swedish actress plays engineer Juliette Nichols in Silo, about a community living 144 levels underground?

Rebecca Ferguson is better known as Lady Jessica in the Dune films and as the MI6 agent Ilsa Faust opposite Tom Cruise.

Which novel opens the MaddAddam trilogy, with a lone survivor called Snowman watching over lab-made humans?

Oryx and Crake was shortlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize, and its author calls it speculative fiction because nothing in it lies beyond what people can already begin to do.

Which Naomi Alderman novel gives teenage girls the ability to deliver electric shocks, upending male rule worldwide?

The Power won the 2017 Women's Prize for Fiction and is framed as a history written 5,000 years later, in a world long used to women being in charge.

Which Dave Eggers novel follows Mae Holland into a tech giant that puts cameras everywhere and treats privacy as theft?

The Circle reached cinemas in 2017 with Emma Watson as Mae and Tom Hanks as Bailey, one of the three men who run the company.

Which Combine-ruled urban district does Gordon Freeman reach by train at the start of Half-Life 2?

City 17 owes its Eastern European look to art director Viktor Antonov, a Bulgarian who steered the team towards the kind of streets he knew.

Which Portuguese Nobel laureate wrote Blindness, about a sightless epidemic whose victims are locked in an asylum?

José Saramago gives none of his characters a proper name, so readers know them only by labels such as the doctor's wife.

Which Yoko Ogawa novel is set on an island where hats, birds and perfume vanish from everyone's minds?

The Memory Police hunt islanders who can still remember, and the 1994 book waited 25 years for the translation that made it a National Book Award finalist.

Which Greek hero's myth, with its young tributes sent to die, did Suzanne Collins call a basis for The Hunger Games?

Theseus, in the best-known telling, volunteered to join the youths that Athens sent to Crete as tribute, and the author has called her heroine a futuristic version of him.

Which Kazuo Ishiguro novel is narrated by an Artificial Friend chosen as companion to a sickly child?

Klara and the Sun has its machine narrator treat the Sun as a kindly god, bargaining with him to save the girl's life.

Which X-Men storyline sends Kitty Pryde's mind back from a 2013 where Sentinels hunt mutants into camps?

Days of Future Past ran for just two issues of The Uncanny X-Men in 1981, yet its dark tomorrow was revisited many times and reached cinemas in 2014.

Which French author's Paris in the Twentieth Century was rejected by his publisher and went unpublished until 1994?

Jules Verne pictured a 1960 of skyscrapers, petrol-driven cabs and a kind of fax machine, and his publisher judged it too unbelievable to sell.

Which now-everyday word was popularised by Michael Young's 1958 satire about a future Britain run by a new elite?

Meritocracy was meant as a warning, and in 2001 its author wrote of his disappointment at seeing Tony Blair's Labour Party embrace the word as an ideal.

Which John Wyndham novel has telepathic children hide their gift in a post-nuclear Labrador that hunts down mutants?

The Chrysalids was retitled Re-Birth for American readers, and its hunted telepaths are finally rescued by an expedition from distant Sealand, once New Zealand.

Which Orwell protagonist rewrites old records at the Ministry of Truth before beginning a forbidden affair with Julia?

Winston Smith's name is usually taken to pair Winston Churchill with the commonest of surnames, marking him out as an everyman.