Ignorance Is Bliss: 7 Utopian Dystopias

The film adaptation of The Giver, starring Hollywood heavyweights Jeff Bridges and Meryl Streep, features a dystopian society in which suffering has been eliminated, safety is a given, and war is not even a memory in people’s lives. Doesn’t sound so bad, right? Dystopian worlds are inherently wrong. However, unlike societies like the ones depicted in The Hunger Games, V for Vendetta, and Blade Runner, in which people know how terrible things are, there are other—darker, scarier, and much more interesting—dystopian societies in which people are happy, mostly because they’re ignorant of the backstory. Disturbingly, they make us doubt why those societies are necessarily bad, if happiness prevails.

1. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World

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In this dystopian masterpiece, genetically modified people remain permanently happy through controlled sexual pleasure, causing society to lose all notions of art, ethics, and nonconformity.

2. Lois Lowry’s The Giver

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Phillip Noyce’s movie is adapted from Lois Lowry’s novel, a chilling society that vanishes pain but, in order to do so, eliminates all past memories.

3. Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day

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Levin’s haunting novel envisions a society ruled by a central computer called UniComp that has been programmed to keep every single human on the surface of the earth in check. People are continually drugged by means of regular injections so that they remain satisfied and cooperative.

4. Samuel R. Delany’s Trouble on Triton

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Samuel R. Delany’s ambiguous utopia takes us to a practically lawless society in which humans have unprecedented freedom, to the degree that they can modify their physical appearances as they wish. As peaceful as it may seem, Triton is willing to wage war by any means necessary to protect its society.

5. Ian McDonald’s Out of Blue Six

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Out of Blue Six describes a society in which people’s genetic predispositions and aptitudes guide their lives. In this self-contained city, happiness is the most cherished value, and the Ministry of Pain swiftly prosecutes anyone who interferes with the contentment of another, which makes for a thrilling story of free will and self-determination.

6. James Morrow’s City of Truth

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Truth reigns supreme in the city-state of Veritas. Not even politicians lie, and weirdly frank notices abound. In this dystopia of mandatory candor, every preadolescent citizen is ruthlessly conditioned, through a Skinnerian ordeal called a “brainburn,” to speak truthfully under all circumstances.

7. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We

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Dubbed George’s Orwell’s inspiration for Nineteen Eighty-Four, We describes OneState, a totalitarian society ruled by the omnipotent, omnipresent Benefactor. Though everyone is happy in a vacuous way, in Zamyatin’s thought-provoking creation there are no individuals, just numbers.