Vladimir Nabokov liked to examine cruelty and the human condition. That didn't mean he was cruel; there's no evidence he kicked puppies just for the fun of it. Similarly, 'Black Mirror' likes to examine possible dystopias, but that doesn't mean the show is cynical enough to endorse them.

Jeff Vandermeer

The future is always a dystopia in movies.

I've always been interested in those Orwellian dystopian novels, like 'Fahrenheit 451,' 'Brave New World,' and obviously Orwell's '1984.'

Alexander Skarsgard

World Well Ways

Much like dystopian and post-apocalyptic books are a way to explore the worst-case scenarios lurking around the corner, fantasy can serve as a wonderful tool for showing kids that they have an inherent power in them to create change, both in themselves and in their community.

Alexandra Bracken

Power Change Worst

'The Handmaid's Tale' takes place in the near future, a dystopian future, and is based on the book by Margaret Atwood. It takes place in what was formerly part of the United States at a period of time when society has been taken over by a totalitarian theocracy. It's about the women who live in subjugation.

Alexis Bledel

Women Time Society

Our social fabric is sundered. GoFundMe and the other crowdfunding sites that have proliferated since 2010 are an example of what has sprung up in its place, what I have called America's dystopian social net. That is, we now require private solutions to what are public problems.

Alissa Quart

Life Up UN

The beauty of dystopia is that it lets us vicariously experience future worlds - but we still have the power to change our own.

Ally Condie

Power Future Experience

When we read dystopia, we root for these people to break free because we are these people; hoping and fighting against things that are bigger than ourselves.

Ally Condie

Use Us Top

Orwell had a very accurate foresight of today's dystopian world we live in. If only he was around to see it.

Andrew Gower

World Well Very

Within the realm of fiction, it is always tempting to set one's stories in a dystopian future, where all our misgivings about state power can be shown in full force.

Anne Fortier

Power Future Within

Once you get into the world of dystopia, it's hard to avoid plagiarism, because other people have had such powerful visions.

Anthony Horowitz

Power You World

It's a dystopian world where things aren't connected. But life feels light when we can communicate, joke or laugh on ourselves.

Ashish Vidyarthi

Life World Where

As a reader, I've always been interested in dystopian novels like 'Nineteen Eighty-four'.

Barbara Demick

Teen Ways Way

Being stuck in adolescence - that's a hell. 'Peter Pan' is a dystopia, and we forget that. Neverland is a bad place to be.

Ben Sasse

Pet Tuck Top

I'm a huge fan of dystopian films. I collect them in my brain.

Brittany Howard

Top Them T

What's fun about a dystopian novel is that we can enjoy and be entertained. But that world is only slightly different, right? It's familiar enough to be recognizable, and skewed enough to give us pause.

Chang-Rae Lee

World Wed Use

If you're living in a dystopia, you don't necessarily want to look at another one.

Charlie Brooker

You Want Top

In movies and in television the robots are always evil. I guess I am not into the whole brooding cyberpunk dystopia thing.

Daniel H. Wilson

Movies Whole Who

People read vampire novels and say, 'Oh I want to read another vampire novel.' People read fantasy, and they're like, 'Oh I love fantasy.' I don't know that people are necessarily finishing 'Hunger Games' and immediately wanting to read another dystopian tale.

David Levithan

Love Wanting Want

I'm not a 'dystopian, futuristic master': I'm a schnook walking the street. It's an insane reality we're living in, and I'm just trying to translate it for myself.

El-P

Yin Walking Walk

If you're an activist trying to do something important, I salute you. Most of us just give ourselves ethical brownie points for watching Channel 2 instead of Channel 3, like characters in a broad dystopian satire.

Frankie Boyle

You Yin Watching

YouTube is the place where people go to consume advertisements willingly. It's some capitalist dystopian nightmare.

Freddie Wong

At the core of 'Star Trek' is Gene Roddenberry's vision of the future. So much of science-fiction is about a dystopian society with human civilization having crumbled. He had an affirmative, shining, positive view of the future.

George Takei

CCTV is seen either as a symbol of Orwellian dystopia or a technology that will lead to crime-free streets and civil behaviour. While arguments continue, there is very little solid data in the public domain about the costs, quantity and effectiveness of surveillance.

Heather Brooke

Amid apocalyptic dystopia, 'Fahrenheit 451''s protagonist retains sparks of curiosity, creativity, and courage, and these human characteristics are the seeds of hope that can arise, phoenix-like, from civilization's ashes.

Heidi Hammel

Vladimir Nabokov liked to examine cruelty and the human condition. That didn't mean he was cruel; there's no evidence he kicked puppies just for the fun of it. Similarly, 'Black Mirror' likes to examine possible dystopias, but that doesn't mean the show is cynical enough to endorse them.

Jeff Vandermeer

In a sense, fictional dystopias have been a way of distracting us from the truth of our condition by placing it 'over there.'

Jeff Vandermeer

I think the idea of a distant, far off dystopia, where the world is completely different from what we have now, is good, but it's been done. Especially in YA movies.

Jennifer Yuh Nelson

My greatest fear about a world in which racial reassignment surgery becomes common is that it then becomes an expression of all kinds of class privilege. You have a truly dystopian society divided between the people who can afford to be racially altered and perfected and the ones who can't.

Jess Row

All of my work has been about ideas of utopia and dystopia. I think that's what gives America interest. It's many things all at once. It's such a complicated society.

Joel Sternfeld

I look around, and 50 percent of the big-budget entertainment you are seeing these days is dystopian. This is the era of 'Hunger Games' and blasted landscapes and 'The Walking Dead.'

John Lithgow

Although I write dystopian fiction, I don't believe in dystopian fantasies.

John Twelve Hawks

If I think about music in the future, I imagine it often as not involving electricity, in some dystopian, post-apocalyptic future. And that's what I get from Penderecki: people making music by taking these instruments out of boxes and playing them. That's a very bizarre and modern thing.

Jonny Greenwood

In every revolution, there are winners and losers. Every dystopia is a utopia for somebody else. It just depends where you are. Are you in the class that benefits, or are you in the class that's not?

Ken Liu

What tends to happen when people talk about Chinese sci-fi in the West is that there's a lot of projection. We prefer to think of China as a dystopian world that is challenging American hegemony, so we would like to think that Chinese sci-fi is all either militaristic or dystopian. But that's just not the reality of it.

Ken Liu

The kind of dystopian books that I've always loved the most are the ones where you find yourself in a world that's less scorched-earth and instead a world that has just been made different.

Laura van den Berg

Most dystopian, classic and contemporary, paints a future world that puts a twist on present society - a future world that could plausibly happen.

Lauren DeStefano

'Dystopian,' by definition, promises a darker story.

Lauren DeStefano

I think dystopian futures are also a reflection of current fears.

Lauren Oliver

Dystopian novels help people process their fears about what the future might look like; further, they usually show that there is always hope, even in the bleakest future.

Lauren Oliver

People in the know say 'The Giver' was the first young adult dystopian novel.

Lois Lowry

I majored in English in college, so I read the classic dystopian novels like '1984' and 'Brave New World.'

Lois Lowry

I never, as a reader, have been particularly interested in dystopian literature or science fiction or, in fact, fantasy.

Lois Lowry

I think sci-fi films have become rather bleak, and understandably so - I think we've made some big mistakes globally with how we're developing, and we deal with that guilt by creating these very dystopian futures in films.

Maggie Grace

Would we be so enamored with dystopian fiction if we lived in a culture where violent death was a major concern? It wouldn't be escapism.

Maggie Stiefvater

Our problem right now is that we're so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge number of people who are not going to know what to do. But within every dystopia there's a little utopia.

Margaret Atwood

That's what 'Star Trek' was: We don't know how to make an ideal society, but we're going to portray that, and then we're going to work backward. I think that's why science fiction - despite the dystopian parts - comes out of this super ideal that, eventually, we will get to some better place where we actually live up to our ideals.

Margot Lee Shetterly

I'm a writer; as soon as I imagine what would happen if I found the fountain of youth, it turns into a dystopia in my head.

Marie Brennan

When I first read Margaret Atwood's novel 'The Handmaid's Tale,' it was Saudi Arabia as I knew it that came to mind, not a dystopian future United States as in the new television adaptation.

Mona Eltahawy

Utopias and dystopias can exist side by side, even in the same moment. Which one you're in depends entirely on your point of view.

Naomi Alderman

Writers of feminist dystopian fiction are alert to the realities that grind down women's lives, that make the unthinkable suddenly thinkable.

Naomi Alderman