Banned dystopian novels

Dystopian novels imagine a state that controls what people think, so it isn't surprising that real states banned them. These are the dystopias in our catalogue that a government, court or publisher suppressed, in the order they were written.

The novels

1. We, Yevgeny Zamyatin (written 1920–21). A glass-walled state where citizens are numbers and every hour is scheduled. Refused publication in Soviet Russia; it first appeared in English in New York in 1924 and wasn't published in the USSR until 1988. Huxley and Orwell both drew on it.
2. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley (1932). A World State that keeps people content with conditioning, consumption and the drug soma. Banned in Ireland in 1932.
3. Animal Farm, George Orwell (1945). Strictly a fable, not a future world, but a portrait of a revolution turning into a dictatorship. Turned down by British publishers in 1944 and banned in the Soviet bloc.
4. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell (1949). Surveillance, a rewritten past and a language designed to make dissent unthinkable. Banned in the Soviet Union until 1988.
5. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury (1953). Firemen burn books. In an irony Bradbury pointed out himself, his own publisher sold an expurgated school edition for years without telling him.

What about The Handmaid's Tale and A Clockwork Orange?

Both are often on "banned dystopian" lists, mainly because of challenges in US schools and libraries. This catalogue lists books banned by governments, courts, customs, churches, publishers or major retailers, not school-district challenges, so they aren't here yet. See are banned books really banned? for the difference.

Read them

All five are in print, with a buy button on each book page. For non-fiction about how states really control information, try the media and propaganda and mind control shelves.