Dystopian fiction. (Genre/Form Term)

Booker, M. The science fiction handbook, 2009: p. 65-73 (dystopian science fiction: if a utopia is an imaginary ideal society that dreams of a world in which the social, political, and economic problems of the real present have been solved ... then a dystopia is an imagined world in which the dream has become a nightmare. Also known as anti-utopias, dystopias are often designed to critique the possible negative implications of certain forms of utopian thought)

Gill, V.K. African American utopian critiques, 2006, viewed online Feb. 13, 2013: p. 2 (George Schuyler's Black No More (1931) is often seen as an anti-utopian text) p. 3 (Octavia Butler presents readers with a negative utopia, also known as dystopia, in Parable of the Sower (1993); counter-utopian science fiction novels) p. 5 (counter-utopian novels)

World literature today, summer 1994: p. 597 (traditional utopian, dystopian, anti-utopian, and counterutopian fiction)

LCSH, Oct. 21, 2014 (Dystopian plays. UF Anti-utopian plays; Cacotopian plays; Dystopias--Drama; Dystopic plays; Negative utopian plays)

GSAFD, 2000 (Dystopias: Literally, "bad place." Use for works that are accounts of imaginary worlds, usually in the future, in which present tendencies, beliefs, principles, or theories are carried out to their intensely unpleasant culmination. Examples include George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave new world.)

Fiction set in an uncertain future, in a society ruled by an ineffectual, corrupt, or oppressive regime or by aliens, robots, etc. For fiction set in a world or civilization after a catastrophic event (e.g., nuclear war, alien invasion, pandemic, environmental collapse), sometimes also including the period immediately preceding the event, see Apocalyptic fiction.

Note under Apocalyptic fiction