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Josef K. is arrested one morning and never told what he is accused of. Kafka turns a legal system nobody can explain into a portrait of power that answers to no one.

Franz Kafka

London imagines an American oligarchy that crushes a workers' movement and rules for centuries. Written in 1908, it is one of the first novels to treat concentrated economic power as a political regime.

Jack London

Bernard Marx lives in a World State that has engineered away pain, family and choice, conditioning every citizen to love the role assigned to them. Huxley's 1932 novel is still the sharpest account of a dystopia that controls people through pleasure rather than fear.

Aldous Huxley

In a collectivist future the word for a single self has been erased from the language. A short, stark novella about a man who rediscovers the idea of the individual.

Ayn Rand

Humanity lives underground in isolated cells, served by a Machine that supplies everything and is worshipped like a god. Forster published it in 1909 and anticipated screen-mediated life with unsettling accuracy.

E. M. Forster