114
votes
Accepted
Movie where protagonist time-travels to dystopian future when people become mentally degraded
Idiocracy
IMDb has the following summary for the film:
Private Joe Bauers, the definition of "average American", is selected by the Pentagon to be the guinea pig for a top-secret hibernation ...
- 144k
87
votes
Accepted
Humorous essay on dystopian novel tropes
This has surely got to be "It’s A Bunch of Years After The War And Everything Is Different", a humorous piece by Daniel Mallory Ortberg dated 11 February 2014. It's short but here are a few ...
- 135k
73
votes
Accepted
Novel set in the future, children cannot change the class they are born into, one class is made uneducated by associating books with pain
"Babies having to associate books and electrocution" is most certainly Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley. You can read the whole text here (I'm assuming huxley.net is a legit source).
The ...
- 58k
69
votes
Accepted
A universe not quite like ours
The Forest of Time by Michael Flynn. I read it in The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection:
The story is told from the perspective of Oberleutnant Rudolf Knecht, Chief Scout of the ...
- 113k
50
votes
Accepted
Really bizarre dystopian children’s film with hundreds of young boys forced to play piano
That's The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T
a 1953 Technicolor American musical fantasy film about a boy who dreams himself into a fantasy world ruled by a diabolical piano teacher enslaving children to ...
- 13.1k
44
votes
Accepted
Older science fiction book about time travel to retrieve things but they went sideways through the dimensions instead
This is The Flight of the Horse by Larry Niven. It's a fixup novel built from a compilation of stories about the hapless Hanville Svetz who is tasked with retrieving the things you mention.
The ...
- 113k
42
votes
Accepted
Story about a girl who discovers she lives in an "exhibition" and manages to escape to Indianapolis/Minneapolis
I found the book! It is called Running out of Time (1995) by Margaret Peterson Haddix.
Jessie Keyser is a 13-year-old girl from the village of Clifton, Indiana, in the 1840s. During a village-wide ...
- 521
36
votes
Accepted
90s (or earlier) short story concerning two mathematicians and "dark numbers"
I wonder if this is "The Masters" collected in Ursula Le Guin's The Wind's Twelve Quarters?
There are no "dark numbers", but there are "black numbers" (i.e. numbers represented using Arabic numerals) ...
- 22.4k
35
votes
Accepted
80s 90s movie involving a futuristic society with no crime
This is the TV movie, Tempting Fate (1998).
A brain surgeon lost his chance to be with his dream girl and opts for a friend's invention bringing him to a parallel world, where the dream girl is "...
- 128k
34
votes
Movie or book about people kept in a type of prison where if their name came up in a lottery, they'd be subject to experiments and/or organ harvesting
Sounds like the premise for The Island (2005).
From Wikipedia:
The Island is a 2005 American science fiction action thriller film directed and co-produced by Michael Bay. It stars Ewan McGregor, ...
- 128k
30
votes
Accepted
Show/miniseries which aired on HBO in the early '90s, featuring "Water Police"
If "WP" stands for "Water & Power" instead of "Water Police" then you might have been watching Tank Girl (1995).
It's set in a world where rain has basically stopped ...
- 138k
29
votes
Movie where protagonist time-travels to dystopian future when people become mentally degraded
That's Idiocracy, for sure.
In a speech, President Camacho gives Joe the impossible job of fixing
the nation's food shortages, Dust Bowls, and crippled economy within a
week. Joe discovers that ...
- 62.4k
28
votes
Accepted
Dystopian future, illegal parents are punished by rapid aging
This reminds me of Futu.re (or Будущее) a novel by Dmitry Glukhovsky, first published (in Russian) in 2013. It is set in Europe in the 25th century after the invention of a drug which stops the aging ...
- 68.9k
28
votes
Accepted
Sci-fi short story about a dystopian future where all natural resources had been used up and people were struggling to survive
This could be Philip K. Dick's "Autofac" (GALAXY November 1955 and numerous anthologies and collections), in which automatic factories were set up during the "Total Global Conflict"...
- 1,186
26
votes
Accepted
Sci-fi dystopian novel where not being addicted to any substance is illegal
The bit about addiction being mandatory makes me think of Sheckley's The Status Civilization (1960).
The protagonist is Will Barrent, who was convicted of a crime on Earth, mindwiped, and shipped to ...
- 138k
26
votes
Accepted
A novel about people living hanging on the walls of huge building, with "angels" (?) floating around
This is Farewell Horizontal by K.W. Jeter.
The story is set in a single gigantic structure. The main character is a freelance journalist/artist. There are numerous military clans. There are floating ...
- 709k
25
votes
Accepted
Short story about AI robot who kills all humans except a small group
Likely I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison
A mad computer is torturing a small group of humans. One of them eventually takes it upon himself to kill the others with an icicle.
I ...
- 709k
24
votes
Accepted
Title of dystopian story set in an amusement park
"Spending a Day at the Lottery Fair", a short story by Frederik Pohl; first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1983, available at the Internet Archive.
Of ...
- 169k
24
votes
Accepted
What is the short story about a computer program that employers use to micromanage every aspect of a worker's life?
Manna by Marshall Brain. From the wiki article:
The fictional story is set on an unspecified date in the future and begins in Cary, North Carolina. The narrator recalls his first minimum wage job at ...
- 56.1k
23
votes
Accepted
What does 0.2 tenths of the population mean?
The Gregory Zilboorg translation renders that line as "0.2" or "two tenths" of the population that did not die out, which suggests that the original text may have said as much.
(...
- 233k
22
votes
Accepted
Story where everyone had to get a daily injection of mind control drug
This Perfect Day by Ira Levin.
I remembered the foil covered pad to defeat the injections:
He was the first one in the dining room; ate and drank, and went back to his room with a cake wrapper folded ...
- 113k
22
votes
Book set in a New Zealand or Australian future society where the rich and poor live separately. Includes a character named Billy, short for Billy Goat
A lot of the information matches with The Sea and Summer, a novel by George Turner, published in 1987 (and released as The Drowning Towers in the USA).
The dystopia is set in a near future Melbourne. ...
- 68.9k
21
votes
SF story about women being eliminated from Earth by men
Could this be "The Screwfly Solution" by Raccoona Sheldon? (AKA Alice Sheldon, AKA James Tiptree Jr.)?
Per wikipedia, the main character is a researcher working in South America. At the end ...
- 709k
20
votes
Accepted
Film (possibly made for TV) where everyone wears a headset which controls thoughts by suppressing IQ
You're describing Harrison Bergeron (1995). Everyone wears an IQ suppressing headband and everything's very '1950s'.
Harrison: Last night, seeing those programs I realized that...Everything looks ...
- 709k
20
votes
Accepted
Book set in a New Zealand or Australian future society where the rich and poor live separately. Includes a character named Billy, short for Billy Goat
Is this Drowning Towers (1987), alternately titled The Sea and Summer, by George Turner...?
According to this review, global warming and rising sea levels have caused economic and ecological disaster....
- 128k
20
votes
Accepted
A novel about people most of whom are more or less color blind
Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde.
Hundreds of years in the future, the world is an alarmingly different place. Life is lived according to The Rulebook and social hierarchy is determined by your ...
- 113k
19
votes
Accepted
A dystopian short story where children are raised to be murdered
The short story you refer to is:
A.: ONLY THROUGH DEATH WILL YOU LEARN YOUR TRUE IDENTITY
By ETGAR KERET, published in Wired magazine and available to read here:
https://www.wired.com/2016/12/etger-...
- 906
19
votes
Short story/novel dystopian where the main character is compelled to buy consumer goods which he packs into a recycling slot
As per Story about a future of over-production, could this be Frederik Pohl's "The Midas Plague"?
In a world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities
enjoyed by mankind. ...
- 233k
19
votes
SF cyberpunk graphic novel from 80s involving a habitat called the hoop and its occupants hoopers
This is the first part of Alan Moore's "The Ballad of Halo Jones" which was originally published as a comic strip in 2000AD. It was later printed separately as a graphic novel.
We first ...
- 5,251
19
votes
Accepted
Child in a dystopian city who had to forage for food
The is Outside, by Andre Norton, published in 1975. It takes place in a post-apocalyptic domed city, that was built to protect the inhabitants from the polluted outside world. However, almost a ...
- 99k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible