Imagined futures · free
Dystopian classics, free to read online
Dystopias & dark utopias
The public-domain futures — from Wells’s machine age to London’s iron heel.
The futures that came first
The twentieth century’s great dystopias didn’t come from nowhere. Jack London imagined a corporate tyranny in The Iron Heel decades before Orwell; H. G. Wells split humanity in two in The Time Machine and built a sleeping-giant police state in When the Sleeper Wakes. Even the utopias here — Bellamy’s, Gilman’s — carry a warning in the lining.
Read them and you can watch the genre being invented, one uneasy future at a time.
Reading for the end of the world
Distraction-free reader
No ads, no pop-ups, no feeds — just the text and a page that gets out of the way.
Works offline
Install to your home screen and these futures come with you, signal or no signal.
Five reading themes
Cold daylight or a bleak midnight — set the mood the book deserves.
Questions, answered
Are 1984 and Brave New World here?
Not yet — those are still under copyright in the United States, so no honest free reader can offer the full text. What you can read free are the books that imagined the dystopia first: the public-domain visions that Orwell and Huxley were answering.
Which of these is the best place to start?
Jack London's The Iron Heel is the blueprint for the modern dystopia, and Wells's The Time Machine shows you the far end of it in a single afternoon. Both are short, both are free.
Do I need to install anything?
No. Every book opens in your browser. If you want it offline, install goread to your home screen and the reader works on the train or a plane.
Keep exploring
Step into a darker future
The Iron Heel, The Time Machine, Herland — see which imagined future got closest to ours.
Read The Time Machine free