While the idea of a better or – at least – fundamentally different world than the present one is old, as a genre, dystopian fiction has seen a significant upsurge of popularity both with authors and readers towards the 21^st century. When Thomas More first imagined a ‘Utopia’ in 1516, he used the imagined country as an allegory to point out what was amiss in Tudor England. Since then, authors have time and again reverted to utopian and dystopian fiction to scrutinise and partake in politics from the literary margin. In order to trace the development of specifically ‘dys’-topian, rather than ‘u’-topian fiction, we will consider Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) as a quasi-Urtext and then pay attention to more recent representations in British fiction, namely Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) and Ali Smith’s Gliff (2024).

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