Books like Nineteen Eighty-Four, according to Reddit

The read-alike list

Ranked by co-mention strength — how often each book shares a thread with Nineteen Eighty-Four, normalized so ubiquitous books don't dominate.

#1

Brave New World

Aldous Huxley

Engineered from a bottle into a rigid caste and dosed on soma, a man discovers he'd rather have real unhappiness than the world's manufactured peace.

105 shared threads

#2

Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury

A fireman whose job is burning books meets a girl who keeps asking why, and can't stop asking himself the same question afterward.

71 shared threads

#3

The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood

A woman loses her name, her money, and her right to read the day a new American theocracy assigns her to breed for a commander's household.

61 shared threads

#4

The Dispossessed

Ursula K. Le Guin

A physicist from an anarchist moon travels to the capitalist planet his people fled, carrying a theory of time that could unite both worlds or arm one of them.

93 shared threads

#5

Neuromancer

William Gibson

A washed-up hacker gets his nervous system rebuilt for one last job, in a world Gibson invented before the internet existed to copy it.

92 shared threads

#6

Slaughterhouse-Five

Kurt Vonnegut

Billy Pilgrim comes unstuck in time, bouncing between a WWII POW camp, a Tralfamadorian zoo, and his own suburban optometry practice, all at once.

46 shared threads

#7

Flowers for Algernon

Daniel Keyes

Charlie Gordon's IQ triples after experimental brain surgery, then the same surgery begins failing, and he narrates his own decline in real time.

54 shared threads

#8

Snow Crash

Neal Stephenson

Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for the Mafia, moonlights as a hacker-samurai, and stumbles into a virus that infects minds instead of computers.

81 shared threads

#9

The Road

Cormac McCarthy

A father and son push a shopping cart down a dead American highway, and the only rule left is that they're the good guys.

38 shared threads

#10

The Left Hand of Darkness

Ursula K. Le Guin

A human envoy crosses a glacier on foot with the one alien on the planet capable of ambisexuality, and neither of them trusts the other yet.

85 shared threads

#11

Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro

Three friends grow up in a quiet English boarding school where everything is normal except the one thing nobody explains to them.

33 shared threads

#12

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Douglas Adams

Earth gets demolished to build a hyperspace bypass, and the last man alive escapes only because an alien researching a galactic encyclopedia needed an assistant.

52 shared threads

The overlap, in numbers

Where each pairing actually shows up. Click through for the full Reddit verdict on each book.

1. #1 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley — 105 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
2. #2 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury — 71 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
3. #3 The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood — 61 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
4. #4 The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin — 93 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
5. #5 Neuromancer by William Gibson — 92 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
6. #6 Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut — 46 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
7. #7 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes — 54 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
8. #8 Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson — 81 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
9. #9 The Road by Cormac McCarthy — 38 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
10. #10 The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin — 85 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
11. #11 Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro — 33 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
12. #12 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams — 52 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF