Everyone recommends 1984. These are the books sitting behind it on the shelf: dystopias that called the future early, then got shelved. None of them is famous. Most of them are better than half the canon.
1. Swastika Night · Katharine Burdekin (1937)
Written in 1937, before most of Europe took Hitler seriously, Burdekin imagines the world seven hundred years after the Nazis win: a Hitler cult, Jews erased from history, women kept in camps. It forecast the Reich's own mythology while the Reich was still young. Almost nobody read it.
2. The Iron Heel · Jack London (1908)
London, the dog-sled writer, imagining a fascist takeover of the United States, framed as a rebel's manuscript annotated by a scholar writing centuries after the oligarchy falls. Orwell read it and called London a prophet. Readers mostly stopped at Call of the Wild.
3. Limbo · Bernard Wolfe (1952)
After World War III, violence gets blamed on limbs themselves: some men amputate theirs on principle, others bolt on nuclear-powered prosthetics, and the two camps despise each other. A vulgar, brilliant satire that nobody can decide was serious. That confusion is the point.
4. Camp Concentration · Thomas M. Disch (1968)
Conscientious objectors in a military camp are injected with a disease that makes them geniuses before it kills them. Told as the prisoner's own journal while his sentences get smarter than his jailers'. The cruelest IQ-boost novel ever written.
5. The Futurological Congress · Stanislaw Lem (1971)
An overpopulated world where the government keeps order through chemical happiness piped into the air, until the narrator's reality starts peeling away. Funny and paranoid, and mercifully short. One of Lem's most accessible novels, and somehow one of his least read.
6. The Year of the Quiet Sun · Wilson Tucker (1970)
A government time machine lets an operative visit the near future, and every jump forward shows the collapse coming sooner. Written as the American experiment curdles, bleak and patient. Tucker was a working science-fiction pro for decades, and this one still slipped out of print.
7. My Brother on the Moon · Maximilian Coolheit Vorfahrenheit (2026)
Disclosure: I wrote this one, and it is by definition the least-known book on this list. A gravedigger in a collapsed town where the sickness calls one violent hour out of every citizen; he buries the day's dead, and a stranger asks for nothing but a shovel. ~68 pages, free on Kindle Unlimited. Amazon link. It's last because every book above earned its obscurity over decades.
Where to start
Fastest gut-punch: The Iron Heel. Strangest: Limbo. Funnest despite itself: The Futurological Congress. Then the indie that hasn't earned obscurity yet.