Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

[Tempus]

'Brave New World' Aldous Huxley. I think even more chilling than Orwell's heavy handed fascist view in '1984'.

I knew someone would have beaten me to it. I'd also recommend 'Brave New World', frightening, as Pad said, and perhaps more relevant today in our society.

There's some other recommendations I'd second in this thread: 'Animal Farm', 'Heart of Darkness', 'Farenheit 451'. My own suggestions would be:

'Catch-22' by Joseph Heller - perhaps straying a bit from the theme, but a very good book. I read it a long time ago so I probably have a shallow (and hazy) interpretation of the book, but it seemed to be a critique of a detached, hierarchical command structure, in addition to other things. It's satirical and is very funny (I think my sense of humour would be impoverished if I hadn't read it), although I recall it becoming quite dark and powerful toward the latter part of the book.

'Level 7' by Mordecai Roshwald. It was written during the Cold War and is set, for the most part, in a bunker (on the eponymous 'Level 7'). It follows one of the 'Push Buttons' who's in control of launching nuclear weapons in the case of an outbreak of 'hot' war. Again, I read this quite a while back, but I vaguely remember the themes of MAD, dehumanisation (the people in the bunkers are known by their roles and numbers, not names), authoritarianism (maybe?) and detachment (the idea of war being fought by proxy, rather than actual combatants).