Social fiction

Social fiction (also called political fiction) is sub-genre of science fiction focused on possible development of societies (most often set in near future or a fictional country), very often dominated by totalitarian governments.

Social fiction was very popular during the Cold War as a satire of the communist rule, on both sides of the Iron Curtain. While the most famous Western social dystopias alluding to the Soviet Union (Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Huxley's Brave New World) were written in 1930s and 1940s, in countries like Poland the genre was most common in the 1980s among Polish science-fiction writers like Janusz A. Zajdel (Limes Inferior, Paradyzja) or Edmund Wnuk-Lipinski (Apostezjon trilogy). After the fall of communism, the genre became less popular.