I think you wrong Huxley and Orwell by dismissing their works, nineteen eighty-four and Brave New World, as "...melodrama...based on one author's fantasies of utopia and dystopia." Orwell's novel, for example, maybe a number of things, but 'melodrama' isn't one of them, and the prospect of such a world as he envisioned is patently unabsurd, as anyone living in North Korea can tell you. There is no better, more insightful portrait of the totalitarian mindset to be found anywhere. His novel does what all great literature does: tells a greater truth by means of the artifice of fiction.
I can take or leave Huxley's novel, although his essays are worthwhile. Ayn Rand, on the other hand, is a hack writer and even worse philospher. Whitaker Chambers, in a 50-year-old National Review article recently republished on NR online, had her down cold.
Those real-life stories are the ones that should be told. I feel that all works of fiction work to undermine actual human stories, distorting and misleading to the silly psychological whims of the author. Huxley and Orwell remind me of spoiled old libs who obviously never experienced what real people suffer. If they did, they would have been able to cope with their fears and delusions without writing long and complex stories about them.
My 2 cents... I value their work as entertainment and mildly insightful. As for Ayn Rand, I know she wrote (reality-based) essays besides her novels. That's a format I'm more open to take seriously.