Dystopian Literary Fiction

More than 15 years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale, the theocratic regime of the Republic of Gilead maintains its grip on power, but there are signs it is beginning to rot from within. At this crucial moment, the lives of three radically different women converge, with potentially explosive results. Two have grown up as part of the first generation to come of age in the new order. The testimonies of these two young women are joined by a third voice: a woman who wields power through the ruthless accumulation and deployment of secrets.

As America collapses in the chaos of war, pollution, and bankruptcy, two sisters pool their resources to survive alone in the hills above San Francisco. Although dwindling food and increasing isolation threaten them, they soon find a more immediate danger standing at their door. When a young man arrives, his friendship offers tantalizing fulfillment, but his love threatens to divide the sisters.

The auto age is defunct. Buicks, Chryslers, and Pontiacs disfigure the landscape. Vines sprout in Manhattan. Wolves are seen in downtown Cleveland. And psychiatrist, mental hospital outpatient, and inventor Dr. Tom More has created a miraculous instrument: the ontological lapsometer, a kind of stethoscope of the human spirit. With it, he plans to cure mankind’s spiritual flu. But first, he must survive Moira, Lola, and Ellen - and discover why so many living people are actually dead.

Le temps de lire cette phrase naîtront sept cent millions de fourmis... Cent millions d’années avant que l'humanité n'apparaisse sur terre, le peuple des fourmis, réparti sur et sous toute la surface du globe, a conçu des civilisations, érigé des empires, bâti des cités, pensé l'art de la guerre et s'en est donné les moyens. Un monde qui rivalise avec celui de l'homme, et peut le submerger sous son invincible déferlement. Fondé sur de rigoureuses données scientifiques, un thriller aussi fascinant qu'angoissant qui fit date. Attention où vous mettrez les pieds.

Bubblegum is set in an alternate present-day world in which the internet does not exist and has never existed. Rather, a wholly different species of interactive technology - a "flesh-and-bone robot" called the Curio - has dominated both the market and the cultural imagination since the late 1980s. Belt Magnet, who as a boy in greater Chicago became one of the lucky first adopters of a Curio, is now writing his memoir, and through it we follow a singular man out of sync with the harsh realities of a world he feels alien to but must find a way to live in.

The Strange Bird is a new kind of creature, built in a laboratory - she is part bird, part human, part many other things. But now the lab in which she was created is under siege, and the scientists have turned on their animal creations. Flying through tunnels, dodging bullets, and changing her colors and patterning to avoid capture, the Strange Bird manages to escape. But she cannot just soar in peace above the earth.

Day one: The Georgia Flu explodes over the surface of the Earth like a neutron bomb. News reports put the mortality rate at over 99%. Week Two: Civilization has crumbled. Year Twenty: A band of actors and musicians called the Travelling Symphony move through their territories performing concerts and Shakespeare to the settlements that have grown up there. Twenty years after the pandemic, life feels relatively safe. But now a new danger looms, and it threatens the hopeful world every survivor has tried to rebuild.

Delaney Wells is an unlikely new hire at the Every. A former forest ranger and unwavering tech skeptic, she charms her way into an entry-level job with one goal in mind: to take down the company from within. With her compatriot, the not-at-all-ambitious Wes Makazian, they look for the Every's weaknesses, hoping to free humanity from all-encompassing surveillance and the emoji-driven infantilization of the species. But does anyone want what Delaney is fighting to save? Does humanity truly want to be free?

Equality 7-2521 is a young man who yearns to understand “the Science of Things”, but he lives in a bleak, dystopian future where independent thought is a crime and where science and technology have regressed to primitive levels. All expressions of individualism have been suppressed in his world. Obedience to the collective is so deeply ingrained that the very word “I” has been erased. In pursuit of his quest for knowledge, Equality 7-2521 struggles to answer the questions that burn within him.

In the Before, when the government didn't prohibit large public gatherings, Luce Cannon was on top of the world. One of her songs had just taken off and she was on her way to becoming a star. Now, in the After, terror attacks and deadly viruses have led the government to ban concerts, and Luce's connection to the world - her music, her purpose - is closed off forever. She does what she has to do: She performs in illegal concerts to a small but passionate community, always evading the law.

In Victoria on a former prison colony, two exiled groups - the farmers of Shantih and the city dwellers - live in apparent harmony. All is not as it seems, however. While the peace-loving farmers labor endlessly to provide food for the city, the city bosses rule the Shantih with an iron fist. When a group of farmers decide to form a new settlement further away, the bosses retaliate by threatening to crush the "rebellion".

Years ago, just before the country was incinerated to wasteland, 10 men and their families colonized an island off the coast. They built a radical society of ancestor worship, controlled breeding, and the strict rationing of knowledge and history. Only the Wanderers - chosen male descendants of the original 10 - are allowed to cross to the wastelands, where they scavenge for detritus among the still-smoldering fires.

En un futuro inquietante y dominado por clones que parecen haber pagado la inmortalidad con la pérdida de la capacidad de reír y de experimentar emociones auténticas, dos misteriosos personajes, Daniel24 y Daniel25, encuentran los diarios de su «original», Daniel1, famoso por sus monólogos cáusticos en los que mezcla la provocación con una visión fría y cruel de la existencia. A través de la lectura de estos diarios, Daniel25 conocerá los últimos años de la vida de Daniel1, y el descubrimiento de su dolor le llevará a poner en riesgo el sueño de la inmortalidad de sus creadores.

One night in an isolated college town in the hills of Southern California, a first-year student stumbles into her dorm room, falls asleep - and doesn't wake up. She sleeps through the morning, into the evening. Her roommate, Mei, cannot rouse her. Neither can the paramedics, nor the perplexed doctors at the hospital. When a second girl falls asleep, and then a third, Mei finds herself thrust together with an eccentric classmate as panic takes hold of the college and spreads to the town.

Daniel Quinn, well known for Ishmael - a life-changing book for readers the world over - once again turns the tables and creates an otherworld that is very like our own, yet fascinating beyond words. Imagine that Nazi Germany was the first to develop an atomic bomb and the Allies surrendered. America was never bombed, occupied, or even invaded, but was nonetheless forced to recognize Nazi world dominance....

Wherever Hel looks, New York City is both reassuringly familiar and terribly wrong. As one of the thousands who fled the outbreak of nuclear war in an alternate US - an alternate timeline - she finds herself living as a refugee in our own not-so-parallel New York. The slang and technology are foreign to her, the politics and art unrecognizable. While others, like her partner Vikram, attempt to assimilate, Hel refuses to reclaim her former career or create a new life. Instead, she obsessively rereads Vikram's copy of The Pyronauts - a science-fiction masterwork in her world.

iDEATH is a place where the sun shines a different color every day and where people travel to the length of their dreams. Rejecting the violence and hate of the old gang at the Forgotten Works, they lead gentle lives in watermelon sugar. In this book, Richard Brautigan discovers and expresses the mood of the counterculture generation.

When Dorrit Wegner turned fifty, the government transferred her to a state-of-the-art facility where she can live out her days in comfort. Her apartment is furnished to her tastes, her meals expertly served, and all at the very reasonable non-negotiable price of one cardiopulmonary system. Once an outsider without family, derided by a society bent on productivity, Dorrit finds within The Unit the company of kindred spirits and a dignity conferred by 'use' in medical tests.

From the perspective of those who live in Herot Hall, the suburb is a paradise. Picket fences divide buildings—high and gabled—and the community is entirely self-sustaining. Each house has its own fireplace, each fireplace is fitted with a container of lighter fluid, and outside—in lawns and on playgrounds—wildflowers seed themselves in neat rows. But for those who live surreptitiously along Herot Hall’s periphery, the subdivision is a fortress guarded by an intense network of gates, surveillance cameras, and motion-activated lights.

The first novel Nabokov wrote while living in America, and the most overtly political novel he ever wrote, Bend Sinister is a modern classic. While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay, it is, first and foremost, a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man caught in the tyranny of a police state. Professor Adam Krug, the country's foremost philosopher, offers the only hope of resistance to Paduk, dictator and leader of the Party of the Average Man.