Dystopian Literary Fiction

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.

Storms and flooding are worsening around the world, and a mysterious immune disorder has begun to afflict the young. Sophie Perella is about to begin her senior year of high school in Toronto when her little sister, Kira, is diagnosed. Their parents' marriage falters under the strain, and Sophie's mother takes the girls to Oxford, England, to live with their Aunt Irene.

רפובליקת גלעד מציעה לשֶלְפְרֶד אופציה אחת בלבד: ללדת ילדים. אם לא תעשה זאת, היא צפויה, כמו כל מתנגדי המשטר, להיתלות על החומה או להישלח אל אחת המושבות ולמות שם מוות אטי ממחלת קרינה. אבל גם תנאי חיים דכאניים אינם יכולים למחוק את התשוקה המינית - לא שלה עצמה ולא של שני הגברים שעתידהּ תלוי בהם. סיפורה של שפחה, חזון מבריק של אמריקה במאה ה-21, כתוב באירוניה מזעזעת ונותן ביטוי מלא לכישרונה האדיר של מרגרט אטווד, לשנינותה ולכושר ההבחנה החודר שלה. זהו תרגיל מופלא במדע בדיוני כמו גם סיפור מוסר כן במיוחד.

George Orwell (1903-1950) was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic. Considered a classic of dystopian fiction, 1984 has contributed many terms to common usage, including "Big Brother", "doublethink", "newspeak", and "thoughtcrime", while the adjective "Orwellian" has entered the English language in the context of government deception, surveillance, and misleading terminology. The narrative unfolds in an imagined future when most of the world has fallen prey to omnipresent government surveillance, propaganda, and endless war.

"Unendlicher Spaß" - so nannte James Incandenza seinen Film, der Menschen, die ihn anschauen, so verhext, dass sie sich nicht mehr von ihm lösen können und dabei verdursten und verhungern. Radikale Separatisten planen mithilfe dieses Films einen Angriff auf das sensations- und vergnügungslüsterne Amerika. Ein zügelloser, unfassbarer Roman, der die menschlichen Obsessionen, Zerstreuungen und Lustbarkeiten in Worte fasst.

The Marigold, a gleaming Toronto condo tower, sits a half-empty promise: a stack of scuffed rental suites and undelivered amenities that crumbles around its residents as a mysterious sludge spreads slowly through it. Public health inspector Cathy Jin investigates this toxic mold as it infests the city’s infrastructure, rotting it from within, while Sam “Soda” Dalipagic stumbles on a dangerous cache of data while cruising the streets in his Camry, waiting for his next rideshare alert.

Japan, after suffering from a massive irreparable disaster, cuts itself off from the world. Children are so weak they can barely stand or walk: the only people with any get-go are the elderly. Mumei lives with his grandfather Yoshiro, who worries about him constantly. They carry on a day-to-day routine in what could be viewed as a post-Fukushima time, with all the children born ancient - frail and gray-haired, yet incredibly compassionate and wise. Mumei may be enfeebled and feverish, but he is a beacon of hope, full of wit and free of self-pity and pessimism.

You stay in bed until the afternoon, scrolling through your social media feeds and wondering why everyone else seems to be achieving so much. Sometimes you don't get out of bed at all. Then you hear about Life on Nyx, a programme that allows 100 lucky winners the chance to escape it all, move to another planet and establish a new way of life. One with meaning and purpose. One without Instagram and online dating. There's one caveat: if you go, you can never come back. But you aren't worried about that. After all, what on Earth could there possibly be to miss?

In this ferociously imaginative novel, abortion is once again illegal in America, in vitro fertilization is banned, and the Personhood Amendment grants rights of life, liberty, and property to every embryo. In a small Oregon fishing town, five very different women navigate these new barriers alongside age-old questions surrounding motherhood, identity, and freedom.

In a speculative future, Abel, a menial worker, is called to serve in a secretive and fabled jury system. At the heart of this system is the repeat room, where a single juror, selected from hundreds of candidates, is able to inhabit the defendant's lived experience, to see as if through their eyes.

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.

Mikhail lives in Russia in 1881. When a skeleton of a rare wild horse is brought to him, the zoologist plans an expedition to Mongolia to find the fabled Przewalski horse, a journey that tests not only his physicality, but his heart.In 1992, Karin, alongside her troubled son Mathias and several Przewalski horses, travels to Mongolia to re-introduce the magnificent horses to their native land. The veterinarian has dedicated her life to saving the breed from extinction, prioritizing the wild horses, even over her own son.

In a parched Southern California of the near future, Luz, once the poster child for the country's conservation movement, and Ray, an army deserter turned surfer, are squatting in a starlet's abandoned mansion. Most "Mojavs", prevented by armed vigilantes from freely crossing borders to lusher regions, have allowed themselves to be evacuated to encampments in the east. Holdouts like Ray and Luz subsist on rationed cola and water and whatever they can loot, scavenge, and improvise.

Amparándose en la coartada del terrorismo islámico, unos políticos teócratas se hacen con el poder y, como primera medida, suprimen la libertad de prensa y los derechos de las mujeres. Esta trama, inquietante y oscura, que bien podría encontrarse en cualquier obra actual, pertenece en realidad a esta novela escrita por Margaret Atwood a principios de los ochenta, en la que la afamada autora canadiense anticipó con llamativa premonición una amenaza latente en el mundo de hoy.

The world Cal and Frida have always known is gone, and they've left the crumbling city of Los Angeles far behind them. They now live in a shack in the wilderness, working side-by-side to make their days tolerable despite the isolation and hardships they face. Consumed by fear of the future and mourning for a past they can't reclaim, they seek comfort and solace in each other. But the tentative existence they've built for themselves is thrown into doubt when Frida finds out she's pregnant.

As a child, Linda Russell was left to raise herself in a 20-acre walled-off property in rural Washington. The woods were her home, and for 12 years she lived oblivious to a stark and terrible truth: Her mother had birthed her only to replace another daughter who died in a tragic accident years before. Then one day Linda witnesses something she wasn’t meant to see.

It's been nearly two decades since the Red Allies first attacked New York, and Manhattan is now a prisoner-of-war camp ruled by Rolladin and her brutal, impulsive warlords. For Skyler Miller, Manhattan is a cage that keeps her from the world beyond the city's borders. But for Sky's younger sister, Phee, the POW camp is a dangerous playground of possibility--and the only home she'd ever want.

King has tenderly staked out a territory for his wife and three daughters, Grace, Lia, and Sky. He has lain the barbed wire; he has anchored the buoys in the water; he has marked out a clear message: Do not enter. Or viewed from another angle: Not safe to leave. Here women are protected from the chaos and violence of men on the mainland. The cult-like rituals and therapies they endure fortify them from the spreading toxicity of a degrading world. But when their father, the only man they've ever seen, disappears, they retreat further inward until the day two men and a boy wash ashore.

Not far in the future, the seas have risen, and the central latitudes are emptying. But it's still a good time to be rich in San Francisco, where weapons drones patrol the skies to keep out the multitudinous poor.

When spring comes, the people leave their winter cave, foraging for honey and shoots, bulbs and grubs, the hot richness of a deer's brain. They awaken the fire to heat their naked bodies, lay down their thorn bushes and share pictures in their minds. But strange things are happening - inexplicable scents, sounds and violence - and, suddenly, unimaginable creatures are half-glimpsed in the forest: an upright new people of bone-faces and deerskins. What the early people don't know is that their season is already over....