Dystopian Literary Fiction

For five years Edie has worked for the Elysian Society, a secretive organisation that provides a very specialised service: its clients come to reconnect with their dead loved ones by channelling them through living 'Bodies'. Edie is one such Body, perhaps the best in the team, renowned for her professionalism and discretion. But everything changes when Patrick, a distraught husband, comes to look for traces of his drowned wife in Edie....

In the turn 2099, the world has become starkly divided between the progress-obsessed Metropolis, and the isolated, exploited outside. In the Metropolis, the Users have become entirely dependent on their ever-expanding grid. Sustained through Poplar Corp.’s updates, the technologically enhanced Users work in unison toward their final end, ALT•4•1- an update that will alter the User in ways unimaginable. However, after a lifetime building Poplar Corp. and the Metropolis from the ground up, Dr. Mulligan has had an epiphany.

The collapse of civilization has left the survivors scattered among a few settlements along the wilderness fringe of a land ravaged by war. Preyed upon by roving bands of sadistic ex-soldiers and ever at the mercy of a natural world that has turned against them, a family is facing their final days. Hope appears in the guise of their young son. Raised in isolation and taught by his father to survive at any cost, he is thrust headlong into a battle for the future of humankind.

In the wake of tragedy, ex-boxer Kelly returns to Detroit after years in the South. Unable to find work, he scavenges for scrap metal in the hundred thousand abandoned buildings at the heart of the city, an area he calls "the zone", where one day he finds something far more valuable than the copper he's come to steal: a kidnapped boy handcuffed to a bed, crying out for rescue. After being celebrated as a hero, Kelly secretly decides to avenge the boy's unsolved kidnapping, a task that will take him deeper into the zone.

A man and a woman have moved into a small house in a small village. The woman is an "examiner", the man her "claimant". The examiner is both doctor and guide, charged with teaching the claimant a series of simple functions: This is a chair, this is a fork, this is how you meet people. She makes notes in her journal about his progress: He is showing improvement, yet his dreams are troubling.

When a dust storm engulfs her Colorado town and pink snow blankets the streets, a heartbreaking decision faces Ruby Cole, a girl who counts birds. She must either abandon her baby or give in to her father, whom she nicknames Lord God, and marry a man more than twice her age who already has two wives. She chooses to run, which sets in motion an interlocking series of actions and reactions, upending the lives of an equestrian police officer, pawnshop riffraff, a disabled war vet, Nuisance Animal destroyers, and a grieving ornithologist who is studying the decline of bird populations.

A few short years from now, the world is an even more uncertain place than it is today, and politics everywhere is marching rightward: Trump is gone, but Brexit is complete, as is Frexit. Britta, a wife, mother, and successful businesswoman, ignores the daily news and concentrates on her family and her work running a clinic specializing in suicide prevention. But her legitimate business is connected to a secret and far more lucrative operation known as The Bridge, an outfit that supplies terrorist organizations looking to employ suicide bombers.

Wealthy participants in the "companionship" program choose to upload their consciousness before dying, so they can stay in the custody of their families. The less fortunate are rented out to strangers upon their death, but all companions become the intellectual property of Metis Corporation, creating a new class of people - a command-driven product-class without legal rights or true free will. Sixteen-year-old Lilac is one of the less fortunate. But when she realizes she’s able to defy commands, she throws off the shackles of servitude and runs away.

Four children live on an island that serves as the repository for all the world’s garbage. Trash arrives, the children sort it, and then they feed it to a herd of insatiable pigs: a perfect system. But when a barrel washes ashore with a boy inside, the children must decide whether he is more of the world’s detritus, meant to be fed to the pigs, or whether he is one of them.

While on vacation on an idyllic island called Miden, a seemingly aimless woman meets an attractive man and leaves her country to be with him. A few months later, newly pregnant and just beginning to feel comfortable in her lover's space, her life is upended when a girl arrives at the door. Slight and pretty, the girl discloses a drawn out and violent affair she's had with her professor, the father of the woman's unborn child. In alternating perspectives, the professor and his girlfriend reflect upon their lives, each other, and their interloper.

Helsinki is battling ruthless climate catastrophe. Tapani Lehtinen, a struggling poet, is among the few still willing to live in the city. When Tapani’s wife, Johanna, a journalist, goes missing, he embarks on a frantic hunt for her. Johanna’s disappearance seems to be connected to a story she was researching about a serial killer known as "The Healer". Determined to find Johanna, Tapani’s search leads him to uncover secrets from her past - secrets that connect her to the very murders she was investigating.

In the future, love is complicated and death is not necessarily the end. Love Minus Eighty follows several interconnected people in a disquieting vision of romantic life. There's Rob, who accidentally kills a jogger, then sacrifices all to visit her in a cryogenic dating facility, seeking forgiveness but instead falling in love. Veronika, a shy dating coach, finds herself coaching the very woman who is stealing the man she loves. And Mira, a gay woman accidentally placed in a heterosexual dating center, desperately seeks a way to reunite with her frozen partner as the years pass.

Say you're a time traveler and you've already toured the entirety of human history. After a while, the outside world might lose a little of its luster. That's why this time traveler celebrates his birthday partying with himself. Every year, he travels to an abandoned hotel in New York City in 2071, the hundredth anniversary of his birth, and drinks 12-year-old Scotch (lots of it) with all the other versions of who he has been and who he will be.

See the rain forests...northern beauty, misted nights. Come to Lighthouse Island.... In the coming centuries, the world's population has exploded and covered the Earth with endless cities. Animals are nearly all gone. Drought plagues the land and cloudy water is issued by the quart. There are no maps, no borders, no numbered years. On this urban planet the only relief from the overcrowding, the petty informers, and the harsh rule of the big Agencies is the television in every living space, offering dreams of vanished waterfalls and the promise of virtual vacations in green spaces for the lucky few.

Would you live your life differently if you were given a second chance? Hannah, David, Connie, and Linda - four terminally ill patients - have been selected for the SUBlife pilot program, which will grant them brand-new, genetically perfect bodies that are exact copies of their former selves - without a single imperfection. Blemishes, scars, freckles, and wrinkles have all disappeared; their fingerprints are different; their vision is impeccable; and, most importantly, their illnesses have been cured.

The Resistance still fights the invaders, but they are nothing more than an annoyance to the Illyri, an alien race of superior technology and military strength. When caught, the young rebels are conscripted. Part soldiers, part hostages, they join the Brigades, sent to fight at the edges of the growing Illyri Empire.

Insomnia has claimed everyone Biggs knows. Even his beloved wife, Carolyn, succumbed before disappearing into the quickly collapsing world. Yet Biggs can still sleep, and dream, so he sets out to find her. He ventures out into a world ransacked by mass confusion and desperation, where he meets others struggling against the tide of sleeplessness. Chase and Jordan are devising a scheme to live off their drug-store lootings; Lila is a high school student wandering the streets in an owl mask; Felicia abandons the sanctuary of a sleep research center to try to protect her family.

The America of 2037 is a country distracted by, infatuated with, and addicted to Arcadia. The brainchild of reclusive genius Juan Diego Reyes, Arcadia is a wickedly immersive, all-encompassing social-media platform and virtual-reality interface. Although Arcadia has made the Reyes family fabulously wealthy, it's left them - and the rest of the country - impoverished of that rare currency: intimacy.

When a widower receives notice from a doctor that he doesn't have long left to live, he is struck by the question of who will care for his adult son - a son whom he fiercely loves, a boy with Down syndrome. With no recourse in mind, and with a desire to see the country on one last trip, the man signs up as a census taker for a mysterious governmental bureau and leaves town with his son.

Ten long years have passed since war first broke out, and one couple still does not know the whereabouts of their children, or what their country is even fighting for. They follow orders and their lives go by simply, routinely, until one day, mute boy walks onto their property. When the authorities announce that the area needs to be evacuated and that everyone must relocate to the transparent city, the three leave together.