Young Adult Dystopian Fiction

They injected me with a VR chip, a GPS tracker, and my first Seed. They gave me unbelievable powers. Then they sent me to fight. The monsters here are alien and vicious. There is a second moon in the sky. I watched a tree start moving and kill someone. And the other Players…? They're even worse.

They thought escaping the undead hordes was their ticket to freedom. They couldn't have been more wrong. Now Wren and Robyn must face a new enemy and a kind of danger like no other they have encountered. Their success means a chance of survival for everyone they care about. Their failure means the end of everything they have fought for. For these two sisters time is running out fast and the sun is setting on the longest day of their lives. Just one question still remains, will they get to see the dawn?

If the melt-down, flood, plague, the third World War, new Ice Age, Rapture, alien invasion, clamp-down, meteor, or something else entirely hit today, what would tomorrow look like? Some of the biggest names in YA and adult literature answer that very question in this short story anthology, each story exploring the lives of teen protagonists raised in catastrophe's wake - whether set in the years soon after the change, or in decades far in the future.

In the near-future United States, a one-child policy is ruthlessly enforced. Everyone follows the Rule of One. But Ava Goodwin, daughter of the head of the Texas Family Planning Division, has a secret - one her mother died to keep and her father has helped to hide for her entire life. She has an identical twin sister, Mira.

After seven months as a captive of Minerva, the insane Alpha queen, Lyric Walker has escaped to the surface. Her only goal is to warn the world about the Great Abyss. When she finally arrives back in Coney Island, she discovers a world she never expected, one where humans and Alpha are finally working hand in hand to rebuild the country. But she soon discovers that an old enemy allied with an old friend may kill them all before the monsters get their turn.

When she lost her soul mate, Caleb, Eve felt like her world had ended. Trapped in the palace, forced to play the part of the happy, patriotic princess of The New America - and the blushing bride of her father's top adviser - Eve's whole life is a lie. The only thing that keeps her going is Caleb's memory, and the revolution he started. Now, Eve is taking over where Caleb left off. With the help of Moss, an undercover subversive in the King's court, she plots to take down The New America, beginning with the capital, the City of Sand.

Thirteen-year-old Kyra has grown up in an isolated polygamous community without questioning her father's three wives and her twenty brothers and sisters. Or at least without questioning them much—if you don't count her secret visits to the Mobile Library on Wheels to read forbidden books, or her meetings with the boy she hopes to choose for herself instead of having a man chosen for her. But when the Prophet decrees that Kyra must marry her 60-year-old uncle—who already has six wives—Kyra must make a desperate choice in the face of violence and her own fears of losing her family.

When Reed is sent to a secret reeducation center for teens in the middle of the Dirt, he doesn’t expect friendship — not with Xoey, the fragile girl who arrives with him. Not with Adam, the brooding boy who has been here longer than anyone. But especially not with Riley, a girl he knew in the Sand who has every reason to hate him.

Welcome to the New Alliance – a reimagined world after a war and a flood. Taryn Beck and her family don’t have much, and her younger brother needs vital medication to survive. Medication they can’t access or afford. Taryn secretly enters Network G’s reality show: Starmaker, the most watched TV show in the world. The rules are simple; young women from all over the globe compete to join an all-singing, all-dancing pop outfit, DOLLHOU5E. If you win, a life of luxury, stardom and wealth awaits . . . But there’s a catch.

Tally tenía un sueño: ser perfecta. Ahora ya lo ha hecho realidad y ha perdido, como consecuencia, casi todos los recuerdos de su pasado. Su única preocupación es ser admitida en la mejor pandilla de la ciudad, y para lograrlo solo tiene que ganarse la aprobación de Zane—el chico más popular y deseado—durante una peculiar fiesta de disfraces que se celebrará en Nueva Belleza. Pero la noche de la fiesta, un encuentro fugaz hará que el mundo de Tally se tambalee...

Reed Paine thought stealing the Liberty Bell and escaping from Windmill Bay would be his end game, but he never intended to leave two friends behind. When he and Riley decide to search for her sister instead of returning for their friends, they face mounting guilt over their decision, along with dangers they never imagined in the Red Zone.

A formula has been created. One that will ensure immunity for all. But it’s been stolen as a hidden enemy undermines every step to save the Vulnerables. Echo is doing everything she can to hunt the saboteur. River is about to discover he’s more connected to this than he ever thought possible.

Lucy's life by the pond has always been full. She has water and friends, laughter and the love of her adoptive mother, Lynn, who has made sure that Lucy's childhood was very different from her own. Yet it seems Lucy's future is settled already - a house, a man, children, and a water source - and anything more than life by the pond is beyond reach. When disease burns through their community, the once life-saving water of the pond might be the source of what's killing them now.

Ever since the war ended, the United English Cityships have had equality. The rules are clear. You are born, you live and the day following your sixtieth birthday, you are sent off for your final sleep. Lock is a firm believer in the system. It means that everyone is truly treated equally. It’s only when she checks in an attendee who claims to be younger than her chip says that Lock starts to realise there may be someone gaming the system.

Scarb are the enemy. The enemy. The enemy. I told myself this over and over. They murdered my parents. They rape the land and kill humans as if they are the vermin. They took Ray. I ran water over my face, looked at my eyes with their double lenses like two blue lakes: one navy, one ice. The enemy. And now I'm one of them.

Having survived a violent confrontation with the US government, Avie is not out of danger. Both she and the young man she loves, Yates, have been declared terrorists, and Yates is hospitalized in critical condition, leaving Avie with the perilous task of carrying information that can bring down the Paternalist party, if she can get it into the right hands.

A scorned god. A mysterious acolyte. A forgetting drug. A dangerous forest. One girl caught between the freedom she always wanted and a sister she can't bear to leave behind. Under the cover of the Night Forest, will Lucha be able to step into her own power...or will she be consumed by it?

L'ensemble des besoins des êtres humains peut être classé en cinq catégories. Aujourd'hui, cette théorie est le principe d'un nouveau jeu de télé-réalité : La pyramide des besoins humains. Nous sommes 15 000 candidats, et dans cinq semaines il n'en restera plus qu'un. Et moi dans tout ça ? Disons que je m'appelle Christopher Scott. Disons que j'ai dix-huit ans. Que j'habite sur un morceau de carton, dans la rue, à Londres. Enfin, peu importe mon nom, peu importe mon âge. Je suis le candidat no 12778. Je n'existe pas encore.

Acadia - the last human city, a fact all of its citizens were told from birth. For 200 years, a countless host of creatures have laid siege to Acadia, leaving the land rough with the bodies of the fallen. For Cojax becoming a Validated, a true defender of the city, is his greatest ambition. That all changes when Jessica appears - a girl from outside the city walls - from a land that supposedly held no life.

The year is 2195. The place is New Victoria - a high-tech nation modeled on the manners, mores, and fashions of an antique era. A teenager in high society, Nora Dearly is far more interested in military history and her country’s political unrest than in tea parties and debutante balls. But after her beloved parents die, Nora is left at the mercy of her domineering aunt, a social-climbing spendthrift who has squandered the family fortune and now plans to marry her niece off for money.