Haunting Dystopian Books To Read Right Now

Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving father. His mother Margaret, a Chinese American poet, left without a trace when he was nine years old. He doesn’t know what happened to her — only that her books have been banned. Then one day, Bird receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, and soon he is pulled into a quest to find her. His journey will take him back to the many folktales she poured into his head as a child, through the ranks of an underground network of heroic librarians, and finally to New York City, where he will finally learn the truth about what happened to his mother, and what the future holds for them both.

Erin is a plastic girl living in a plastic world. Every day she eats a breakfast of boiled chicken, then conveys her articulated body to Tablet Town, where she sells other figurines Smartbodies: wearable tech that allows full, physical immersion in a virtual world, a refuge from real life’s brutal wars, oppressive governmental monitoring, and omnipresent eco-terrorist insurgency. Both a crypto-comedic dystopian fantasy and a deadly serious dissection of our own farcical pre-apocalypse, Scott Guild’s novel is an achingly beautiful, disarmingly welcoming, and fabulously inventive look at the hollow core of modern American society — and a guide to how we might reanimate all its broken plastic pieces.

Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of Paul Atreides − who would become known as Maud’Dib — and of a great family’s ambition to bring to fruition humankind’s most ancient and unattainable dream. A stunning blend of adventure and mysticism, environmentalism, and politics, Dune won the first Nebula Award, shared the Hugo Award, and formed the basis of what is undoubtedly the grandest epic in science fiction.

Propelled by its heroine’s wisecracking voice, set in a city that’s at once stunningly imagined and intimately familiar, and brimming over with clever problem-solving and heist-y fun, Artemis is another irresistible brew of science, suspense, and humor from #1 bestselling author Andy Weir.

A searing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son’s fight to survive. The Road boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.

When Thomas wakes up in the lift, the only thing he can remember is his name. He’s surrounded by strangers—boys whose memories are also gone. Outside the towering stone walls that surround them is a limitless, ever-changing maze. It’s the only way out—and no one’s ever made it through alive. Then a girl arrives. The first girl ever. And the message she delivers is terrifying: Remember. Survive. Run.

Kirsten Raymonde is a part of the Traveling Symphony, a nomadic troupe of actors and musicians making their way through the plague-ravaged remnants of the U.S. to bring music and art to a desperate people. When a cult led by a man simply called Prophet threatens the troupe’s very existence, Kirsten and her compatriots are pushed apart and struggle for survival and a safe haven. Through it all, a narrative thread from the past links the fates of these disparate people firmly together.

A pandemic has devastated the planet, sorting humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead. Mark Spitz is a member of the civilian sweeper unit tasked with clearing lower Manhattan of the remaining feral zombies. Zone One unfolds over three surreal days in which Spitz is occupied with the mundane mission of straggler removal, the rigors of Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder (PASD), and the impossible task of coming to terms with a fallen world. And then things start to go terribly wrong…

The year is 2172. Climate change and nuclear disasters have rendered much of earth unlivable. Only the lucky ones have escaped to space colonies in the sky. In a war-torn Nigeria, battles are fought using flying, deadly mechs and soldiers are outfitted with bionic limbs and artificial organs meant to protect them from the harsh, radiation-heavy climate. Two sisters, Onyii and Ify, dream of more. Their lives have been marked by violence and political unrest. Still, they dream of peace, of hope, of a future together. And they’re willing to fight an entire war to get there.

On an unnamed island, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, and roses. Most of the inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few able to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten. When a young writer discovers that her editor is in danger, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards, and together they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past. Powerful and provocative, The Memory Police is a stunning novel about the trauma of loss.

Darrow is a Red, a member of the lowest caste in the color-coded society of the future. He works all day, believing that he and his people are making the surface of Mars livable for future generations. But Darrow and his kind have been betrayed and now he will stop at nothing to bring down his enemies…even if it means he has to become one of them to do so.

As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges how special they were. Now, years later, Kathy is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it is that makes them special. Suspenseful, moving, beautifully atmospheric, Never Let Me Go is a modern classic.

In the Society, Officials decide. Who you love. Where you work. When you die. Cassia has always trusted the Society’s choices. And when her best friend appears on the Matching screen, she’s certain he’s the one—until she sees another face flash for an instant before the screen fades to black. Now she is forced to choose between the only life she’s ever known and a path no one has dared to follow…between perfection and the truth.

This book imagines a world where America is half underwater and under the constant surveillance of an artificially intelligent internet. The upper caste, known as “Netted,” occupy the literal high-ground. The lower caste, “Surplus,” make their way in the swamps and on the water. When the government resurrects the game of baseball, a pitching prodigy—and the daughter of a Surplus couple—sees a way out and up the insurmountable social ladder, but at what cost? The wry undertones and sheer plausibility make this well-hewn dystopian novel all the more unsettling.

American War is a must-read. Set against the backdrop of the Second American Civil War, Sarat Chestnut has grown up in a world where drones fill the sky, oil is outlawed, and her climate change-ravaged home is partially underwater. When her father is killed and her family is displaced to a refugee camp, Sarat becomes a dangerous cog in the resistance movement, trading her humanity for vengeance in hopes of a better world.

Rebecca cannot shake the feeling that the world around her is slightly off. Her husband, a renowned physicist, is busy at work on what most would call a time machine—although he and his team avoid that label. When a car crash, resulting from the failure of a self-driving car, ends in tragedy, timelines seem to converge and Rebecca begins to realize nothing is quite as it seems.

Multiverse travel is finally possible, but there’s just one catch: No one can visit a world where their counterpart is still alive. Enter Cara, whose parallel selves happen to be exceptionally good at dying — from disease, turf wars, or vendettas they couldn’t outrun. Cara’s life has been cut short on 372 worlds in total. On this dystopian Earth, however, Cara has survived. Identified as an outlier and therefore a perfect candidate for multiverse travel, Cara is plucked from the dirt of the wastelands and is on a sure path to citizenship and security. But trouble finds Cara when one of her eight remaining doppelgängers dies under mysterious circumstances, plunging her into a new world with an old secret.

In the world that Rosemary Laws and Luce Cannon know, there is only the Before and the After. In the Before, Luce was a rising music star—until the government banned concerts and large events amidst a spate of terrorist attacks and deadly virus outbreaks. In the After, Rosemary finds a new job facilitating virtual reality concerts. When Rosemary gets a taste of what the Before was like after a chance encounter with Luce, her life—and possibly the world as she knows it—may never be the same.

In this near-future thriller, Cloud is a monolithic tech company accounting for the bulk of the American economy—it’s Big Business meets Big Brother in sanitized box stores and sprawling live-work compounds. Working for Cloud is not the life Paxton imagined for himself, but it’s better than the squalor of the outside world. When he meets Zinnia, a woman who has infiltrated Cloud with the hope of exposing the company’s darkest secrets, Paxton is unknowingly swept into a plot that will shatter the carefully cultivated world around him and prove just how far-reaching Cloud really is.

In 2059, the world is on the verge of destruction. A solar event that occurred forty years ago brought the earth’s rotation to a halt, leaving half of the world in darkness. Humanity survives in a handful of habitable zones just outside the scorching sunlight and the frozen darkness. Ellen Hopper, a scientist working a derelict rig in the Atlantic, is called back to London and soon discovers a secret that could threaten whatever waning time humanity has left.

The Dreamers follows an ordinary town that is transformed by a mysterious illness that triggers perpetual sleep. Written in luminous prose, this novel is a breathtaking and beautiful story, startling and provocative, about the possibilities contained within a human life—if only we are awakened to them.