So You Want to Read Dystopian Fiction: Here’s Where to Start

Mystery writer Phyllis Dorothy James wrote only one science-fiction, but wow, is it a doozy. It is the year 2021, and England has become a brutal dictatorship. Humanity is no longer capable of reproducing, and the final generation of babies, the Omegas, have grown into nihilistic adults with little compassion for their fear-stricken elders. Protagonist Theo is a college professor: a useless profession in a world with no more young people to educate. Life seems hopeless until the day he is approached by a group of dissidents who claim to know of a pregnant woman. If they’re telling the truth, it could mean there’s hope yet for humanity. This novel was adapted into the absolutely crushing 2006 film “Children of Men”, directed by Alfonso Cuarón.

The Handmaid’s Tale is a modern classic: a feminist science-fiction parable about reproductive liberty and religious oppression. The United States is no more following a coup and nuclear exchange. In its place is Gilead: a theocratic dictatorship. Radiation and pollution following the war has taken a toll on the residents of Gilead, many of whom have become sterile. Offred is a handmaid: one of countless fertile women held in bondage by Gilead’s ruling men. Offred, dehumanized and treated as little more than breeding stock, is expected to clean and bear her master’s children. Unwilling to accept a life of servitude, Offred hatches a plan to escape Gilead.

Lenny Abramov is a middle-aged man stuck in the past century: a time of paper books and face to face communication. Unfortunately for him, he’s madly in love with Eunice Park, a young Korean-American woman who is thoroughly a product of a modern age of hyper-consumerism and constant online connection. As Lenny and Eunice pursue their awkward courtship, a borderline illiterate America collapses into totalitarianism around them. Don’t be fooled by the title: Super Sad True Love Story packs quite a wallop. Rumor has it that Showtime will be adapting this as a series sometime in the future.

A patient escapes from a biological testing facility, unknowingly carrying a deadly weapon: a mutated strain of super-flu that will wipe out 99 percent of the world’s population within a few weeks. Those who remain are scared, bewildered, and in need of a leader. Two emerge—Mother Abagail, the benevolent 108-year-old woman who urges them to build a peaceful community in Boulder, Colorado; and Randall Flagg, the nefarious “Dark Man,” who delights in chaos and violence. As the dark man and the peaceful woman gather power, the survivors will have to choose between them—and ultimately decide the fate of all humanity.

Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city. Within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end. Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians. They call themselves The Traveling Symphony, and they have dedicated themselves to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who will threaten the tiny band’s existence. And as the story takes off, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, the strange twist of fate that connects them all will be revealed.

The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years.