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Booklists

Lists of books, many of which received at least one starred review (indicating a work of unusual merit) from the following review sources: Booklist , Publisher's Weekly (PW), Kirkus and Library Journal (LJ). Additional titles of interest may be included on the lists. Titles are generally listed alphabetically by author.

 

 

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Booklists and Suggested Reading

Dystopias Booklist

 

Page Modified: April 5, 2008

Dystopian Fiction - novels set in a world gone wrong. This list includes classic titles, current fiction (all genres) and some classic novels for children and teens.

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Annotations are from Advance, the Ingram Book Magazine, unless noted.

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Adult Fiction Stars

• The Handmaid's Tale
  Author: Atwood, Margaret
  Publisher: Houghton $ 16.95 ISBN: 0395404258 Date: 1985
  First published in 1985, this is a novel of such power that the reader is unable to forget its images and its forecast. It is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and tour de force. "A novel that brilliantly illuminates some of the darker interconnections between politics and sex".--"The Washington Post Book World".
  Updated 5.18.05
• Oryx and Crake
  Author: Atwood, Margaret
  Publisher: Doubleday $ 26 ISBN: 03885503857 Date: 2003
  KirkusBooklistPWLJ
  With command of her material and with her sharp wit and dark humor, Atwood projects a conceivable future of the world, a place left devastated in the wake of ecological and scientific disaster, and populated by a cast of characters who will continue to inhabit dreams long after the book is closed.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars
  Updated 4.29.03
• Turning on the Girls
  Author: Bernard, Cheryl
  Publisher: FSG $ 23 ISBN: 0374281785 Date: 2001
  In the wickedly amusing Turning on the Girls, Cheryl Benard proves herself to be truly an equal-opportunity satirist. It's the year 2000-something. A decade ago, the world's power was seized by women, and since then things have been wonderful . . . or at least they will be--just as soon as the new rulers finish fixing things.
  Updated 5.26.05
• Bloodtide
  Author: Burgess, Melvin
  Publisher: Tor $ 24.95 ISBN: 0765300486 Date: 2001
  PW
  From the author of the critically-acclaimed award-winning Smack comes a novel set in the chaos of a ruined London in the not-too-distant future. Twins Siggy and Signy become entangled in family ties and the tragic rivalries that could destroy them both in a city that becomes a battle ground between two warring families of ruthless ganglords.
  Suggested Reading: Adult Books for Teens
  Updated 5.26.05
• Parable of the Sower
  Author: Butler, Octavia
  Publisher: Seven Stories $ 19.95 ISBN: 1888363258 Date: 1993
  PW
  In a time of urban squalor, rampant violence, and deadly decay, anarchy rules. But for Lauren Olamina, a new hope is dawning when she leaves the chaos of L.A. and flees north with a tiny band of followers.
  Updated 5.23.05
• Parable of the Talents
  Author: Butler, Octavia
  Publisher: Seven Stories $ 24.95 ISBN: 1888363819 Date: 1998
  PW LJ
  In this long-awaited novel, Butler revisits familiar themes to tell of a society in 2032 whose very fabric has been torn, and where the basic physical and emotional needs of people seem almost impossible to meet.
  Suggested Reading: African American Stars
• Circuit of Heaven
  Author: Danvers, Dennis
  Publisher: Eos $ 14 ISBN: 0380974479 Date: 1998
  NYTBR Notable Book
  Reluctant to visit the parents who had forsaken him for a virtual reality paradise called "the Bin," Nemo, who refuses to submit to technological advances, meets Justine and begins to doubt his fervent beliefs, and when she begins to have someone else's dreams, they are both plunged into a nightmare world.
  Updated 5.26.05
• Walking Tour
  Author: Davis, Kathryn
  Publisher: Houghton Mifflin List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0395945410 Date: 1999
  KirkusPW
  By turns dazzling and as dark, as risky and entrancing as the landscape it describes, The Walking Tour is part mystery story, part shrewd visionary meditation on the uneasy marriage of art and commerce, telling the story of a fatal accident which occurs during a walking tour in Wales.
  
• Distress
  Egan, Greg
  Publisher: HarperPrism List Price: $21 ISBN: 0061052647 Date: 1997
  Publishers Weekly
  In his latest novel, the author of Permutation City and Quarantine creates a fragmented futuristic world where technology and bio-engineering threaten humanity's very existence. The year is 2055, and the world's only hope for survival lies in Violet Mosasa's development of a final Theory of Everything. But whether it will lead to the total destruction of Life As We Know It or the complete remaking of the Universe may be a risk to dangerous to take.
  
• The Misconceiver
  Author: Ferriss, Lucy
  Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 22.95 ISBN: 0684800926 Date: 1997
  PW
  A provocative, dystopian novel in the tradition of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Caught in the social and political crossfire after Roe v. Wade is overturned in 2011, Phoebe performs illegal "misconceptions" in her basement, restoring to desperate women some control over their own bodies.
• The Physiognomy
  Author: Ford, Jeffrey
  Publisher: Avon $ 12 ISBN: 0380793318 Date: 1997
  Kirkus NYTBR Notable Book
  Sent from the Well-Built City to a barren mining town, physiognomist Cley is directed to find the thief who has stolen a supernatural and legendary white fruit that grew in the Earthly Paradise. By the author of Vanitas.
  Updated 5.25.05
• P.E.A.C.E
  Author: Holmes, Guy
  Publisher: Simon & Schuster $23 ISBN: 0684870797 Date: 2000
  Kirkus
  The police procedural meets 1984. In this sharply drawn, prophetic literary thriller, an anti-crime video surveillance system turns New York City into the base for an astonishing conspiracy that reaches to the highest levels of government.
  Suggested Reading: Conspiracy Theory
  Updated 10/5/00
• The Children of Men
  Author: James, P.D.
  Publisher: Knopf $ 22 ISBN: 0679418733 Date: 1993
  In 2021, with the human race becoming extinct because of the infertility of all males, Oxford historian Theodore Faron is drawn into the schemes of an unlikely group of revolutionaries out to save society
  Updated 5.18.05
• Body Politic
  Author: Johnson, Paul
  Publisher: St Martins List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 0312202792 Date: 1999
  PW
  Gorky Park meets Brave New World in this award-winning debut novel of a serial killer lost in a supposedly perfect society overtaken by the Enlightenment.
  Suggested Reading: Scottish Crime Fiction
  
• Water of Death
  Author: Johnston, Paul
  Publisher: Minotaur $ 24.95 ISBN: 0312273118 Date: 2001
  Booklist
  Edinburgh, 2025: an almost crime-free oasis surrounded by anarchic city-states. But global warming has turned summer into the Big Heat, and water, like everything else, is strictly rationed. Citizens live only for the weekly lottery drawing. When a recent winner goes missing, however, subversive investigator Quintilian Dalrymple is called in to deal with a case of the summertime blues. Then a body is discovered face down in the Water of Leith, and the only clue to the death is a bottle of contraband whisky. Quint thinks he sees traces of a conspiracy to destabilize the city, as the body count -- like the temperature -- keeps on rising.
  Suggested Reading: Scottish Crime Fiction
  Updated 3/13/01
• The Tyrant's Novel
  Author: Keneally, Thoams
  Publisher: Delacorte $ 25 ISBN: 0385511469 Date: 2004
  KirkusPW
  In a work that evokes the classic cautionary tale Fahrenheit 451, Keneally masters the gripping perspective of a man caught between the unconscionable demands of his government and the meager prospect of running for his life.
  Suggested Reading: Political Fiction
  Updated 5.24.04
• A Philosphical Investigation
  Author: Kerr, Philip
  Publisher: FSG $ 20 ISBN: 0374231761 Date: 1993
  KirkusPW
  In an intensely violent futuristic world where serial killers abound and people are screened to determine their predisposition for criminality, a man who fits the model decides to become a serial killer of serial killers.
  Updated 5.25.05
• Second Angel
  Author: Kerr, Philip
  Publisher: Henry Holt $ 25 ISBN:0805059628 Date: 1999
  Kirkus
  Set in 2069, on the centennial of the Apollo XII Moon mission, this dystopian high-velocity thriller reveals an Earth where plagues have destroyed the major food supplies, climatic changes have brought constant winter to the once-industialized West, and a new and virulent virus has infected the population.
• Just Like Beauty
  Author: Lerner, Lisa
  Publisher: Farrar $ 24 ISBN: 0374180628 Date: 2002
  Library Journal
  A darkly comic and surprisingly sweet coming-of-age story is set in the dystopic suburban near future, where a plague of mutant grasshoppers invades a hopelessly artificial landscape and bands of teenage boys run amok.
  Updated 10/8/01
• Eyes of the Calculor
  Author: McMullen, Sean
  Publisher: Tor $ 27.95 ISBN: 0312877366 Date: 2001
  Booklist
  Two thousand years in the future, the Dragon Librarians of Australica have just one means to hold their world together: kidnap every numerate person on their continent and rebuild their out-of-date, human-powered computer--the Calculor.
  Suggested Reading: Librarian Stars
• Perdido Street Station
  Author: Mieville, China
  Publisher: Del Rey $ 18 ISBN: 0345443020 Date: 2001
  KirkusLJ
  In the sprawling gothic city of New Crobuzon, a stranger has come to request the services of Isaac, an overweight and slightly eccentric scientist. But it is an impossible request--that of flight--and in the end Isaac's attempts will only succeed in unleashing a dark force upon the city.
  
• Scar
  Author: Mieville, China
  Publisher: Del Rey $ 18.95 (trade paper) ISBN: 0345444388 Date: 2002
  PWLJ
  Aboard a vast seafaring vessel, prisoners and slaves are being transported to a fledgling colony of New Crobuzon. When the ship is besieged by pirates, the senior officials are executed, and surviving passengers are brought to a floating city constructed upon the hulls of pirated ships, a place whose leaders harbor a sinister agenda.
  Suggested Reading: Pirate Stars
• Iron Council
  Author: Mieville, China
  Publisher: Del Rey $ 24.95 ISBN: 0345464028 Date: 2004
  PW
  Following Perdido Street Station and The Scar, acclaimed author China Mieville returns with his hugely anticipated Del Rey hardcover debut.
  Updated 7.6.04
• Woman on the Edge of Time
  Author: Piercy, Marge
  Publisher: Random Date: 1976
  Connie Ramos, a woman in her mid-thirties, has been declared insane. But Connie is overwhelmingly sane, merely tuned to the future, and able to communicate with the year 2137. As her doctors persuade her to agree to an operation, Connie struggles to force herself to listen to the future and its lessons for today....
  Updated 5.23.05
• Thinner Than Thou
  Author: Reed, Kit
  Publisher: Tor $ 24.95 ISBN: 0765307626 Date: 2004
  PWBooklist
  In the tomorrow of Thinner Than Thou, the cult of the body has become the one true religion. The Dedicated Sisters are a religious order sworn to help anorexic, bulimic, and morbidly obese youth. Throughout the land, houses of worship have been replaced by the health clubs of the Crossed Triceps. And through hypnotically powerful evangelical infomercials, the Reverend Earl preaches the heaven of the Afterfat, where you will look like a Greek god and can eat anything you want. Just sign over your life savings and come to Sylphania, the most luxurious weight-loss spa in the world, where the Reverend himself will personally supervise your attainment of physical perfection.
But the glory of youth and thinness that America worships conceals a hidden world where teens train for the competitive eating circuit, where fat porn and obese strippers feed people's dark desires, and where an underground railroad of rebellious religions remember when people worshipped God instead of the Afterfat. - Publisher Marketing
Suggested Reading: Adult Books for Teens
Updated 6.15.04
• Distraction
  Author: Sterling, Bruce
  Publisher: Spectra $ 23.95 ISBN: 0553104845 Date: 1999
  PW Kirkus
  An electrifying cautionary tale from Bruce Sterling - called "one of the best thinkers in science fiction today" (Newsweek) - propels readers to 2043, when high technology is humanity's ultimate threat.
  
• The Visitor
  Author: Tepper, Sheri S.
  Publisher: Eos $ 25.95 ISBN: 0380979055 Date: 2002
  PW
  Centuries after an asteroid nearly obliterates the Earth, young orphan Disme Latimer is keeper of a mysterious book. Written by her ancestor, Neil Latimer, who chose to protect the remains of the post-apocalyptic world, the book contains "myths" that suggest that a band of scientists from that time--including Neil--have miraculously survived. Disme's quest to discover the truth will bring her face to face with an unimaginable evil.
  
• Player Piano
  Author: Vonnegut, Kurt , Jr.
  Publisher: Macmillan Date: 1952
  Vonnegut's first novel spins the chilling tale of engineer Paul Proteus, who must find a way to live in a world dominated by a super computer and run completely by machines. His rebellion is a wildly funny, darkly satirical look at modern society.
  Updated 5.23.05
• City on Fire
  Author: Williams, Walter Jon
  Publisher: HarperCollins $22 ISBN: 0061052132 Date: 1997
  PW NYTBR Notable Book
  After the war, Aiah must contend with Constantine, the man she transformed into a leader, as he forces her to recruit plasm divers to destroy the Silver Hand and work with a terrifying human-turned-monster that only ventures out of his hole to destroy life, but she also discovers her heritage and what lurks behind the Shield.
  Updated 5.26.05
• Let's Put the Future Behind Us
  Author: Womack, Jack
  Publisher: Atlantic $ 23 ISBN: 0871136279 Date: 1996
  Kirkus
  In this satirical romp through post - Soviet Russia, Womack describes a world of petty bureaucrats, shameless opportunities, and full-blown mafiosi.
  Updated 5.25.05
  Also: Random Acts of Senseless Violence, Heathern, Ambient

Classics

• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner
• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick
• 334 by Thomas M. Disch
• A Very Private Life by Michael Frayn
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
• Animal Farm by George Orwell

For Children and Teens

• Off the Road by Nina Bawden
• No Kidding by Bruce Brooks
• The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead and The Pool of Fire by John Christopher
• The Supernaturalist by Eoin Colfer
• The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau
• The House of the Scorpion and The Ear, the Eye and the Arm by Nancy Farmer
• The Dirt Eaters by Dennis Foon
• Hole in the Sky by Pete Hautman
• The Cure by Sonia Levitin
• The Giver and Gathering Blue by Lois Lowry
• Secret Under My Skin by Janet Elizabeth McNaughton
• Shade's Children by Garth Nix
• The Last Book in the Universe by W.R. Philbrick
• Rotten Island by William Steig
• River Rats by Caroline Stevermer
• Uglies by Scott Westerfeld

 

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