Great Dystopian Sci-fi
1984 - George Orwell
Written in 1948, 1984 was George Orwell’s chilling prophecy about the future. And while 1984 has come and gone, his dystopian vision of a government that will do anything to control the narrative is timelier than ever...
Winston Smith toes the Party line, rewriting history to satisfy the demands of the Ministry of Truth. With each lie he writes, Winston grows to hate the Party that seeks power for its own sake and persecutes those who dare to commit thoughtcrimes. But as he starts to think for himself, Winston can’t escape the fact that Big Brother is always watching...
A startling and haunting vision of the world, 1984 is so powerful that it is completely convincing from start to finish. No one can deny the influence of this novel, its hold on the imaginations of multiple generations of readers, or the resiliency of its admonitions—a legacy that seems only to grow with the passage of time.
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Brave New World predicts - with eerie clarity - a terrifying vision of the future. Read the dystopian classic that inspired the upcoming Sky TV series.
EVERYONE BELONGS TO EVERYONE ELSE
Welcome to New London. Everybody is happy here. Our perfect society achieved peace and stability through the prohibition of monogamy, privacy, money, family and history itself. Now everyone belongs.
You can be happy too. All you need to do is take your Soma pills.
Discover the brave new world of Aldous Huxley's classic novel, written in 1932, which prophesied a society which expects maximum pleasure and accepts complete surveillance - no matter what the cost.
Do Androids Dream of Electric sheep? - Philip K Dick
World War Terminus had left the Earth devastated. Through its ruins, bounty hunter Rick Deckard stalked, in search of the renegade replicants who were his prey. When he wasn't 'retiring' them with his laser weapon,
he dreamed of owning a live animal - the ultimate status symbol in a world all but bereft of animal life.
Then Rick got his chance: the assignment to kill six Nexus-6 targets, for a huge reward. But in Deckard's world things were never that simple, and his assignment quickly turned into a nightmare kaleidoscope of subterfuge and deceit - and the threat of death for the hunter rather than the hunted ...
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
Discover the dystopian novel behind the award-winning TV series before you read the Booker Prize-winning sequel The Testaments
‘I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.’
Offred is a Handmaid in The Republic of Gilead, a religious totalitarian state in what was formerly known as the United States. She is placed in the household of The Commander, Fred Waterford – her assigned name, Offred, means ‘of Fred’. She has only one function: to breed. If Offred refuses to enter into sexual servitude to repopulate a devastated world, she will be hanged. Yet even a repressive state cannot eradicate hope and desire. As she recalls her pre-revolution life in flashbacks, Offred must navigate through the terrifying landscape of torture and persecution in the present day, and between two men upon which her future hangs.
Masterfully conceived and executed, this haunting vision of the future places Margaret Atwood at the forefront of dystopian fiction.
Skin - Liam Brown
A strange virus is sweeping the globe.
Humans have become allergic to one another.
Simply standing next to somebody could be a death sentence.
A kiss could be fatal.
Angela is a woman trying to get by in this bewildering new world. Though she still lives with her husband and children, they lead separate lives. Confined to their rooms, they communicate via their computers and phones. In some ways, very little has changed.
That is, until she spots a mysterious stranger walking through town without even a face mask for protection. A man, it seems, immune to this disease. A man unlike anyone else she knows. A man it might just be safe to touch...
Among Wolves - R. A. Hakok
You carry no metal.
You keep within hollering distance.
You stay out of the dark places.
These are the rules Gabriel lives by.
There are no exceptions.
It has been ten years since the iron virus laid waste to the land, and still the children huddle deep inside the mountain, waiting for the day it will be safe to venture out again. But through the long winters the ash-storms continue to rage, and supplies are running low. Kane says it will be okay, but Gabriel isn’t so sure. Gabriel’s their scavenger. He’s seen what it’s like out there.
Then one day Gabriel finds a bloodstained map. The blood’s not a problem, nor are the long-dried remains of the person it once belonged to. Gabriel’s used to seeing dead bodies; there's worse waiting in any Walmart or Piggly Wiggly you care to wander into. Except this one he recognizes, and it shouldn’t be all the way out here. Now all Gabriel can think is how he's going to make it back to the bunker to let the others know what he's found.
But the map Gabriel has stumbled on is the key to a secret, one that has lain buried for a decade. Gabriel's about to learn that inside the mountain not everything is as it seems. And if he can’t get Mags and the others out, a fate worse than death awaits them all.
Never let me go - Kazuo Ishiguru
One of the most acclaimed novels of the 21st Century, from the Nobel Prize-winning author
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
In this nightmare vision of a not-too-distant future, fifteen-year-old Alex and his three friends rob, rape, torture and murder - for fun. Alex is jailed for his vicious crimes and the State undertakes to reform him - but how and at what cost?
The Children of Men - P.D. James
Award-winning P.D. James, one of the masters of British crime fiction, plots this atmospheric and disturbing novel in the year 2021. Children of Men is a brilliant mystery possessing all of the qualities which distinguish P.D. James as a novelist.
Under the despotic rule of Xan Lyppiatt, the Warden of England, the old are despairing and the young cruel. Theo Faren, a cousin of the Warden, lives a solitary life in this ominous atmosphere. That is, until a chance encounter with a young woman leads him into contact with a group of dissenters. Suddenly his life is changed irrevocably, as he faces agonising choices which could affect the future of mankind.
PD James is the world's pre-eminent crime writer, most famous for her Adam Dalgliesh mysteries and for her bestselling titles Death Comes to Pemberley and The Murder Room. Children of Men was adapted into a hit film in 2006, directed by Alfonso Cuarón the film starred Clive Owen, Michael Caine and Julianne Moore.
Lord of the flies - William Golding
William Golding's Lord of the Flies is a dystopian classic: 'exciting, relevant and thought-provoking' (Stephen King). When a group of schoolboys are stranded on a desert island, what could go wrong?
'One of my favorite books - I read it every couple of years.' (Suzanne Collins, author of The Hunger Games)
A plane crashes on a desert island. The only survivors are a group of schoolboys. By day, they discover fantastic wildlife and dazzling beaches, learning to survive; at night, they are haunted by nightmares of a primitive beast. Orphaned by society, it isn't long before their innocent childhood games devolve into a savage, murderous hunt ...