Showing titles in Dystopian

Tautly-written and suspenseful, Burning Chrome collects 10 of William Gibson’s best short stories with a preface from Bruce Sterling, co-Cyberpunk and editor of the seminal anthology Mirrorshades. These brilliant, high-resolution stories show Gibson's characters and intensely-realized worlds at his absolute best.

Often compared to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid’s Tale and Naomi Alderman's The Power - Woman on the Edge of Time has been hailed as a classic of speculative science fiction. Disturbing and forward thinking, Marge Piercy’s remarkable novel will speak to a new generation. Connie Ramos has been unjustly incarcerated in a mental institution with no hope of release. The authorities view her as a danger to herself and to others. Her family has given up on her. But Connie has a secret - a way to escape the confines of her cell. She can see the future.

Day one: The Georgia Flu explodes over the surface of the Earth like a neutron bomb. News reports put the mortality rate at over 99%. Week Two: Civilization has crumbled. Year Twenty: A band of actors and musicians called the Travelling Symphony move through their territories performing concerts and Shakespeare to the settlements that have grown up there. Twenty years after the pandemic, life feels relatively safe. But now a new danger looms, and it threatens the hopeful world every survivor has tried to rebuild.

Ruth lives in the heart of the city. Working, drinking, falling in love: the rhythm of her vivid and complicated life is set against a background hum of darkening news reports from which she deliberately turns away. When a new romance becomes claustrophobic, Ruth chooses to leave behind the failing relationship, but also her beloved friends and family, and travels to the other side of the world in pursuit of her dream life working with whales in New Zealand.

London is in lockdown under martial law. A hospital is being urgently built by the river Thames to contain the thousands of victims of a flu-like epidemic. Construction is brought to a sudden halt when a leather holdall containing the bones of a child is unearthed from the rubble. A psychopath has been unleashed on the city; his mission is to take all measures necessary to prevent the bones from being identified. But why are he and his handlers determined to go to such murderous lengths to hide the origins of the body?

Jacky was running. There was no thought in his head, only an intense drive to run. There was no sense he was getting anywhere, no plan, no destination, no future. All he had was a sense of what was behind, what he was running from. Jacky was running. The natives of the colony are restless. The settlers are eager to have a nation of peace, and to bring the savages into line. Families are torn apart, reeducation is enforced. This rich land will provide for all.

Tonight was meant to be about kink. Our lives are a nightmare of last-minute deployments and near misses, and we needed the break. Instead, we broke. The whole world broke. But as city after city is blown apart, and with a club full of civilians to protect, we have to pull it together and get them to safety. No matter how we’re feeling. No matter how many family members are disintegrating into ash. We have a job to do, so we’ll be each other’s strength.

Big Brother is watching you.... 1984 is the year in which it happens. The world is divided into three superstates. In Oceania, the Party’s power is absolute. Every action, word, gesture and thought is monitored under the watchful eye of Big Brother and the Thought Police. In the Ministry of Truth, the Party’s department for propaganda, Winston Smith’s job is to edit the past. Over time, the impulse to escape the machine and live independently takes hold of him and he embarks on a secret and forbidden love affair.

With Fred ready to give birth and the revelation that Mary is also pregnant, spirits are high in the community. For Morgan, however, it's just one more thing to worry about. His mom and dad are now settled in and getting to work, but the babies are coming, the milking barn needs to be built, and the power plant must be kept running. To make matters worse, they're now dealing with the US Army. Morgan has real concerns once he hears about the Army's plans and what they expect of the people of Lake County. After more than a year without the rule of law, are the people ready to return to it?

Do the impossible or lose your family forever.... Edgar Hill, unsympathetic husband and halfhearted father, finds himself in a hopeless situation. Despite all his best efforts, he hasn't managed to keep his family together. In fact they are further from him than ever - 550 miles, to be precise. And in a world near annihilated by a terrible disaster, leaving the UK harsh and brutal, uncrossable by car or bike, his journey to find his loved ones will be fraught with challenges.

With the plan of mass murder foiled, Rivera and his team face the challenges of cleaning up the mess. They soon come to realize that Zion can't operate in a vacuum, and the key to their future relies on uniting the wasteland. Going back out, the fight to rid their world of the most dangerous elements comes at a great cost...Can they handle it?

Life is lived according to The Rulebook and social hierarchy is determined by your perception of colour. Eddie Russett is an above average Red who dreams of moving up the ladder by marriage to Constance Oxblood. Until he is sent to the Outer Fringes where he meets Jane - a lowly Grey with an uncontrollable temper and a desire to see him killed. For Eddie, it's love at first sight. But his infatuation will lead him to discover that all is not as it seems in a world where everything that looks black and white is really shades of grey.

Returning to the universe of Revenger, award-winning author Alastair Reynolds delivers another thrilling tale set among the stars. Two sisters ran away from home to join the crew of a spaceship. They took on pirates, faced down monsters and survived massacres...and now they're in charge. Captaining a fearsome ship of their own, adventures are theirs for the taking - and there's hoards to loot and treasures to find in the darkest reaches of space. But the rules are also more relaxed out on the fringes, as they're about to discover....

Twenty-year-old Arden Roosa knows only Ourland. Two worlds split and stitched together, with broken pieces from each, statues of fallen gods, and heavenly artifacts that are worshipped…or feared. But nothing is more fearsome than the night. A strange madness haunts the darkest hours, turning innocents into gleeful killers. Arden does her best to stay safe, until she reads a book written about her life―The Book of Arden―and everything changes.

Conor Maguire nearly lost his daughter Barb when she was three years old, injured by the drunk driver that killed his wife. When the justice system failed him, Conor, the son and grandson of IRA bombers, retaliated against the driver in dramatic and gruesome fashion. For over 25 years, Conor designed and built custom weapons of death and destruction at his compound in the mountains of Virginia. Then a series of devastating terror attacks brought down the United States. Conor and Barb assumed they were safe in their secure compound. Then Barb was kidnapped.

Once you get it, you simply cannot stop screaming. You can’t eat or sleep. It drives you more and more insane until you can’t stand to be alive a second longer. When the phenomenon hits Chuck's city, the chronically unemployed pervert joins a band of misfits to make his final stand.

In late-twenty-first-century Australia, Tao-Yi and her partner Navin spend most of their time inside an immersive, consumerist virtual reality called Gaia. They log on, go to work, socialise and even eat in this digital utopia. Meanwhile, their aging bodies lie suspended in pods inside cramped apartments. Across the city, in the abandoned real world, Tao-Yi's mother remains stubbornly offline, dwindling away between hospital visits and memories of her earlier life in Malaysia.

The seventh and never-before-published book in USA Today best-selling author Nicholas Sansbury Smith's propulsive postapocalyptic series about a soldier's mission to save the world.

The award-winning Claire North returns with her most powerful and imaginative novel yet - a spellbinding tale set in a future utopian society that is thrilling, moving and thought-provoking in equal measure. Once the world was on fire - but that was long ago. The Burning Age gave way to an era of peace, humanity finding harmony with nature and each other, as new cities rose from the ruins of the old. Ven used to be a holy man, a guardian of ancient archives. Sorting secrets from sacrilege, he studied the past so that we might never repeat it.

Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past to suit the needs of the Party. Yet he inwardly rebels against the totalitarian world he lives in, which demands absolute obedience and controls him through the all-seeing telescreens and the watchful eye of Big Brother, symbolic head of the Party. In his longing for truth and liberty, Smith begins a secret love affair with a fellow worker, Julia, but soon discovers the true price of freedom is betrayal.