Dystopian Science Fiction

When the External Womb Programme is launched, the news is controversial. Hundreds take to the streets in protest, feeling strongly that growing a baby outside of the human body is "unnatural". But thousands more people rejoice: at last, an alternative for those who wish to have children but worry about the physical toll it may take. A chance that throwing a baby-shaped grenade into one's career path might not derail it entirely.

Like all citizens since the ruining, Carrington Hale knows the importance of this day. But she never expected the moment she'd spent a lifetime preparing for - her choosing ceremony - to end in disaster. Ripped from her family, she'll spend her days serving as a lint, the lowest level of society. She knows it's her duty to follow the true way of the authority. But as Carrington begins this nightmare, rumors of rebellion rattle her beliefs.

Gamer PerfectQuestion fights for ColaCorp in WarWorld, an online combat sport arena where megacorporations field entire armies in the battle for real world global advertising-space dominance. Within the immense virtual battlefield, players and bots are high-tech grunts, using drop-ships and state-of-the-art weaponry to wipe each other out. But times are tough, and the rent is due, and when players need extra dough there's always the Black, an illegal open source tournament where the sick and twisted desires of the future are given free rein in the Wastehavens.

Seventeen-year-old Genesis Lee has never forgotten anything. As one of the Mementia small group of genetically enhanced humans, Gena remembers everything with the help of her Link bracelets, which preserve them perfectly. But Links can be stolen, and six people have already lost their lives to a memory thief, including Gena’s best friend. Anyone could be next.

Eco-terrorists unleash the worst attack the world has ever seen. Over 25,000 autonomous combat drones are released in Manhattan. Hundreds of thousands are dead, and the entire island is evacuated and quarantined in just a few days' time. Ten years later, Manhattan is still empty of humans, with the exception of the salvage specialists of the most watched reality show in history: Zone War. Produced live and unedited, the show follows five teams of armored vehicle specialists who brave the active drones to recover lost riches and collect bounties on dead ones.

Spensa’s life as a Defiant Defense Force pilot has been far from ordinary. She proved herself one of the best starfighters in the human enclave of Detritus, and she saved her people from extermination at the hands of the Krell - the enigmatic alien species that has been holding them captive for decades. What’s more, she traveled light-years from home as an undercover spy to infiltrate the Superiority, where she learned of the galaxy beyond her small planet home. Now, the Superiority - the governing galactic alliance bent on dominating all human life - has started a galaxy-wide war.

On Tartarus I was born... Soaked in power and secrets, Tartarus is a city for rebels, exiles, and criminals. As a messenger, every shadow is my friend. I know all the secrets of this place. Or, at least, I thought I did. When my best friend, Kida, goes missing, I don't waste any time assuming her identity to draw her or whoever took her, out of hiding. On Tartarus I will die...

Best-selling novelist Michael O’Brien returns to the theme of people of faith striving to find their way through a societal collapse during the rise of new dimensions of totalitarianism. Set in the near future, all of North America is plunged into crisis as basic communications and other services suddenly and inexplicably fail. As the tension mounts, a disparate group of people come together from several directions, apparently by coincidence. Many of them are strangers to each other, and some are very young—whom their parents and guardians call “our pied piper children.

After the explosive events surrounding MPF6's destruction on Karkin Four, Wic and his team of daredevil operators join forces with the rebel force known as the Blood Guard. While the Phantoms desire to help relocate human refugees to safer worlds, they're forced to confront a more pressing objective: cut off the head of the beast and keep the Androchidan Empire from enslaving another world. Wic is immediately flung into the heat of battle, driven by retaliation, a need for justice, and the need to send a message to all other deviant species who'd wish to take advantage of the innocent.

This exciting collection presents two previously unpublished stories by SF legend Octavia E. Butler. A Necessary Being precedes the events of Survivor, Butler's third (famously disowned) installment in her Patternist series, and includes characters from it, focusing exclusively on the Kohn, aliens who build their social hierarchies on the blueness of their fur. In Childfinder, a black woman with the gift of identifying children with latent psychic ability refuses to share her skill with an organization of white telepaths.

In 2040 the US government poisoned the food supply, tainted the water supply, and destroyed the money supply. It's never enough as they say; now allied with an extraterrestrial Father Kim, who unleashed his alien technology that extracts and bottles souls. Young Olympian Janet's innocent twin brother is his victim. While she is determined to understand the truth, she teams up with relentless news reporter Carmen as they find out how much a soul is worth!

Life in SoCal in 2195 is controlled by a corporatocracy. Elsa scavenges twenty-first-century trash, living on the edge of starvation in this ruthless world through her grit and instincts. When she unearths a metal tube containing maps to six Doomsday seed bunkers and a silver key, she dreams of renewable sources of food and a life based on more than subsistence, but GreenCorps will stop at nothing to acquire her find. Accused of theft and beaten half to death, she escapes with a handsome train hopper. They seek the long-lost bunkers, hoping to break GreenCorps' monopoly on food.

It's the end of oil. We knew it was coming one day. But it happened so fast! Devlin Quinn turns 16 the same week that a battle in a distant war shuts off the flow of imported petroleum to the US. Gas runs low, then runs out, and soon the highways are empty. And then it gets very serious. The grocery store shelves are empty, and people become desperate for food. Dev is trained to fight-his father made sure of that-but is he trained enough? Smart enough? Tough enough? He is about to find out when people desperate for food flee the burning cities and attack....

For many billions of years, humans - having conquered the curse of aging - spread throughout the entire Milky Way. They are able to live all their dreams, but to their great disappointment, no other intelligent species has ever been encountered. Now, humanity itself is on the brink of extinction because the universe is dying a protracted yet inevitable death.

When a listless office employee (the narrator) meets Tyler Durden, his life begins to take on a strange new dimension. Together they form Fight Club - a secretive underground group sponsoring bloody bare-knuckle boxing matches staged in seedy alleys, vacant warehouses, and dive-bar basements. Fight Club lets ordinary men vent their suppressed rage, and it quickly develops a fanatical following.

Rowan and Citra take opposite stances on the morality of the Scythedom, putting them at odds, in the chilling sequel to the Printz Honor Book Scythe from New York Times best seller Neal Shusterman, author of the Unwind dystology.

Whether romantic or platonic, changing relationships prove tricky for Rose, Tom, Clara, and Craig—never mind adapting to the new not-so-normal. Being surrounded by the undead is bad enough, but with a tyrant-in-training running their Safe Zone, it’s that much worse.

When Theo meets Kylee at the beach, it is love at first sight...but everything is about to change. As they share their first kiss, the ground trembles beneath them and a gigantic tidal wave strikes the beachfront, demolishing everything in its path. Theo, Kylee, and their friends now battle to stay alive as they realize everything outside their island is gone. The small group now faces a growing evil which threatens to make survival impossible. On Atlantic Island, there are no games....

Three weeks after the nation's power grid goes down, chaos reigns. Food supplies have dried up. Fuel is running low. And the bleak, brutal winter is relentless. Fall Creek has forged a shaky peace, but the cost for safety proves higher than some are willing to pay. The town is a powder keg waiting to explode. For Hannah, home is finally within reach. But it won't be anything like she expected....

It's New Year's Eve, and the world is about to change. Forever. Out of nowhere, a catastrophic EMP event cripples the nation's power supply. Cars spiral off the streets. Planes hurtle from the skies. And in the powerless confusion, it doesn't take long for terrified survivors to resort to violence. Max is working as a security guard in the city center when the power goes out. Surrounded by chaos, he knows he only has one choice: to get out of the city and get to the countryside. But will he make it out of a city that is rapidly collapsing?