N.K. Jemisin’s books are some of the most original and eye-opening fantasies being published today, and these books have a particularly vibrant take on survival. Jemisin’s world goes through cycles of catastrophes that upend humanity each time. The stress of the continual shifts leads to an oppressed people known as […]
Read MoreScience Fiction
Void Star, Zachary Mason
Vivid, tumultuous, and propulsive, Void Star is Zachary Mason’s mind-bending follow-up to his bestselling debut, The Lost Books of the Odyssey. -Goodreads Catastrophic events propel Zachary Mason’s Void Star, a mind-bending novel in which rising seas have rendered large swaths of the planet uninhabitable, and impoverished masses huddle in favelas […]
Read MoreThe Book of Joan, Lidia Yuknavitch
In Lidia Yuknavitch’s novel The Book of Joan, the planet in 2049 has been destroyed by war and climate change, and the wealthy have retreated skyward to a ramshackle suborbital complex controlled by a celebrity-billionaire-turned-dictator who continues to suck resources from Earth. –E-flux A riveting tale of destruction and love […]
Read MoreRokit, Loranne Vella
On one hand it’s [Rokit] about travelling back to one’s roots. Petrel’s grandmother was Maltese, so he leaves Croatia, where he’s been living for the past seven years, to learn more about her country. It is also about the fragmentation of Europe – Petrel is travelling at a time when […]
Read MoreBlack Wave, Michelle Tea
It’s 1999 in San Francisco, and as shockwaves of gentrification sweep through Michelle’s formerly scruffy neighborhood, money troubles, drug-fueled mishaps, and a string of disastrous affairs send her into a tailspin. Desperate to save herself, Michelle sets out to seek a fresh start in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, climate-related disruptions and […]
Read MoreSplinterlands, John Feffer
Part Field Notes from a Catastrophe, part 1984, part World War Z, John Feffer’s striking new dystopian novel, takes us deep into the battered, shattered world of 2050. The European Union has broken apart. Multiethnic great powers like Russia and China have shriveled. America’s global military footprint has virtually disappeared […]
Read MoreBannerless, Carrie Vaughn
Decades after economic and environmental collapse destroys much of civilization in the United States, the Coast Road region isn’t just surviving but thriving by some accounts, building something new on the ruins of what came before. Goodreads Reviews Back to Goodreads
Read MoreIn the Heart of the Valley of Love
Cynthia Kadohata explores human relationships in a Los Angeles of the future, where rich and poor are deeply polarized and where water, food, and gas, not to mention education, cannot be taken for granted. There is an intimate, understated, even gentle quality to Kadohata’s writing—this is not an apocalyptic dystopia—that […]
Read MoreThe Inner Sense of Trees, Tara Daisy Galadriel Joy
The Inner Sense of Trees is a brightly illustrated epic adventure designed to inspire the reader to consider the true importance of nature. It is set on a little planet that is not so very dissimilar from Earth, although it looks quite different. Upon this planet everything – from the […]
Read MoreWalkaway, Cory Doctorow
Coming April 25, 2017 from Tor Books: It’s been almost a decade since we’ve had a new adult novel from Cory Doctorow. In the future, anyone can print up anything that they need to survive. A communist named Hubert, Etc falls in love with a rich heiress named Natalie, and […]
Read MoreAmerican War, Omar El Akkad
This award-winning journalist, until recently with The Globe and Mail, turns to fiction with a debut novel set in a not-too-distant America – ravaged by environmental calamities, dwindling resources and population displacement – that has fractured and descended into a second civil war. Considering the country’s current political and social […]
Read MoreTreeVolution, Tara Campbell
Campbell is the recipient of the Washington, D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities’ 2016 Larry Neal Writers’ Award, Adult Fiction and 2016 Mayor’s Arts Award for Outstanding New Artist. …exciting, entertaining, thought-provoking, with an upside-down look at the current plague of people on our planet. A must-read for fans […]
Read MoreThe Terranauts, T.C. Boyle
Ultimately, human emotions eclipse the project’s “noble experiment” premise and things begin to fall apart. What does that portend for the possible colonization of the moon or Mars, where pioneers would live in similar facilities? “It says that with global warming, the massive dislocation of peoples, tribal warfare and battles […]
Read MoreJagannath, Karin Tidbeck
Enter the strange and wonderful world of Swedish sensation Karin Tidbeck with this feast of darkly fantastical stories. Whether through the falsified historical record of the uniquely weird Swedish creature known as the “Pyret” or the title story, “Jagannath,” about a biological ark in the far future, Tidbeck’s unique imagination […]
Read MoreNight of the Animals, Bill Broun
Broun packs his novel with futuristic invention, Chablis-dry humor and a thick, dreamy nostalgia for the midsummer mayhem of Puck and his retinue — that old, good Britain. –New York Times, “The Shortlist / Eco-Fiction” Night of the Animals is an enchanting and inventive tale that explores the boundaries of […]
Read More