You know you need to get your hands on a book when it’s already been optioned for a movie, set to be produced by Leonardo DiCaprio. That’s the case with The Sandcastle Empire, a near-future story set in a post-sea-rise America that’s embroiled in a world war. Needless to say, […]
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Finding Jade, Mary Jennifer Payne
The year is 2030, and climate change is making life on Earth more challenging. In the midst of it all, fourteen-year-old Jasmine Guzman is struggling to come to terms with the abduction of her twin sister, Jade, and with her mother’s illness. Things go from bad to worse when a […]
Read MoreSannah and the Pilgrim, Sue Parritt
When Sannah the Storyteller, a descendant of environmental refugees from drowned Pacific islands, finds a White stranger on her domestep, she presumes he’s a political prisoner on the run seeking safe passage to egalitarian Aotearoa. However, Kaire’s unusual appearance, bizarre behaviour, and insistence he’s a pilgrim suggest otherwise. Appalled by […]
Read MoreThe Ice, Laline Paull
Her [Paull’s] second novel, The Ice, focuses on human intrigue in the warming Arctic: in its opening pages, a glacier calves to reveal a body, several years dead, and the novel plays out as an inquest into this death. By embedding a mystery in layers of melting Arctic ice, Paull […]
Read MoreLotus Blue, Cat Sparks
Sparks’s post-apocalyptic wasteland is far more imaginative and richly rendered [than Mad Max]. More than mere warlords threaten the ragged survivors of this world. Rampant biotech and unchecked corporate greed have left it littered with still-functioning weapons of immense destructive capability. A number of characters journey through this dying terrain, […]
Read MoreThe End We Start From, Megan Hunter
This novel, published on May 18, 2017, will also be made into a movie by actor Benedict Cumberbatch. Benedict is now excited to turn the book, about a mother and her newborn child who are forced to become refugees after London is flooded due to climate change, into a movie. […]
Read MoreAgency, William Gibson
Due out in January 2018, the novel will travel between two periods: one in present-day San Francisco, where Clinton’s White House ambitions are realised; and the other in a post-apocalyptic London, 200 years into the future after 80% of the world population has been killed. –The Guardian In William Gibson’s […]
Read MoreThe Broken Earth Trilogy, N.K. Jemisin
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 MoreVoid 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 […]
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