By the time I read the third chapter of Lois Lowry’s The Giver, my 13-year-old mind had been blown and my lifelong love for futuristic dystopian novels was officially born. The brilliance with which Lowry slowly peels back the perfection…
By the time I read the third chapter of Lois Lowry’s The Giver, my 13-year-old mind had been blown and my lifelong love for futuristic dystopian novels was officially born. The brilliance with which Lowry slowly peels back the perfection…
Marie Lu’s revolutionary debut novel Legend jumpstarted her illustrious career in speculative YA. Protagonists June and Day grew up under vastly different circumstances, yet the military prodigy and the rebel from the slums still manage to work together to uncover…
One of the most popular end-of-the-world stories, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is a Pulitzer Prize-winner about an unnamed man who travels with his son across a lifeless post-apocalyptic America. Although it’s violent and can be hard to read, The Road…
What links book-burning, ultraviolence, and Québécois radicals? Famously banned, and notoriously cynical, Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel is part of an anti-tradition of books that ask us to be a free thinker in a world full of drones. Weaving science fiction…
Aldous Huxley is most famous for his novel Brave New World, but the English writer produced a substantial body of work throughout his prolific career. Apart from novels, Huxley wrote short stories, poetry, non-fiction work, and even numerous screenplays. He had…
“Big brother is watching you…” the utterance has come to encapsulate the terrifying yoke of state power in the 20th century. Orwell’s vision of a horrifying future was written in 1948 amidst the rising forces of fascism and communism, but…
Pierce Brown’s Red Rising series is a space opera—a genre defined by interplanetary or interstellar civilizations and, yes, an operatic tone of epic deeds—that stresses both the space and the opera in equal measure. Brown’s main cast are young and…
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is one of the most popular dystopian novels of the twentieth century. This is the story of Offred, living under a totalitarian regime in the Republic of Gilead, formerly part of the United States. Dire…
Reading The Hunger Games for the first time, I was utterly sucked into the story, unwilling to put the book down for longer than absolutely necessary. This book resonated with millions of readers from the get-go and helped spark a…
Marissa Meyer’s The Lunar Chronicles are action-packed sci-fi retellings of some of our favorite classic tales, including Cinderella (Cinder), Little Red Riding Hood (Scarlet), Rapunzel (Cress), and Snow White (Winter). Our princess isn’t a delicate lady locked in a tower,…