Tag Archive for: dystopia

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Dirt | Laura Baggaley

 

In the near future, global food supply chains have failed: people live on rations, and supplement their food by growing as much as they can on government-allotted plots of land. For most people, farming is controlled by a huge agricultural company that dictates what crops they plant and how they manage them.

At the heart of the story are two teenagers, Sam and Avril: Sam lives in town, where he and his family follow the rules of the Green Cultivation Corporation, and Avril lives in a beautiful hidden valley where her extended family practices sustainable agriculture. The collision of their different ways of thinking about how to farm and how to live drives this touching romance about sustainable agriculture, community versus insularity, and sharing rather than hoarding.

 

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Juice | Tim Winton

 

The acclaimed Australian novelist Tim Winton returns to his abiding theme of the outback with a hard-hitting novel set in a far future of grimly plausible climate devastation and precarity. In a world where the descendants of fossil fuel barons hoard their resources and shoot to kill, the novel’s protagonist has spent years in the shadowy “Service”, whose mission is their annihilation. But when he and the child he has pledged to protect encounter a guard with a crossbow, he must tell the story of his life to stay alive. A gripping, heart-stopping story of sacrifice, betrayal and redemption by a master of the cli-fi genre.

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Extremophile | Ian Green

 

For fans of cli-fi and cyberpunk, this whirlwind of a novel is set in a dystopian London, where deregulated corporations thrive amidst the chaos, and climate collapse is met with both nihilism and fierce activism. Charlie and Parker, biohackers by day and musicians by night, are reluctantly thrust into a high-stakes mission after they are hired by an eco-terrorist group to commit heists and unravel a sinister corporate plot.

This is speculative fiction at its most visceral—violent, darkly humorous, and brimming with raw emotion: a brutal yet strangely beautiful elegy to a fractured world.

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NOTES FROM THE BURNING AGE | CLAIRE NORTH

 

Claire North started writing when she was 14 years old.  This doesn’t guarantee that she’s a writing genius – but actually, she is. Notes from the Burning Age is set in a post-apocalyptic future where The Burning Age is a time remembered with great fear: humanity pushed too hard and the spirits of the earth, returned to exact…not quite revenge because they don’t care about people, but they did what they must to stop further damage and humanity barely survived…magically written.” – Manda Scott

Even If Everything Ends | Jens Liljestrand

Raging wildfires sweep through the Swedish countryside – turning holidaymakers into climate refugees. And yet, against this hellscape, life goes on. Marriages collapse; teenagers fall in love; parents succumb to midlife crises; children rebel.

As society starts to crumble, the fates of four very different characters intertwine. Didrik, a father of three and media consultant, finds that his misguided efforts to be the hero that saves his family only make things worse. Melissa, a climate change denying influencer, is determined to live for the moment, despite it all. Andre, the bitter teenage son of an international sports star, uses the erupting violence to orchestrate his own personal revenge. And Vilja, a once self-absorbed teenage girl steps up in the face of all this adult ineptitude, to organise and resist. This novel asks us to face up to one question: how will you decide to live, even if everything ends?

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Oryx and Crake | Margaret Atwood

Oryx and Crake is the first book in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian trilogy MaddAddam. The novel is set in a post-apocalyptic future around the year 2050 and centres on the main character called Snowman. As the only human left on earth, Snowman is tasked with teaching a group of humanoids known as Crakers. All the while he is dwelling on the past, his lost-love Oryx and the devastating set of events that brought him to this place.

 

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The Swan Book | Alexis Wright

The Swan Book is set in the future, with Aboriginal people still living under the Intervention in the north, in an environment fundamentally altered by climate change.

It follows the life of a mute teenager called Oblivia, the victim of gang-rape by petrol-sniffing youths, from the displaced community where she lives in a hulk, in a swamp filled with rusting boats, and thousands of black swans driven from other parts of the country, to her marriage to Warren Finch, the first Aboriginal president of Australia, and her elevation to the position of First Lady, confined to a tower in a flooded and lawless southern city. The Swan Book has all the qualities which made Wright’s previous novel, Carpentaria, a prize-winning bestseller.

It offers an intimate awareness of the realities facing Aboriginal people; the wild energy and humour in her writing finds hope in the bleakest situations; and the remarkable combination of storytelling elements, drawn from myth and legend and fairy tale, has Oblivia Ethylene in the company of amazing characters like Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions, the Harbour Master, Big Red and the Mechanic, a talking monkey called Rigoletto, three genies with doctorates, and throughout, the guiding presence of swans.

 

Read our Librarian’s top climate change fiction picks by heading to our Fiction section

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Things We Didn’t See Coming | Steven Amsterdam

Opening on the eve of the millennium, when the world as we know it is still recognisable, we meet the nine-year-old narrator as he flees the city with his parents, just ahead of a Y2K breakdown. Next he is a teenager with a growing criminal record, taking his grandparents for a Sunday drive.

In a world transformed by battles over resources, he teaches them how to steal. In time we see him struggle through strange, horrific and unexpectedly funny terrain as he goes about the no longer simple act of survival.

Despite the chaos of his world, he keeps his eyes on the exit door, his heart open and his mind on what he thinks is going to happen next.

 

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MaddAddam | Margaret Atwood

Toby, a survivor of the man-made plague that has swept the earth, is telling stories. Stories left over from the old world, and stories that will determine a new one.

Listening hard is young Blackbeard, one of the innocent Crakers, the species designed to replace humanity. Their reluctant prophet, Jimmy-the-Snowman, is in a coma, so they’ve chosen a new hero – Zeb, the street-smart man Toby loves. As clever Pigoons attack their fragile garden and malevolent Painballers scheme, the small band of survivors will need more than stories.

 

Read our Librarian’s top climate change fiction picks by heading to our Fiction section