25 books
Megha Majumdar
It’s set in Kolkata, India, a few decades out, under flood and heat and a food shortage that has markets selling seaweed and synthetic fish. Ma runs a shelter, cares for her elderly father and her two-year-old daughter, and has…
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Near-future America, where the prison system got turned into a televised blood sport. Sign up for the program and you fight other prisoners to the death on live TV; survive three years and you walk free. Almost nobody makes it.…
Emily St. John Mandel
Los Angeles, 2031, the first spring after the United States comes apart. Peacekeepers are pulling out, the curfew just lifted, the jacarandas are blooming, and everybody in the city is going to a party. Ari Waker walks across Silver Lake…
Claire Vaye Watkins
The Southwest has dried out and been evacuated, and a dune sea called the Amargosa is moving east across California, burying towns. Luz, a former poster child for the drought-relief effort, and Ray, an ex-soldier, are squatting in an abandoned…
Ling Ling Huang
Enka grows up on the poor side of a walled city in Florida, gets a scholarship to an elite art school, and immediately fixes on Mathilde, the prodigy everyone else is afraid to approach. Mathilde is genuinely great and genuinely…
Nathaniel Rich
Mitchell Zukor is a young math genius hired by a Manhattan firm called FutureWorld that sells corporations worst-case scenarios — for a fee, they calculate your catastrophic exposure and indemnify you against being sued for not foreseeing it. Mitchell is…
Margaret Atwood
Snowman is living in a tree, wrapped in a bedsheet, maybe the last human, looked after by a group of gentle green-eyed people who aren’t human at all and think he’s a prophet. He works backward through how this happened:…
George Saunders
Six stories, and the title one has a man and a woman playing cave people in a theme park exhibit, required to grunt at visitors, receiving a daily goat, and filing performance reports on each other. That’s the register throughout:…
Ling Ma
Candace Chen works a dead-end job in New York coordinating the production of specialty Bibles in Chinese factories. Shen Fever arrives — a fungal infection that doesn’t kill people so much as lock them into repeating one familiar routine forever,…
Emily St. John Mandel
An actor dies onstage during King Lear in Toronto on the night a flu arrives that will kill almost everybody. Twenty years later the Traveling Symphony walks a circuit around the Great Lakes performing Shakespeare for the settlements that are…
Gary Shteyngart
A near-future America where everyone wears an äppärät around their neck broadcasting their credit rating and screwability to everyone in the room, the dollar is pegged to the yuan, and the country is being run into default by a party…
Andrew Krivak
Off in the future, society has collapsed, leaving behind only a girl and her father as the last people on the planet. They live in an idyllic setting, the stuff of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dreams: a mountainside cabin near a…
Rae Giana Rashad
Set in an America where a second civil war broke out in 1954 and the wrong side won. By 2030 a white-run government called the Order classifies Black people as Descendants of Slavery, and an algorithm hands out your job,…
Peter Heller
We’ve all imagined what it would be like to survive an apocalypse, but Peter Heller imagined it better. It’s nine years after a pandemic, our location a small airport at the base of the Colorado Rockies. Hig (Big Hig to…
Naomi Alderman
Three tech billionaires have bunkers, and their prediction models are telling them when to run. Around them, a handful of people who know the systems from the inside — a survivalist forum obsessive, a daughter, a lover, an ex-employee —…
M.R. Carey
Melanie is ten, brilliant, and loves her teacher. Every morning soldiers strap her into a wheelchair at gunpoint to take her to class. Carey lets you work out why on your own, and once you have it, the book turns…
Kim Stanley Robinson
It opens with a heat wave in Uttar Pradesh that kills twenty million people in a week, and the rest of the book is the world reacting. A UN agency is set up in Zurich to represent people who aren’t…
Kaliane Bradley
A near-future British government has time travel and no idea what to do with it, so it pulls a handful of people out of history moments before they would have died and assigns each one a “bridge” — a civil…
Diane Cook
Many dream of the camping trip that never ends. Surely our best selves are found in nature, right? In Diane Cook’s novel The New Wilderness, a mother saves her daughter from pollution-induced asthma by moving to the Wilderness State, an…
Chana Porter
An alien species arrives, and instead of invading it just seeps into everything — the water, the food, the bodies — and makes the world gentle. No scarcity, no illness, no death you don’t choose. Trina Goldberg-Oneka, a trans woman…
Margaret Atwood
Thirty-odd years after The Handmaid’s Tale, told by three women. Aunt Lydia, the most senior of the Aunts, who runs Ardua Hall and has spent years quietly compiling files on everybody who matters. Agnes, raised inside as a commander’s daughter,…
John Lanchester
Sea level went, and Britain has ringed the entire island in concrete. Every citizen serves two years as a Defender on the wall, twelve-hour shifts staring at cold water, and the rule is simple: If Others get past you, you…
Paolo Bacigalupi
The Colorado River has been cut down to nothing and the states have gone to war over what’s left, legally and otherwise. Nevada has water knives — Angel Velasquez is one — men who show up with a court order…
Paolo Bacigalupi
Oil is gone, the seas came up, and the world runs on calories — which means the agribusiness companies that own the seed patents own everything. Thailand has held out, protected by seawalls, a ruthless Environment Ministry, and a hidden…
Ian McEwan
The year is 2119, most of Britain is under water and reduced to an archipelago, and an academic named Thomas Metcalfe has built his career on a lost poem — read aloud once at a dinner party in 2014, never…
