Books tagged with: bleak

Yoss is one of the most controversial and successful of Cuba's science fiction writers. As well known for his rock-and-roll style as he is for his portrait of Cuba under Communism, his work is modern, dynamic and yet deep and thoughtful. A Planet for Rent is set in the near future where Earth, wrack...

Brave new world was written over 80 years ago; back in 1932 and describes London in the year 2540 - or 632 AF as the year is described in the book. The AF stands for "After Ford", meaning the American industrialist Henry Ford who has become something of a messianic figure in Huxley's World. It's bee...

Bringing forth the end of days is a science fiction novel of post apocalypse survival, and is the debut novel of Simon Law. The year is 2013 and World War 3 has scorched the earth, on top of a biological attack that has destroyed all plant life, leaving a world without life giving oxygen. Civilisati...

Broken is a speculative fiction novel by Susan J Bigelow. When Broken lost her ability to fly, she thought she was finished with being an extrahuman, a superhero. Then the world around her started to break apart and the mysterious teenager Michael found her, bringing with him the promise of rebirth...

Candle is the third volume in the Century Next Door series by the author John Barnes. Barnes, just keeps on getting better and better. Candle is clearly his best book to date, which says a lot. Currie is an old man, when the global controlling super mind, called One True, asks him to take on the tas...

Frankenstein.com follows the sleuth DCI Jack Renton who we were first introduced to earlier this year in Resident Fear . Another murderer is on the loose in the northeast of England and this time it's a much more macabre, chilling murder scene that the detectives are drawn to. A horrific picture tha...

Good News from Outer Space is a science fiction novel by John Kessel. This probably the strangest book that I've read in a long time. Taking place in the last days of 1999 the book is mostly about faith run amok. Kessel paints a picture of an alternative timeline that's dark and that I do not care f...

Kaleidoscope Century is the second volume in the Century Next Door series by the author John Barnes. I'm quite sure that I haven't read any John Barnes before and that can only be classified as a big mistake. Barnes is writing like nobody else that I can remember or try to compare him to. It's fast,...

Lies, Inc. is a science fiction novel by the award winning author Philip K Dick. To control the aggressiveness of citizens living on top of one another in crowded file cabinets like anthills in overpopulated urban regions, Lies Incorporated uses computer software to keep people sublimely quiet. A me...

Noir is a science fiction novel by K W Jeter. NOIR.....Hohoho! What a way to go! Corpses in this book aren't allowed to die, they go into debt and are kept from the grave to hang out on the dead side of what was L.A. (now the Gloss) to wait for some job so they can be buried. X shaped pupils. One gu...

I've been meaning to grab this series for quite some time — the combination of Atwood's evocative prose and a post-apocalyptic setting is a highly promising one. Oryx and Crake tells the story of an altered world through the eyes of a man once known as Jimmy. Now known as Snowman and clothed in dete...

SOUTH is a dystopian fiction set in an alternate America, set in modern times, where a civil war breaks out between the North and the South. The story follows a variety of five characters, each trying to kill, hide or survive. The book follows Garrett and Dyce, on the run from the South’s law enforc...

State of Being is the third novel in the God Head trilogy and follows directly on from the cataclysmic events in State of Union . Jake Travissi is on the run, having lost everything he cared for and the future looks bleak with AI taking over the surviving population; the only hope may mean going int...

The Genocides is a classic science fiction novel by Thomas M Disch. In this post apocalyptic tale of vegetable domination, the earth has been overtaken by a strain of alpha plants... massive and imposing, they suck up all the resources and wreak major havoc on the ecosystem. In just 7 years these gr...

The Miracle Inspector is a science fiction novel by Helen Smith. England is now a partitioned country with the capital an oppressive place where poetry has been banned, schools are shut and women no longer allowed to work outside of the home. Lucas and Angela decide to try and escape the confining r...

What if our day to day behaviour was recorded, analysed and mapped to create a copy of us in a  digital utopia? How would this new reality transact with our own where people need to be born and grow up before they can be absorbed? What would the consequences be for those left behind? Migration tells...

Karin Tidbeck has written a number of short-stories, her first english Language collection (firmly rooted in Weird Fiction ), Jagannath , was nominated for the World Fantasy award and short-listed for the James Tiptree Junior award. It also received wide-spread critical acclaim. Amatka is her first...

Paul McAuley is a vastly under-appreciated author. His books are inspiring, hypnotic and inventive. Austral is all of these and more, a book set in a plausible, climate-changed future where the planet has a new continent with a partial thawing of the Antarctic. There are still vast vistas of ice but...

This Christmas a member of the family introduced me to NCIS. For those who have yet to discover this long-running US-based TV show it's a police-procedural series that follows the Naval Criminal Investigation Service. Until this time I hadn't even known such an organisation existed, not to mention t...

Hutchinson's writing has, at times, turned out to be worryingly prophetic - he wrote about the break-up of the European Union while Brexit was just a twinkle in David Cameron's eye, in his astounding Fractured Europe series. This time he's writing about life in rural England after an apocalypse. Wor...

A change of pace and approach from Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls is a first-person past narrative, presented as a journal. This is a collection of writings from Stefan Advani, the chronicler of the last days of the last city of humankind – Shadrapar. Our story begins with Stefan being brought to...

As the world tears itself apart in front of us, there is something comforting about reading a good dystopian novel. If we are going to go out, at least it will not be due to zombies, bombs, viruses or all the bees dying out. Then again, it could be all of these together. Once the nuclear fallout has...

Above all genres, science fiction is my favourite. Why? Because anything can happen. You can have epic space battles between alien races you cannot pronounce or go in the other direction and create a subtle alternative reality where words have the power to kill. Ideas run the entire gamete and they...

I sometimes like to think about a singular change to  the  world and how  it  would affect the future. It  says  a  lot  about me that in most cases my thoughts  end up at dystopia.  Humans   are  always going to end at some point, I was just hoping that it would be a few years after I had gone. I a...

There are two ways that you can view the future. We are all doomed, or we will somehow save ourselves. The optimistic  The Day the Earth Stood Still  way of thinking is that humans will only get around to do something when we are really in a pickle. World ending disaster will be averted at the last...

There is one solution that would benefit our climate massively, but it is a bitter pill to swallow. Less humans. We are the cause of pretty much all the issues that the Earth is currently having and when we are gone, it will happily float around the solar system without us. A little bit grubbier, bu...

I adore science fiction, but it also frustrates me. I consider myself reasonably well read and clever enough to cope with most books, but occasionally a science fiction book comes along that I just cannot get my head around. Momenticon by Andrew Caldecott is a Bizzaro take on a dystopian future that...

Science Fiction is one of the best genres because you can explore subjects via a prism of the future. Writing a book about how we treat others does not have to be told via a historic story, or the present, you can look far to the future and draw parallels between that world and ours. What would happ...

When the apocalypse inevitably comes do you want to know about it? Would you like the chance to peer out of the window and see the world burning, perhaps you can make a run for the high ground? Another option is to live in pure ignorance underground, competing with your fellow residents for the perc...

There was a time in my life that I would sit down and read some Dystopian Fiction and not consider at all that it would happen in my lifetime, but all I need to do is some doomscrolling on my social medias to think that elements of Carl Wilhoyte’s Ultimart may not be long in our future. This is a bo...

If you read about the gods, most of them are a little messed up. If they are not descending to pretend to be a swan so they can sleep with woman, they are basically ignoring all the human suffering going on. Are gods omnipotent or just much more powerful than humans? Everything feels like magic, unt...