Unsettling Views of the Future
Explore unsettling views of the future with this curated list of dystopian and speculative books. Discover thought-provoking reads that challenge perceptions of tomorrow.

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The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • A searing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son's fight to survive, this "tale of survival and the miracle of goodness only adds to McCarthy's stature as a living master. It's gripping, frightening and, ultimately, beautiful" (San Francisco Chronicle). A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other. The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation. Look for Cormac McCarthy's new novel, The Passenger, coming October '22.


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Earth Abides
by George Rippey Stewart
Returning from a field trip, Isherwood Williams discovers that a mysterious plague has destroyed human civilization during his absence and makes his way to San Francisco, where he finds a few survivors who build a small community, living like their pioneer ancestors. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

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Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
NOBEL PRIZE WINNER • From the acclaimed, bestselling author of The Remains of the Day comes “a Gothic tour de force" (The New York Times) with an extraordinary twist—a moving, suspenseful, beautifully atmospheric modern classic. One of The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of the 21st Century As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were. Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life. And for the first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it is that makes them special—and how that gift will shape the rest of their time together.

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The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An instant classic and eerily prescient cultural phenomenon, from “the patron saint of feminist dystopian fiction” (The New York Times). Now an award-winning Hulu series starring Elizabeth Moss. Look for The Testaments, the bestselling, award-winning the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale In Margaret Atwood’s dystopian future, environmental disasters and declining birthrates have led to a Second American Civil War. The result is the rise of the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian regime that enforces rigid social roles and enslaves the few remaining fertile women. Offred is one of these, a Handmaid bound to produce children for one of Gilead’s commanders. Deprived of her husband, her child, her freedom, and even her own name, Offred clings to her memories and her will to survive. At once a scathing satire, an ominous warning, and a tour de force of narrative suspense, The Handmaid’s Tale is a modern classic. Includes an introduction by Margaret Atwood

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Fahrenheit cuatrocientos cincuenta y uno
by Ray Bradbury
Fahrenheit 451 ofrece la historia de un sombrĂo y horroroso futuro. Montag, el protagonista, pertenece a una extraña brigada de bomberos cuya misiĂłn, paradĂłjicamente, no es la de sofocar incendios sino la de provocarlos para quemar libros. Porque en el paĂs de Montag está terminantemente prohibido leer. Porque leer obliga a pensar, y en el paĂs de Montag está prohibido pensar. Porque leer impide ser ingenuamente feliz, y en el paĂs de Montag hay que ser feliz a la fuerza... La novela más cĂ©lebre de Ray Bradbury, maestro de la ficciĂłn cientĂfica.

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Nineteen Eighty-four
by George Orwell
Eternal warfare is the price of bleak prosperity in this satire of totalitarian barbarism.

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The Children of Men
by P. D. James
In 2021, with the human race becoming extinct because of the infertility of all males, Oxford historian Theodore Faron is drawn into the schemes of an unlikely group of revolutionaries out to save society.
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The Giver
by Lois Lowry
In a future society, young Jonas is given his lifetime assignment at the Ceremony of Twelve, and discovers the terrible truth about the society in which he lives.

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Island
by Aldous Huxley
A shipwrecked journalist discovers the beauty and serentity promoted by science on the island of Pala.
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