By Albert Brooks
Recommended By Pam Martin, Assistant Library Director

“A near-future world struggles with the challenges of a dramatically aging population revitalized by the cure for cancer, a scenario that is challenged by an unprecedented natural disaster that drives the government into bankruptcy (From the Publisher).”

By Karen Thompson Walker
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

A painstakingly researched debut imagines the coming-of-age story of young Julia, whose world is thrown into upheaval when it is discovered that the Earth's rotation has suddenly begun to slow, posing a catastrophic threat to all life.

By Katsuhiro Otomo
Series Akira

In Neo–Tokyo, built on the former site of Tokyo after World War III, two teenagers are targeted by agencies after they develop paranormal abilities.

By Omar El Akkad

Depicts a second American Civil War and devastating plague in the late twenty-first century that forces a family into a camp for displaced people, where a young woman is befriended by a mysterious functionary who transforms her into a living weapon.

By Jeff VanderMeer
Series Southern Reach Trilogy
Recommended By Cliff Hong, Library Page
With Stacey Mencher, Readers' Services Librarian

Monday, May 18, 2015. 7 PM.

Area X has claimed the lives of members of eleven expeditions. The twelfth expedition consisting of four women hopes to map the terrain and collect specimens, to record all their observations and, above all, to avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.

By Ayn Rand

Classic tale of a future dark age of the great "We" - a world that deprives individuals of name, independence and values.

By Ayn Rand

A woman struggles to manage a transcontinental railroad amid the pressures & restrictions of massive bureaucracy.

By Jeff VanderMeer
Series Southern Reach Trilogy

John Rodriguez, head of the secret agency Southern Reach, is charged with exploring Area X, a remote area sequestered from civilization, as his team exposes disturbing truths about the area, with far-reaching consequences for himself and his agency.

By Suzanne Collins
Series Hunger Games Trilogy

In a prequel to The Hunger Games, eighteen–year–old Coriolanus Snow prepares to mentor the female tribute from District 12 in the tenth Hunger Games, with the fate of his family hanging on the slim chance that he can help her win the Games.

By Jim Butcher
Series Dresden Files #17
Recommended By Stacey Mencher, Technology and Applications Manager

When the Last Titan, a being more dangerous than anything humanity has faced in a millennium, declares war on the city of Chicago, professional wizard Harry Dresden embarks on a defense that permanently transforms the mortal world.

By Samantha Shannon
Series Bone Season
Recommended By Jessikah Chautin, Community Engagement Specialist

A first entry in a planned seven-part series is set in the mid-21st century where major world cities are controlled by a formidable security force and where clairvoyant underworld cell member Paige commits acts of psychic treason before being captured by an otherworldly race that would make her a part of their supernatural army.

By Aldous Huxley
With Lisa Caputo, Assistant Library Director

Tuesday, February 28, 2012. 1 PM & 7:30 PM.

The story of a futuristic World State where all emotion, love, art, and human individuality have been replaced by social stability.

Became the movie: Brave New World.

By Edan Lepucki

After escaping the crumbing ruins of L.A. for a shack in the wilderness, Cal and Frida realize they are pregnant and seek refuge on the nearest settlement - a guarded, dark and paranoid community.

By Suzanne Collins
Series Hunger Games trilogy
Recommended By Megan Kass, Systems Manager

By winning the annual Hunger Games, District 12 tributes Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark have secured a life of safety and plenty for themselves and their families, but because they won by defying the rules, they unwittingly become the faces of an impending rebellion.

By P.D. James
Recommended By Stacey Mencher, Technology and Applications Manager

In 2021, with the human race becoming extinct due to the infertility of all males, Theodore Faron is drawn into the schemes of an unlikely group of revolutionaries out to save society.

By Anthony Burgess

In Anthony Burgess's nightmare vision of the future, where criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, who talks in a brutal invented slang that brilliantly renders his and his friends' social pathology. A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil, and the meaning of human freedom.

Became the movie: A Clockwork Orange.

By Alexandra Bracken
Series Darkest Minds

Sixteen-year-old Ruby breaks out of a government-run “rehabilitation camp” for teens who acquired dangerous powers after surviving a virus that wiped out most American children.

By Veronica Roth
Series Divergent
Recommended By Sharon Long, Assistant Library Director, Megan Kass, Systems Manager, Ralph Guiteau, Readers' Services Librarian

In a dystopian future–era Chicago, 16-year–old Beatrice Prior must choose among five predetermined factions to define her identity for the rest of her life, a decision made more difficult when she uncovers powerful secrets and truths about her identity, her family and the order of her society.

By Veronica Roth

In a future Chicago, sixteen-year-old Beatrice Prior must choose among five predetermined factions to define her identity for the rest of her life, a decision made more difficult when she discovers that she is an anomoly who does not fit into any one group, and that the society she lives in is not perfect after all.

By Philip K. Dick

Rick Deckard is an officially sanctioned bounty hunter tasked to find six rogue androids. They are machines, but look, sound and think just like humans - clever and most of all dangerous humans.

Became the movie: Blade Runner.

By Starhawk

A world without poverty or hunger that honors the Four Sacred Things that sustain life--earth, air, fire, and water--is poised to clash with a nightmare society of authoritarian regimes and food and water shortages.

By Claire North

Forced to relive his life over and over again, Harry August receives a message on his eleventh death bed, from a little girl who tells him that the world is about to end, and it is up to him to stop it.

By Richelle Mead
Series Age of X

Living in exile after failing in his job as an investigator of religious groups and supernatural claims, Justin March, a man from a near-future world decimated by religious extremists, is invited to join an elite branch of the military by genetically enhanced solider Mae, with whom he confronts formidable enemies to solve a string of ritual murders.

By Lois Lowry

Given his lifetime assignment at the Ceremony of Twelve, Jonas becomes the receiver of memories shared by only one other in his community and discovers the terrible truth about the society in which he lives.

Became the movie: The Giver (2014)

By Lois Lowry
Series Giver Quartet

Collects the four giver novels about life in a futuristic society.

By Margaret Atwood
Recommended By Jessikah Chautin, Community Engagement Specialist, Meghan F., Children's Services Librarian

A look at the near future presents the story of Offred, a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, once the United States, an oppressive world where women are no longer allowed to read and are valued only as long as they are viable for reproduction.

By Margaret Atwood

Enrolling in a project that allows them to live in safe homes between alternate service months spent in prison, a homeless couple is threatened by troubling events stemming from the wife’s involvement with another project member.

By Robert Ferrigno
Series Assassin Trilogy
Recommended By Ralph Guiteau, Readers' Services Librarian

“Set in a future American divided into two major regions, Edgar-finalist Ferrigno’s final entry in his Assassin trilogy nicely ties up the wildly diverse plot lines that have motivated his many characters (Publishers Weekly).”

By Suzanne Collins
Series The Hunger Games Trilogy
Recommended By Sharon Long, Assistant Library Director, Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian, Alisa Fogel, Librarian-Programming, Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian, Pam Strudler, Programming & Arts Librarian

In a future North America, where the rulers of Panem maintain control through an annual televised survival competition pitting young people from each of the twelve districts against one another, sixteen-year-old Katniss's skills are put to the test when she voluntarily takes her younger sister's place.

By Suzanne Collins
Series The Hunger Games Trilogy
Recommended By Sharon Long, Assistant Library Director, Alisa Fogel, Librarian-Programming, Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian, Pam Strudler, Programming & Arts Librarian

In a future North America, where the rulers of Panem maintain control through an annual televised survival competition pitting young people from each of the twelve districts against one another, sixteen-year-old Katniss's skills are put to the test when she voluntarily takes her younger sister's place.

By Aldous Huxley

The author's last novel introduces a supposedly Utopian Pacific island where drug use and open sex are encouraged, and children are not at the mercy of one set of parents. In Island, his last novel, Huxley transports us to a Pacific island where, for 120 years, an ideal society has flourished. Inevitably, this island of bliss attracts the envy and enmity of the surrounding world. A conspiracy is underway to take over Pala and events begin to move when an agent of the conspirators, a newspaperman named Faranby, is shipwrecked there. What Faranby doesn't expect is how his time with the people of Pala will revolutionize all his values and - to his amazement - give him hope.

By Patrick Ness
Series Chaos Walking

Pursued by power–hungry Prentiss and mad minister Aaron, young Todd and Viola set out across New World searching for answers about his colony's true past and seeking a way to warn the ship bringing hopeful settlers from Old World.

By Cory Doctorow
With Jackie Ranaldo, Head of Readers' Services

Tuesday, September 20, 2011.  7 PM.

“Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n,” is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works–and how to work the system … But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days.  When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself (From the Publisher).”

By Edward Bellamy
Series Julian West

A wealthy Bostonian awakes from a hypnotic trance to find himself in a futuristic cooperative commonwealth.

By Philip K. Dick
Recommended By Ralph Guiteau, Readers' Services Librarian
With Ralph Guiteau, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, September 12, 2017. 7:30 PM.

Philip K. Dick’s alternate history classic, the United States lost World War II and was subsequently divided between the Germans in the east and the Japanese in the west.

By Samantha Shannon
Series Bone Season

Fugitive Paige Mahoney flees Scion while Jaxon Hall and his Seven Seals prepare for a rare assembly of the clairvoyant community that is clouded by dark secrets, the emergence of the Rephaim, and an elusive Warden.

By Pierce Brown
Series Red Rising Trilogy

Darrow emerges from years of hiding among the Golds and declares an open revolution against the overlords who oppress his people and caused the loss of his wife.

By Kazuo Ishiguro
With Jackie Ranaldo, Head of Readers' Services

Monday, March 5, 2012. 7 PM

The students of Hailsham, an elite school in the English countryside, are so special that visitors shun them. Only, slowly, do they discover their unconventional origins and strange destiny.

By Chang-Rae Lee

“In a class-divided future America where urban neighborhoods function as labor colonies for elite charter villages, Fan, a female fish-tank diver, embarks on what becomes a legendary quest to find the man she loves in a region overcome by anarchic forces (From the Publisher).”

By Octavia E. Butler
Recommended By Stacey Mencher, Technology and Applications Manager, Jackie, Head of Readers' Services, Sonia Grgas, Reference Librarian
With Jackie Ranaldo, Head of Readers' Services

Monday, January 6, 2014. 7 PM.

Set thirty years in the future, a young woman suffering from hyperempathy, to feel others' pain as well as her own, makes a dangerous journey north from Southern California.

By Justin Cronin

A security breach at a secret U.S. government facility unleashes the monstrous product of a chilling military experiment that only six-year-old orphan Amy Harper Bellafonte can stop.

By Pierce Brown
Series Red Rising Saga
Recommended By Stacey Mencher, Technology and Applications Manager

A tale set in a bleak future society torn by class divisions follows the experiences of secret revolutionary Darrow, who after witnessing his wife’s execution by an oppressive government joins a revolutionary cell.

By Tochi Onyebuchi

The author of the award–winning young–adult novel Beasts Made of Night tackles youth, race and the carceral state with magical flair, in his adult–science-fiction debut.

By Jessamine Chan
Recommended By Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian

After one moment of poor judgment involving her daughter Harriet, Frida Liu falls victim to a host of government officials who will determine if she is a candidate for a Big Brother–like institution that measures the success or failure of a mother’s devotion.

By Sarah Pinsker
Recommended By Jessikah Chautin, Community Engagement Specialist

After a global pandemic makes public gatherings illegal and concerts impossible, except for those willing to break the law for the love of music and for one chance at human connection.

By Margaret Atwood
Recommended By Nathalie Levin, Children's Services Librarian

A long–anticipated sequel to the best–selling The Handmaid’s Tale is set 15 years after Offred stepped into an unknown fate and interweaves the experiences of three female narrators from Gilead.

By Scott Westerfeld
Series Uglies

Just before their sixteenth birthdays, when they will will be transformed into beauties whose only job is to have a great time, Tally's best friend runs away and Tally must find her and turn her in, or never become pretty at all.

By Ninni Holmqvist

This novel, set in a dystopia in a near future, is about  people who don’t have any children or anyone else who loves them or needs them.

By Yevgeny Zamyatin

The narrator describes a state in which the individuals have given up their freedom for materialistic rewards, in this utopian satire.

By Emmi Itäranta

Hiding her forbidden ability to dream behind the persona of a model citizen and weaver in her island home’s prestigious House of Webs, Eliana is linked to the young survivor of an attack before the revelation of her secrets prompts her to join a rebel band that would expose the island’s dark undercurrents.