Newest Dystopian Fiction Reviews
The Waking World (The Future King) by Tom Huddleston
Many tales have been told of the boy who became our greatest king. Very few have spoken of the future...
Aran is the son of one of the Island's wealthiest Laws. He lives in the underground farmstead of Hawk's Cross. He wants for nothing. But Aran is not entirely happy. Rumours are everywhere and the Island is under threat. Bands of fierce men known as Marauders are beginning to attack further and further inland, burning homes and taking slaves. Aran wants to join the fight against them but that task has been given to his older brother. Aran's future lies in overseeing the farmstead and it's not a future he wants. Full review...
Fire & Ash by Jonathan Maberry
ALERT! Spoilers for early books in the Rot & Ruin series are scattered throughout this review. So if you haven't read the others, get thee over to my words about book one. Full review...
Last Man Standing by Davide Longo and Silvester Mazzarella
I've read countless dystopian fiction accounts of a world changed overnight by everything from man eating plants, to nuclear war, plague, or zombies. This is the first to present a complete meltdown of society as the result of economic crises, but this does hold far greater credibility than the average vampire or zombie plague. The main protagonist, Leonardo, is not a hero. He is a very ordinary middle aged man with many flaws. He has no super human strength or abilities of any kind - the only thing that gives him the courage to continue is his love for his estranged daughter, who suddenly reappears in his life, along with a deeply disturbed stepbrother, early in the crisis. Full review...
More Than This by Patrick Ness
Here is the boy, drowning.
And Seth does drown. He is alone; taken by the sea, arms and legs flailing and breaking, skull dashed against the rocks whilst the icy water constricts his muscles and breath. Seth is consciously aware of his final moments. His death consumes him with a heavy, confusing blur until… he awakens and finds himself in a desolate, shattered world; naked, alone, starving and alive. This place looks familiar. It looks exactly like the English village where he spent his early childhood before his brother’s accident and his family’s move to America, but it is now overgrown and devoid of human life. It is as if the whole place was simply abandoned one day. Full review...
The 100 by Kass Morgan
Nuclear war has rendered the Earth uninhabitable for centuries. The remains of human society, a colony of people that managed to escape the cataclysm, live out their lives on massive city-like spaceships. Unfortunately, the spaceships are becoming unsustainable and as resources begin to run out, the Council is forced to introduce strict new plans and measures in an attempt to protect the remaining population. With options running out, a dangerous mission is conceived as a desperate roll of the dice: one hundred juvenile delinquents are sent to the Earth to test if the planet can once more sustain life. There is no telling what the remaining radiation will do to the teenagers, but in this hardened society, this is a risk worth taking. Full review...
Split Second by Sophie McKenzie
Nat and Charlie are connected long before they meet. They were both there the day a terrorist bomb decimated the marketplace. Nat was trying to find his brother and stop him because he's pretty sure Lucas is the bomber. Charlie was sulking because her mother wouldn't let her get a tattoo. And the bomb went off. Charlie's mother died. Nat's brother was left in a coma. In this Britain of the near-future, beset by an endless cycle of more and more austerity, where people queue for free food handouts and racist extremist groups are increasingly dominating the public conversation, neither Charlie nor Nat had thought anything could get any worse. But it did. Full review...
1Q84: The Complete Trilogy by Haruki Murakami
The 1Q84 trilogy is, without doubt, an impressive book. In many ways, the trilogy almost has to be read in this way as the three component books make little sense on their own. The first book in the series in particular is almost completely baffling if taken in isolation. It does, though, demand a degree of dedication, and if the prospect of a 1300 page novel in which not a huge amount happens in terms of plot and in which there is a significant level of repetition leaves you cold, then this might not be the best entry point into the wonderful world of Haruki Murakami. As often with Murakami though, it's possible to read this book at a number of levels. On the surface it's a love story set in a slightly fantastical setting with a little bit of crime thrown in. At a deeper level, he explores the thin lines between imagination and reality, life and death and what you might call yin and yang. It's a novel where balance and vacuums play a big part. It seems counter-intuitive to call a book of this magnitude 'delicate', but that's just how the story appears. Full review...
Bloodtide by Melvin Burgess
Set in a world only a book could inhabit - half in a post-apocalyptic future, half in the mists of the myths of the past - Bloodtide retells part of the Volsunga saga - Icelandic tales of gods and heroes and villains. Civilisation has long abandoned London to its criminals and its gang wars, going so far as to surround its borders with released halfmen, genetically manipulated creatures with a lust for violence. With the population trapped inside the city walls, Val Volson has risen to a position of power. Only King Conor is left standing in his way. But Val wants peace. He wants unity so that his people can break out of the city and prosper. Full review...
Night Witches by LJ Adlington
Rain Aranoza comes from Rodina. It's a nation of science and rationality. It holds no truck with superstition and religion. And, in the tradition of all authoritarian societies, it is ruthless in stamping out traces of the Old World and its belief in witches. Rodina is controlled by a network known as Aura and Aura encourages denunciations. Control is enforced by the Scrutiners and Aura instructs citizens in even the minutiae of their daily lives. Full review...
Blinded by the Light by Joe Kipling
Some time in a near-future Britain, things look very different. The Sandman virus wiped out most of the population. The fortunate few live in one of three Neighbourhoods, each protected by the Boundary. Beyond the Boundary is Outside - a wasteland populated with infected feral Echoes. Luckily for MaryAnn, she lives in the Neighbourhood that was once known as Manchester. And she's a rich and privileged Alpha. Although her parents aren't celebrities - which MaryAnn would like, because then she'd be invited to cooler parties - they are influential in the Light, the Neighbourhood's leadership. So MaryAnn has designer clothes, servants, and nothing more to worry about than bagging a date with peer group kudos. Full review...
The Testing by Joelle Charbonneau
I'll break from my usual reviewing style of starting off with a plot summary here, for reasons which will shortly become obvious, and just start by saying The Testing is an interesting dystopian read, with a wonderful narrator, which I'd definitely recommend. Full review...
Winter Damage by Natasha Carthew
The moor and all it had got was out there waiting for her in the dark, a cold rock thing, hard as nails.
But Ennor doesn't see another choice. She has to go. The fourteen-year-old girl lives with her ailing father and autistic brother, Trip, in a trailer on the frozen Cornish moor. Ennor's mother has been gone for years - after they lost the farm and Ennor's father turned to drugs, she turned to religion. And left. But now the country is falling to pieces. There are riots. There's no money to be earned. School has closed. Father is getting iller. They're behind on the rent and eviction is looming. The social are threatening to take Trip away. There's nothing else for it. Full review...
The Fury: The Director's Cut by Alexander Gordon Smith
I chose The Fury expecting a zombie novel. It isn't what I was expecting at all. The official press release describes the Fury as a zombie book without zombies. This book has several things in common with the zombie genre; a group of survivors, in this case all children struggling to survive against a world that wants to destroy them. Unlike the typical zombie book, those affected by the fury are not the mindless living dead. They are ordinary people who go about ordinary lives with one exception. When they get near one of these children they are gripped by an uncontrollable urge to rip them apart, and everyone on the planet, other than a very small group is affected. Parents murder their children, other children will kill their best friends and total strangers will give up everything to destroy them. After they have killed them, they will go back to their ordinary lives. The world will continue unchanged - at least for now. What makes these children different? Why does the whole world want them dead? Who is infected - and with what? Full review...
Stung by Bethany Wiggins
Fiona wakes up confused and disoriented. She's in her bedroom but her bedroom has never looked like this. It's filthy. And abandoned. Where is her family? And how has she come to have a strange tattoo on her hand? Full review...
Fragments by Dan Wells
I didn't have much hope for this book - the middle book in a series tends to be filler, and as Partials was so brilliant, I though it was going to be hard to top. I was very wrong. This book is mind-blowing. Full review...
Noble Conflict by Malorie Blackman
Kaspar believes in the Alliance with a whole heart. Who wouldn't? In the face of terrorist attacks from the Crusader Insurgency, the Alliance's response is non-fatal. Its security forces are equipped with stun guns and captured insurgents are not killed. They're incapacitated, given medical treatment and imprisoned. Guardians like Kaspar are trained to defend themselves against these unprovoked attacks in the least violent way possible. And considering the Crusaders destroyed their own country before attacking Kaspar's, you can see how measured and ethical the Alliance's response seems. Full review...
Silver by Chris Wooding
'Silver' has a large ant with silver circuits on the cover, and while there are no actual ants in this book, the illustration is very well suited. This books puts a unique twist on the ever popular zombie genre. Instead of living corpses, we have nanobots which can turn humans into machines. They possess a swarm intelligence similar to ants. This sounds far fetched but a great deal of progress has been made in research currently being conducted with just this in mind - to create nanobots with swarm intelligence - a phenomenon well known in the natural sciences in which a less intelligent organism is capable of highly intelligent behaviour through a hive mind. It would be impossible for scientists to control hundreds or thousands of nanobots independently - so the idea is to control a few and have these control the rest. Of course there would always be safeguards on this type of technology and there were safeguards in the book as well - they just didn't work. Full review...
ZOM-B Angels by Darren Shan
Ok. I'm going to do this for all books in this series except the first one. Before we begin. If you haven't read the first book in this series, DON'T read this review. It contains spoilers. Read my review of the first book, read the first book itself, then come back. If you don't, you'll be sorry... Full review...
Deadlands by Lily Herne
I was hesitant to choose this book. I love a good dystopian future book. The problem is, I don't define very many of them as good. I have read far too many zombie books that really don't offer anything different, plenty of blood, gore, and damsels in distress, but not enough character development, or logical thought. Psychological horror can be ever so much more chilling than blood and guts, but it is also much more difficult to pull off. Sarah and Savannah Lotz, the mother and daughter team who have written this book under the pen name Lily Herne, have managed to do this perfectly. Full review...
ACID by Emma Pass
The UK is now the IRB - Independent Republic of Britain. It's no longer run by elected politicians, who were completely discredited after a catastrophic financial crash. Instead, the IRB is a police state, led by ACID, a fearsomely authoritarian organisation. Marriage has been abandoned in favour of life partnering - the state tells you who to live with and whether or not you can have a child. Contact with the outside world is forbidden. Society is divided, with a tiny wealthy elite and a huge mass of an underclass living in poverty and shortage. Full review...
After Tomorrow by Gillian Cross
We were looking at a long line of people trudging down a country road. They were loaded with bundles and backpacks and babies and they all looked miserable and exhausted. Refugees, I thought automatically. But they weren't. They were people like us.
After Armageddon Monday - the collapse of all the major banks in the UK - life has become increasingly difficult for Matt and his family. Money is worthless. Food is the main currency. People who have it are resented and hated. They're named and shamed on hoarder websites and subject to violent raids by those who don't. Matt's family has more food than most because they have an allotment and have set up a trading network. But the raiders don't care about how they got their food. They just want it. Full review...
The Vanguard by SJ Griffin
Sorcha Blades and her four closest friends do the best they can with what they have. Living in a post-apocalyptic world, they are from the wrong side of the tracks. Unable to live easy and glittering lives like the elite, they scam and forage and hack their way to some degree of comfort and still manage to avoid the - very unpleasant - state security apparatus for the most part. Not that there's much state left for the security apparatus to protect. Full review...
Fractured by Teri Terry
As a teen criminal in Lorder-run Britain, Kyla was slated - her memories erased and her personality "reset". But Kyla wasn't like the other Slateds - she retained tantalising memories of her previous life. Fractured picks up Kyla's story after she's lost Ben and just as a mysterious man from her past comes back into her life. It seems that Kyla's memories represent more than just a failed slating. She has a role to play in the fight against the Lorders. But it's not as easy as that. Is Kyla a victim? A freedom fighter? A terrorist? And can the end ever justify the means? The more Kyla learns about her history, the more such questions burn. And the more danger she finds herself in... Full review...
Siege by Sarah Mussi
Leah Jackson is miserable and in detention. This is particularly infuriating because the detention means she's likely to be late for her fame and fortune interview, one of the few chances kids at YOP schools have to make it into college and to get a life worth having. But Leah's worries are about to become much, much more immediate. Year 9 kids storm into the room. They're armed. And they're shooting. Leah escapes the melee by hauling herself up into the roofspace. But only just. Kids are dead. Teachers are dead. Everyone else is rounded up in the gym. Only Leah and Anton are free, but they are trapped above the ceiling tiles. Full review...
Requiem by Lauren Oliver
Out in the Wilds, Lena is now trying to cope with the return of her first love Alex along with her feelings for Julian, but these relationship issues take a backseat as life becomes very dangerous for her, and everyone else. Back in Portland, her friend Hana is set to marry the man who will become Mayor - a perfect pairing, surely? While both girls have changed a lot since the start of book one, the biggest changes are still to come... Full review...
Quantum Drop by Saci Lloyd
We're in London. The London that's left after the next financial crash devastates life for most people right across the world. Money is hard to come by, and most people survive on black market credits, supplied by the Betta. Everyone either works for the Betta or borrows from them. And when Anthony's girlfriend gets on the wrong side of the Betta and is taken out in a gang hit, he must venture into the virtual world of the Drop if he is to find out who is responsible and how to get justice. But the Drop is a dangerous, dangerous place... Full review...
The Disappearances by Gemma Malley
The Disappearances opens a year after Evie and Raffy escaped from the City. They have begun a new life in the Settlement - Raffy farms and Evie sews and this kibbutz-like living is like balm in comparison to the ultra-controlled, denunciation environment they left behind. But Raffy's jealousy won't leave him and it's threatening to ruin the couple's precious, new-found peace. Back in the City, Lucas is finding that switching off the System hasn't been the panacea he thought it would be. His people are lost without the rigid controls they had lived under for so long. And to make matters worse, the City's young people are disappearing. Full review...
Rat Runners by Oisin McGann
Nimmo lives in a London of the future. It's not a great place to be. Under constant surveillance by the WatchWorld network and its Robocop-style Safe-Guards, even the slightest transgression brings you into very unwelcome attention from the authorities. Life is particularly difficult for Nimmo. His parents are in prison and he must live below the radar of WatchWorld, amid the city's underground criminals. As you can imagine, Nimmo has skills. And this is why gang boss Move-Easy calls him in when a case containing valuable black market credit cards goes missing. Nimmo, together with sibling grifters Manikin and FX, and teen geek Scope, are to find the case or face Move-Easy's chief goons. Full review...
The Prey by Andrew Fukuda
Having escaped the vampires hunting them on the boat left by the Scientists, Gene, Sissy and the boys make their way down the river and arrive at the Mission. Food is abundant, the place is peaceful, and the Elders promise them a trip on the next train to Civilisation. Gene and Sissy can hardly believe it. But it's soon apparent that the Mission is not all it seems and Gene begins to wonder if they haven't simply exchanged one hellhole for another. Although they find out a great deal more about the Scientist - he developed the Origin, a cure for vampirism - understanding his plans is as frustrating as ever. And with the vampires coming ever closer, even to the Mission itself, and the Elders making moves of their own, time is running out and Gene and Sissy must decide what to do... Full review...
Zom-B Underground by Darren Shan
Ok. Before we begin. If you haven't read the first book in this series, DON'T read this review. It contains spoilers. Read my review of the first book, read the first book itself, then come back. If you don't, you'll be sorry. Full review...
