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The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster

Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison
Sometime in the dark future of urban jungles, riots, food shortages, and senseless violence, a cynical New York City detective embarks on a desperate hunt for the truth.

Magic of the State by Michael Taussig
Set in the enchanted mountain of a spirit-queen presiding over an unnamed, postcolonial country, this ethnographic work of ficto-criticism recreates in written form the shrines by which the dead--notably the fetishized forms of Europe's Others, Indians and Blacks--generate the magical powers of the modern state.

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
It is 1962 and the Second World War has been over for seventeen years: people have now had a chance to adjust to the new order. But it's not been easy. The Mediterranean has been drained to make farmland, the population of Africa has virtually been wiped out and America has been divided between the Nazis and the Japanese. In the neutral buffer zone that divides the two superpowers lives the man in the high castle, the author of an underground bestseller, a work of fiction that offers an alternative theory of world history in which the Axis powers didn't win the war. The novel is a rallying cry for all those who dream of overthrowing the occupiers. But could it be more than that?

The Man Who Japed by Philip K. Dick
Newer York is a post-holocaust city governed by the laws of an oppressively rigid morality. Highly mobile and miniature robots monitor the behavior of every citizen, and the slightest transgression can spell personal doom. Allen Purcell is one of the few people who has the capacity to literally change the way of the world, and once he's offered a high-profile job that acts as guardian of public ethics, he sets out to do precisely that. But first he must deal with the head in his closet.

Market Forces by Richard Morgan
What do you buy and sell when the global markets reach saturation point? The markets themselves. Thirty years from now the big players in global capitalism have moved on from commodities. The big money is in conflict investment. The corporations keep a careful watch on the wars of liberation and revolution that burn constantly around the world. They guage who the winners will be and sell them arms, intelligence and power. In return for a slice of the action when the war is won. The reward? A stake in the new nation.

Memoirs Found in a Bathtub by Stanislaw Lem
A journal excavated some 1200 years in the future reveals the mad logic of a bureaucratic civilization whose downfall coincided with a paper destroying blight.

Messenger by Lois Lowry
For the past six years, Matty has lived in Village and flourished under the guidance of Seer, a blind man, known for his special sight. Village was a place that welcomed newcomers, but something sinister has seeped into Village and the people have voted to close it to outsiders. Matty has been invaluable as a messenger. Now he must make one last journey through the treacherous forest with his only weapon, a power he unexpectedly discovers within himself.

Mockingbird by Walter Tevis
A futuristic tale set in a world where reading is forbidden, citizens are drugged from childhood on and machines dominate humans, focuses on two people who teach themselves how to read and how to think independently.

Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson
Mona's pimp sells her to a plastic surgeon in New York and she's turned overnight into someone else. The pimp winds up dead. Mona weeps for him. She's a sweet, dumb girl ... so far. Angie the famous Hollywood stim star has started remembering things. Despite the efforts of studio bosses to keep her in ignorance, Angie will discover who she really is ... and why she doesn't need to jack into the Matrix in order to enter cyberspace.

Moscow 2042 by Vladimir Voinovich
The year is 1982, just two years before that made famous by Orwell. An exiled Soviet writer discovers that a German travel agency is booking flights through a time warp to a variety of tempting sites and dates in the future. Moscow? The year 2042? How can he resist?

My Melancholy Face by Heinrich Böll

Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
Bill Lee, an addict-hustler, travels to Mexico and then Tangier in order to find easy access to drugs, and ends up in the Interzone, a bizarre fantasy world.

Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin
Set in the not too distant future of 2205, and using fictional legislation implemented in 1991, Native Tongue is an intriguing depiction of a world where women are property, aliens are trading partners, and inherent ability to learn languages is a goldmine inherent only in certain families. What few realise is that a revolution is already underway, and the women deemed least essential are empowering all women to fight back against male dominance.

Neuromancer by William Gibson
The Matrix unfolds like neon origami beneath clusters and constellations of data. Constructs, AIs, live here. Somewhere, concealed by ice, Neuromancer is evolving. As entropy goes into reverse, Molly's surgical implants broadcast trouble from the ferro-concrete geodesic of the Sprawl.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Kathy, Ruth and Tommy were pupils at Hailsham - an idyllic establishment situated deep in the English countryside. The children there were tenderly sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe they were special, and that their personal welfare was crucial. But for what reason were they really there?

Nineteen Eighty-Five by Anthony Burgess

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwel
While the totalitarianism that provoked George Orwell into writing 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' seems to be passing into oblivion, his harrowing, cautionary tale of a man trapped in a political nightmare has had the opposite fate, and its relevance and power to disturb our complacency seem to grow decade by decade.

Noughts & Crosses series by Malorie Blackman
Sephy is a Cross -- a member of the dark-skinned ruling class. Callum is a Nought -- a "colourless" member of the underclass who were once slaves to the Crosses. The two have been friends since early childhood, but that's as far as it can go. In their world, Noughts and Crosses simply don't mix. Against a background of prejudice and distrust, intensely highlighted by violent terrorist activity, a romance builds between Sephy and Callum -- a romance that is to lead both of them into terrible danger. Can they possibly find a way to be together?

Nova Express by William S. Burroughs
The diabolical Nova criminals have gained control and plan on wreaking untold destruction. It’s up to Inspector Lee of the Nova Police to attack and dismantle the word-and-imagery machine of these “control addicts” before it’s too late.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
The narrator of Atwood's riveting novel calls himself Snowman. When the story opens, he is sleeping in a tree, wearing an old bedsheet, mourning the loss of his beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death. He searches for supplies in a wasteland where insects proliferate and pigoons and wolvogs ravage the pleeblands, where ordinary people once lived, and the Compounds that sheltered the extraordinary. As he tries to piece together what has taken place, the narrative shifts to decades earlier. How did everything fall apart so quickly? Why is he left with nothing but his haunting memories? Alone except for the green-eyed Children of Crake, who think of him as a kind of monster, he explores the answers to these questions in the double journey he takes - into his own past, and back to Crake's high-tech bubble-dome, where the Paradice Project unfolded and the world came to grief.

Obernewtyn Chronicles by Isobelle Carmody
This first book of the "Obernewtyn Chronicles" introduces Elspeth Gordie, a Misfit born with enhanced mental powers. To escape a hostile holocaustic society, she manages to get herself sent to Obernewtyn, a Misfit haven where a reclusive doctor is said to be developing a cure for Misfit abilities. Thus begins Elspeth's journey to learn who she is and the destiny she must survive to fulfill.

One (also published as Escape To Nowhere) by David Karp
A dystopian novel set in a perversely benevolent future in which an attempt is made to remould the identity of a so-called heretic, Professor Burden, who had, up until then, regarded himself as a loyal citizen of the State.

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Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler
In California in the year 2025, a small community is overrun by desperate scavengers, as an eighteen-year-old African American woman sets off on foot on a perilous journey northward.

Paradise Lost by John Milton
Paradise Lost is the great epic poem of the English language, a tale of immense drama and excitement, of rebellion and treachery, of innocence pitted against corruption, in which God and Satan fight a bitter battle for control of mankind's destiny. The struggle ranges across heaven, hell, and earth, as Satan and his band of rebel angels conspire against God. At the center of the conflict are Adam and Eve, motivated by all too human temptations, but whose ultimate downfall is unyielding love.

Paris in the 20th Century by Jules Verne
In 1863 Jules Verne, famed author of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in Eighty Days, wrote a novel that his literary agent deemed too farfetched to be published. More than one hundred years later, his great-grandson found the handwritten, never-before published manuscript in a safe. That manuscript was Paris in the Twentieth Century, an astonishingly prophetic view into the future by one of the most renowned science fiction writers of our time . . .

The Penultimate Truth by Philip K. Dick
The story of a society forced into underground shelters after a nuclear war turns the USA into a burned-out landscape.

The People of Sparks by Jeanne DuPrau
This sequel to ‘The City of Ember’ follows the further adventures of Lina Mayfleet and Doon Harrow as they and other residents of Ember take up residence in the town of Sparks.

Perdido Street Station by China Miéville
For more than a thousand years, the parliament and its brutal militia have ruled over a vast array of workers, spies, magicians, and junkies. Now a stranger has come with an impossible demand, and inadvertently something unthinkable is released. A reckoning is due and it is too late to escape.

A Planet for the President by Alistair Beaton
Things are not going well for the President of the United States. He wants Americans to be adored by freedom-loving people everywhere. Instead, half the planet seems to be in permanent insurrection against US power. What's more, there's a growing environmental crisis that even he can't ignore. His advisers warn him he could be remembered as the President who wrecked the planet. That's not exactly the historical legacy he's longed for. At a secret meeting in the Oval Office, the President is persuaded of one simple fact: there are too many people in the world. Eventually, even the United States will become the victim of a polluted planet running out of resources. Only radical action, say his advisers, can deal with the problem. The solution they propose is frighteningly audacious and breathtakingly ruthless. The President, torn between fascination and revulsion, hesitates. But as more eco-disasters hit America, powerful forces within the White House insist that it is time to think the unthinkable. Soon, the President is embarked upon a plan that will guarantee American supremacy for generations to come. Or so he believes...

Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle
If you've seen the progressively cheesier Planet of the Apes movies of 1968-1973, you may be shocked to learn the first movie was adapted from an intelligent, ironic, and literate novel.

Player Piano (also known as Utopia 14) by Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut's first novel, an unforgiving portrait of an automated and totalitarian future, was published in 1952. A human revolt against the machines which control life was arranged by the machines themselves to prove the futility of such resistance.

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
When the renowned aviation hero and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh defeated Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide in the 1940 presidential election, fear invaded every Jewish household in America. Not only had Lindbergh, in a nationwide radio address, publicly blamed the Jews for selfishly pushing America towards a pointless war with Nazi Germany, but, upon taking office as the 33rd president of the United States, he negotiated a cordial 'understanding' with Adolf Hitler, whose conquest of Europe and whose virulent anti-Semitic policies he appeared to accept without difficulty.

Prayers for the Assassin by Robert Ferrigno
Seattle, 2040. The Space Needle lies crumpled. Veiled women hurry through the streets. Alcohol is outlawed, replaced by Jihad Cola, and mosques dot the skyline. New York and Washington, D.C., are nuclear wastelands. At the edges of the empire, Islamic and Christian forces fight for control, and rebels plot to regain free will.

Pretties by Scott Westerfeld
Tally has finally become pretty. Now her looks are beyond perfect, her clothes are awesome, her boyfriend is totally hot, and she's completely popular. It's everything she's ever wanted.  But beneath all the fun -- the nonstop parties, the high-tech luxury, the total freedom -- is a nagging sense that something's wrong. Something important. Then a message from Tally's ugly past arrives. Reading it, Tally remembers what's wrong with pretty life, and the fun stops cold.

Prison Planet by Chris Whatley

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Rammer by Larry Niven
Jerome Corbell is awakened 200 years after being frozen and finds himself in someone else's body and being chosen to train as a rammer, a starship pilot. Should he fail his training, the state would terminate him and give his adopted body to someone else.

Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack
The novel is told in the form of a fictional diary by the 12-year-old protagonist Lola Hart, and details Lola and her family's experiences in a speculative Manhattan in which violence, rising unemployment, and riots are commonplace in the city, as well as the rest of the United States.

Rant by Chuck Palahniuk

Ravage by René Barjavel

"Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman by Harlan Ellison
A rebel inhabits a world where conformity and punctuality are top priorities and the Ticktockman cannot accept the Harlequin's presence in his perfectly ordered world.

Resourcing Humans by Robert Parker Williams

Resurrection Day by Brendan DuBois
In the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, the U.S. has been crippled into a second-rate power dependent upon European allies for survival. In the shadow of this devastating chaos, a reporter stumbles across a man with secrets of the great war's origins--and lies about Kennedy's death.

Return from the Stars by Stanisław Lem
A novel about a spaceship pilot returning to earth, who has been gone for only a decade in space time, but 125 years in earth time.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy
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. They 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 Running Man by Richard Bachman (Stephen King)
Twenty-five years in the future, the world has fallen into chaos. Darkness and paranoia rule the day. In this bleak landscape, Ben Richards is about to go through hell and back for the only thing left he cares about--his family. As a last effort so save his sick daughter, he applies to become a contestant on a deadly game show where you don't win...you survive. The only problem is, where do you hide when the entire world is looking for you?

Running Out of Time by Margaret Haddix
The children of Clifton are dying and Jessie's mother is desperate for medicine to save their lives, but it is 1840 and no such remedy exists. Except that it isn't 1840 at all, it is 1996, and the critical situation forces Jessie's mother to reveal an unbelievable secret.

R.U.R. by Karel Čapek
Great play, that introduced the word "robot" into English, looks to a future in which all workers are automatons. They revolt when they acquire souls (i.e., when they gain the ability to hate) and the resulting catastrophe make for a powerful and deeply moving theatrical experience.

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A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick
Substance D -- otherwise known as Death -- is the most dangerous drug ever to find its way on to the black market. It destroys the links between the brain's two hemispheres, leading first to disorentation and then to complete and irreversible brain damage. Bob Arctor, undercover narcotics agent, is trying to find a lead to the source of supply, but to pass as an addict he must become a user, and soon, without knowing what is happening to him, he is as dependent as any of the addicts he is monitoring.

Sea of Glass by Barry B. Longyear
A boy, who has known nothing in his brief life but love and darkness, forces open a window and sees for the first time the outside world, which also sees him: an illegal immigrant by birth. Arrested, his parents tortured to death, we see through Thomas Windom's eyes a race preparing to deal with overpopulation in the only manner left.

The Secret of the League by Ernest Bramah

Shade's Children by Garth Nix
In the brutal world of the future, an unspeakable fate awaits the human children of the Dormitories when they turn fourteen. It is from this Sad Birthday that Shade's Children - Ella, Drum, Gold-Eye, and Ninde - have escaped. Hunted ceaselessly by savage mutant creatures, they join forces to form a resistance movement. Cunning, clairvoyance, and sheer desperate force of will help them. But ultimately their fate rests with the charismatic Shade, who calls himself their friend . . .

The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner
An enduring classic, this book offers a dramatic and prophetic look at the potential consequences of the escalating destruction of Earth. In this nightmare society, air pollution is so bad that gas masks are commonplace. Infant mortality is up, and everyone seems to suffer from some form of ailment. The water is polluted, and only the poor drink from the tap. The government is ineffectual, and corporate interests scramble to make a profit from water purifiers, gas masks, and organic foods.

The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner
He Was The Most Dangerous Fugitive Alive, But He Didn't Exist! Nickie Haflinger had lived a score of lifetimes...but technically he didn't exist. He was a fugitive from Tarnover, the high-powered government think tank that had educated him. First he had broken his identity code -- then he escaped. Now he had to find a way to restore sanity and personal freedom to the computerized masses and to save a world tottering on the brink of disaster. He didn't care how he did it...but the government did. That's when his Tarnover teachers got him back in their labs...and Nickie Haflinger was set up for a whole new education!

The Shore of Women by Pamela Sargent
In a post-nuclear future, women live in walled cities, controlling all technology. Men, considered incapable of complex intellectual functions, worship females as divine beings. Roaming the countryside in primitive bands, men approach cities only when summoned for purposes of procreation.

The simulacra by Philip K. Dick
Set in the middle of the twenty-first century, The Simulacra is the story of an America where the whole government is a fraud and the President is an android. Against this backdrop Dr. Superb, the sole remaining psychotherapist, is struggling to practice in a world full of the maladjusted.

Sleepwalking by Nicola Morgan

The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya
Two hundred years after civilization ended in an event known as the Blast, Benedikt isn't one to complain. He's got a job—transcribing old books and presenting them as the words of the great new leader, Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe—and though he doesn't enjoy the privileged status of a Murza, at least he's not a serf or a half-human four-legged Degenerator harnessed to a troika. He has a house, too, with enough mice to cook up a tasty meal, and he's happily free of mutations: no extra fingers, no gills, no cockscombs sprouting from his eyelids. And he's managed—at least so far—to steer clear of the ever-vigilant Saniturions, who track down anyone who manifests the slightest sign of Freethinking, and the legendary screeching Slynx that waits in the wilderness beyond.

Small-Minded Giants by Oísin McGann

Smith's Dream by C. K. Stead

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
In the future the only relief from the sea of logos is the computer-generated universe of virtual reality? But now a strange computer virus, called Snow Crash, is striking down hackers, leaving an unlikely young man as humankind's last hope.

The Sound of His Horn by John William Wall

The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth
Time: the near future Place: Madison Avenue, New York An overcrowded world is dominated by a few unscrupulous advertising agencies who have reduced the population to drug- and ad-conditioned consumers. Fowler Schocken Associates, who successfully organised India into a single giant cartel, have a new mission -- the development and exploitation of Venus. Mitchell Courtenay, star-class copysmith, is chosen to sell it to potential colonists. But the Consies, a subversive conservation group, and a rival ad agency also want Venus, and Courtenay finds himself in the midst of a deadly struggle.

Specials by Scott Westerfeld
"Special Circumstances" The words have sent chills down Tally's spine since her days as a repellent, rebellious ugly. Back then Specials were a sinister rumor -- frighteningly beautiful, dangerously strong, breathtakingly fast. Ordinary pretties might live their whole lives without meeting a Special. But Tally's never been ordinary.

The Stand by Stephen King
This is the way the world ends: with a nanosecond of computer error in a Defense Department laboratory and a million casual contacts that form the links in a chain letter of death. And here is the bleak new world of the day after: a world stripped of its institutions and emptied of 99 percent of its people. A world in which a handful of panicky survivors choose sides -- or are chosen. A world in which good rides on the frail shoulders of the 108-year-old Mother Abigail -- and the worst nightmares of evil are embodied in a man with a lethal smile and unspeakable powers: Randall Flagg, the dark man.

Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
There are seven billion-plus humans crowding the surface of 21st century Earth. It is an age of intelligent computers, mass-market psychedelic drugs, politics conducted by assassination, scientists who burn incense to appease volcanoes ... all the hysteria of a dangerously overcrowded world, portrayed in a dazzlingly inventive style.

Stark by Ben Elton
Stark has more money than God and the social conscience of a dog on a croquet lawn. What's more, they know the Earth is dying, so deep in Western Australia a planet-sized plot takes shape. Unfortunately all that stands in the way of the conspiracy are four inept green freaks.

A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder by James De Mille
The yachtsmen found the manuscript afloat at sea in a corroded copper cylinder. The manuscript itself told an incredible tale -- a tale of strange adventures in a place beyond contemporary imagination…

The Supernaturalist by Eoin Colfer
In the not-too-distant future, in a place called Satellite City, thirteen-year-old Cosmo Hill is unfortunate enough to come into the world unwanted by his parents. And so, as are all orphaned boys his age, Cosmo is dipped in a vaccine vat and sent to the Clarissa Frayne Institute for Parentally Challenged Boys-freight class. At Clarissa Frayne, the orphans, called "no-sponsors," are put to work by the state, testing dangerous products that never should be allowed near human beings. By the time the no-sponsors are sent to their cardboard utility pipes, given their nightly meal pack, and finally fall asleep, they are often covered in burns, bruises, or sores from the work of the day. Cosmo Hill knows that he must escape, even though he has no idea what might be waiting for him on the outside.

Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon
In a world born of nuclear rage, an ancient evil roams a devastated America. . . He is the Man with the Scarlet Eye. He has gathered under his power the forces of human greed and madness, searching for a child who has the gift of life, the child named Swan. And when the mighty forces of good and evil finally clash against the nightmare landscape of the new world, no one will escape.

Swastika Night by Katharine Burdekin
Seven hundred years after Hitler's conquest of Europe men are encouraged to follow the soldierly virtues, while women are reduced to breeders and victims.

Sweeney's Island (also known as Cloud On Silver) by John Christopher

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Terraplane by Jack Womack
A retired general and his hit-man kidnap a Russian scientist and travel through time to an alternate New York of 1939.

That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis

Dr. Ransom enters the increasingly pressing conflict between science and ethics and embarks on a mysterious journey.

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
This is the tale of a Victorian time traveler who creates a machine which takes him 800,000 years into the future, to a divided world of innocence and knowledge.

This Other Eden by Ben Elton
If the end of the world is nigh, then surely it's only sensible to make alternative arrangements. There are those who say that's planetary treason, but who cares what the weirdos and terrorists think? Not Nathan. All he cares is that his movie gets made and that there's somebody left to see it.

This Perfect Day by Ira Levin
About a young man fighting a desperate battle for freedom in a world benumbed by chemistry & computerization.

Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick
Ingram Ragle Gumm was living with his sister and her family in 1959 solving newspaper puzzles. But his normal life began to change one day, and he noticed things getting really strange. He thought he was losing his mind. But, instead, he was going sane, and the year was 1996.

The Traveler by John Twelve Hawks
In London, Maya, a young woman trained to fight by her powerful father, uses the latest technology to elude detection when walking past the thousands of surveillance cameras that watch the city. In New York, a secret shadow organization uses a victim’s own GPS to hunt him down and kill him. In Los Angeles, Gabriel, a motorcycle messenger with a haunted past, takes pains to live "off the grid" — free of credit cards and
government IDs. Welcome to the world of The Traveler — a world frighteningly like our own.

The Trial by Franz Kafka
A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K., an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once arrested, he is released, but must report to court on a regular basis--an event that proves maddening, as nothing is ever resolved. As he grows more uncertain of his fate, his personal life--including work at a bank and his relations with his landlady and a young woman who lives next door--becomes increasingly unpredictable. As K. tries to gain control, he succeeds only in accelerating his own excruciating downward spiral.

The Memoirs Of A Survivor by Doris Lessing
In the ruined, barbaric world of the near future, a lone woman cares for a deserted child and surveys her city's disintegration, the hordes of safety-seeking people, and her own painful adolescence, childhood, and infancy.

..twentytwelve by Andrew Keogh
The year is 2012. The global conflict that first manifested itself in the attack on the twin towers and broadened and deepened with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq has continued through the first decade of the new millennium and beyond, bringing with it ever increasing hatred and misery.

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Uglies by Scott Westerfeld
Everybody gets to be supermodel gorgeous. What could be wrong with that?  Tally is about to turn sixteen, and she can't wait. Not for her license -- for turning pretty. In Tally's world, your sixteenth birthday brings an operation that turns you from a repellent ugly into a stunningly attractive pretty and catapults you into a high-tech paradise where your only job is to have a really great time. In just a few weeks Tally will be there. 

Utopia X by Scott Wilson
Populist Huey Long once said that when fascism comes to America it'll come in the guise of anti-fascism. And in America in the year 2048 that is just what has happened. Multiculturalism, praised by many contemporaries, has become an absolute and indomitable force in a future where a tyrannical regime hands down the ultimate penalty to anyone accused of politically incorrect actions or attitudes.

Unwind by Neal Shusterman
In a society where unwanted teens are salvaged for their body parts, three runaways fight the system that would "unwind" them

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Veracity by Mark Lavorato
The story is set in a dystopian future where only a handful of people are left in the world. It recounts the peculiar relationship between two young men who have opposing views on the extremist philosophy they were indoctrinated into. While each of them struggle internally, they’re driven toward increasingly difficult moral and ethical dilemmas, and eventually, regrettably, against each other.

Virtual Light by William Gibson
Berry Rydell, an ex-cop, signs on with IntenSecure Armed Response in Los Angeles. He finds himself on a collision course that results in a desperate romance, and a journey into the ecstasy and dread that mirror each other at the heart of the postmodern experience.

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The Wanting Seed by Anthony Burgess
The Wanting Seed is a Malthusian comedy about the strange world that overpopulation will produce. Tristram Foxe and his wife, Beatrice-Joanna, live in their skyscraper world of spacelessness where official family limitation glorifies homosexuality ("It's Sapiens to be Homo"). This time of the near future is eventually transformed into a chaos of cannibalistic dining-clubs, fantastic fertility rituals, and wars without enemies. The Wanting Seed is a novel both extravagantly funny and grimly serious.

War with the Newts by Karel Čapek
Humans discover and exploit a species of giant, intelligent newt, until the newts gain enough weapons and skills to challenge them.

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
In the One State of the Great Benefactor, there are no individuals, only numbers. Life is an ongoing process of mathematical precision, a perfectly balanced equation. Primitive passions and instincts have been subdued. Even nature has been defeated, banished behind the Green Wall. But one frontier remains: outer space. Now with the creation of the spaceship Integral, that frontier--and whatever alien species are to be found there--will be subjugated to the beneficent yoke of reason.  One number, D-503, chief architect of the Integral, decides to record his thoughts in the final days before the launch for the benefit of less advanced societies. But a chance meeting with the beautiful I-330 results in an unexpected discovery that threatens everything D-503 believes about himself and the One State. The discovery--or rediscovery--of inner space...and that disease the ancients called the soul.

Welcome to the Monkey House (short story) by Kurt Vonnegut

When Smuts Goes by Dr. Arthur M. Keppel-Jones

When the Sleeper Wakes by H. G. Wells
In 1897 a Victorian gentleman falls into a sleep from which he cannot be awoken. During his 200 years of slumber he becomes the Sleeper, the most powerful person in the world. The common people, increasingly oppressed, view the Sleeper as a liberator whose awakening will free them from misery.

Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? by Andrei Amalrik

Wind On Fire (trilogy) by William Nicholson
After Kestrel Hath rebels against the stifling rules of Amaranth society and is forced to flee, she, along with her twin brother and a tagalong classmate, follow an ancient map in quest of the legendary silver voice of the wind singer.

The World Inside by Robert Silverberg
The novel is set on Earth in the year 2381, when the population of the planet has reached 75 billion people. Population growth has skyrocketed due to a quasi-religious belief in human reproduction as the highest possible good. Most of the action occurs in a massive three-kilometer high city-tower called Urban Monad 116.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks
The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
Meg Murray, her little brother Charles Wallace, and their mother are having a midnight snack on a dark and stormy night when an unearthly stranger appears at their door. He claims to have been blown off course, and goes on to tell them that there is such a thing as a "tesseract," which, if you didn't know, is a wrinkle in time. Meg's father had been experimenting with time-travel when he suddenly disappeared. Will Meg, Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin outwit the forces of evil as they search through space for their father?

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The Yawning Heights by Aleksandr Zinoviev

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Z for Zachariah by Robert C. O'Brien
Nuclear war has devastated America, except for the valley where Ann has been living alone - until a scientist in a radiation-proof suit arrives. His behaviour towards her becomes increasingly threatening. Although there may be no one else alive, Ann steals his suit and leaves in search of humanity.