Select language, opens an overlay
  • General Recommendations
  • Staff-Created List

Apocalyptic and dystopian fiction from Multcolib My Librarian Erika

Stories about how humans respond to world-changing events and difficult environments. Get custom reading recommendations here: https://multcolib.org/my-librarian

Multnomah County Library

21 items

  • Dystopian fiction in which the least privileged and most likely to die are the people who can traverse the multiverse. A story about haves and have-nots full of gritty adventure and social criticism
    BookNew York : Del Rey, [2020] — SF JOHNSON 2020
  • In a post-apocalyptic Africa, a young woman must use her magical powers to confront her sorcerer father and fight the genocide of her people. Vivid desert and village settings, decayed technology, juju, magical creatures. Depicts heavy…
    BookNew York, NY : Daw Books, Inc., [2010] — SF OKORAFOR 2010
  • As winter approaches and society crumbles, a small northern Anishinaabe community must learn to survive without eletricity and other modern conveniences.
    BookToronto, ON : ECW Press, [2018] — FICTION RICE 2018
  • Deep underground, 39 women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before.
    BookOakland, California : Transit Books, 2022. — FICTION HARPMAN 2022
  • The heroine of this spare and haunting novella is voraciously alive in the afterlife. -Publisher. Philosophical, moving, leisurely-paced.
    BookNew York : New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2024. — FICTION DEMARCKEN 2024
  • Snowman is the last human on an Earth ravaged by global warming and a genetically engineered virus. He is the caretaker of the Crakers, a green-eyed group of modified humans who subsist only on plants, and who don’t have the capacity for…
    BookNew York : Anchor Books, a division of Random House LLC, 2004. — FICTION ATWOOD 2004
  • A famous actor collapses and dies on stage during a performance of King Lear. Soon 99 percent of the population follows, victims of a pandemic flu. 15 years in the future, in a ravaged world, a troupe of traveling performers go from town…
    BookNew York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2015. — FICTION MANDEL 2014
  • In a dystopian near future, one young woman with an empathic power seeks to create a new way of living that will spread to the stars. Here the apocalypse is climactic and economic.
    BookNew York : Grand Central Publishing, 2019. — SF BUTLER 2019
  • Candace, a millennial office drone, barely notices when a plague sweeps New York. A moving family story, a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale, and a hilarious, deadpan satire. -Publisher
    BookNew York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018. — FICTION MA 2018
  • Evolution has reversed itself, affecting every living creature on earth, and the babies that are born appear to be primitive species of human. 26-year-old Cedar Songmaker is pregnant. This is her journal.
    BookNew York : Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, [2017] — FICTION ERDRICH 2017
  • In the isolation of the Himalayas, the snows still fall, but they are tinged with the ash of a nuclear winter; the winds still blow, but they wail with the cries of ghosts.
    BookBrentwood, TN : CamCat Books, [2023] — SF BOEY 2023
  • Unrelenting drought has transfigured Southern California into a surreal, phantasmagoric landscape. One young couple must leave their Laurel Canyon squat and undertake a journey to a mysterious hidden community. -Publisher
    BookNew York, New York : Riverhead Books, 2015 — FICTION WATKINS 2015
  • If you like both Melville and Blade Runner you might like this. Stories nest inside stories, from the 1800s to a post-apocalyptic Hawaii.
    BookNew York : Random House Trade Paperbacks, ©2004. — FICTION MITCHELL
  • A father and son travel through an America ravaged by a mysterious disaster. Grim, spare, and haunting.
    BookNew York : Vintage International, [2006] — FICTION MCCARTHY 2006
  • A hopeful hard SF story about how humanity deals with the effects of climate change. The opening sequence is devastating, while the rest of the book explores ideas and solutions.
    BookNew York, NY : Orbit, 2020. — SF ROBINSON 2020
  • When the Moon explodes, humanity must figure out how to survive a 5,000-year long catastrophic meteor storm. Where do world leaders announce this doomy news? Crater Lake! Heavy on the delta vees and zero-gs, but also sad, harrowing, and…
    BookNew York, NY : William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, [2015] — SF STEPHENSO 2015
  • Surviving a pandemic disease that has killed everyone he knows, a pilot establishes a shelter in an abandoned airport hangar before hearing a random radio transmission that compels him to risk his life to seek out other survivors. -…
    BookNew York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. — FICTION HELLER 2012
  • A luxury seaside resort is designed to keep its wealthy residents safe from the physical (and moral) fallout of a global disaster. -Publisher. Reissue of 1967 Danish novella.
    BookNew York : FSG Originals/Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2024. — SF HOLM 2024
  • A group of monks attempts to preserve the fragments of science and civilization that remain after a nuclear disaster. Even a tattered grocery list belonging to "Saint Leibowitz" is a sacred relic in this devastated future.
    UnknownNew York : Eos, 2006. — SF MILLER 2006
  • Writing this book caused the author to lose his ability to spell. Open it and you'll see why!
    BookBloomington : Indiana University Press, 1998. — FICTION HOBAN 1998