Best of
Dystopia

1984

Emergence


David R. Palmer - 1984
    With international relations rapidly deteriorating, Candy's father, publicly a small-town pathologist but secretly a government biowarfare expert, is called to Washington. Candy remains at home.The following day a worldwide attack, featuring a bionuclear plague, wipes out virtually all of humanity (i.e., Homo sapiens). With her pet bird Terry, she survives the attack in the shelter beneath their house. Emerging three months later, she learns of her genetic heritage and sets off to search for others of her kind.

Native Tongue


Suzette Haden Elgin - 1984
    Set in the twenty-second century, the novel tells of a world where women are once again property, denied civil rights and banned from public life. Earth's wealth depends on interplanetary commerce with alien races, and linguists--a small, clannish group of families--have become the ruling elite by controlling all interplanetary communication. Their women are used to breed perfect translators for all the galaxies' languages.Nazareth Chornyak, the most talented linguist of the family, is exhausted by her constant work translating for trade organizations, supervising the children's language education, running the compound, and caring for the elderly men. She longs to retire to the Barren House, where women past childbearing age knit, chat, and wait to die. What Nazareth comes to discover is that a slow revolution is going on in the Barren Houses: there, word by word, women are creating a language of their own to free them from men's control.

War Day and the Journey Onward


James Kunetka - 1984
    

The Danger Quotient


Annabel Johnson - 1984
    A super-genius in a small underground colony of survivors of nuclear war, eighteen-year-old Casey risks journeying back to the twentieth century to discover why the survivors are dying and how he can save them all.

Utopia Hunters: Chronicles of the High Inquest


Somtow Sucharitkul - 1984
    Jenjen, a young lightweaver from the world of Essondras, is summoned by the inquestor Ton Elloran to fashion a great lightsculpture commemorating the Inquest's crusade against false utopias. Caught in a great game played with billions of lives, she learns to see in her life, her art and in the great sweep of history itself, the terrible shadow that threatens the Inquest -- and the light that lies beyond that darkness.