Book picks similar to
In the beginning by Michael Farris Smith
fiction
short-stories
ebook
dystopian
The Test
Sylvain Neuvel - 2019
Twenty-five chances to impress.When the test takes an unexpected and tragic turn, Idir is handed the power of life and death.How do you value a life when all you have is multiple choice?
The Bionics
Alicia Michaels - 2012
2016 Once Upon A Book Award Winner. It is the year 4006, and nuclear war has come to the United States. With tens of thousands killed and countless more injured or terminally ill from the blasts, there is no more “normal”…life will never be the same. For her part, Blythe Sol is reeling from the loss of her arm and an eye in one of the blasts – her dreams of following in her father’s footsteps and joining the military completely shattered. When she hears about the Restoration Project – a bionic government program that offers the sick and injured a second chance – she immediately enrolls. Made whole again, Blythe is filled with hope and a renewed sense of purpose. But when it becomes apparent that those outfitted with the robotic parts now possess super-human abilities, fear spreads across the nation. The Bionics are forced to go into hiding, outcast from all society. In desperation, they band together to form an underground rebellion, and Blythe finds herself caught in a confusing tug-of-war between two of her fellow soldiers—Gage Bronson, the mysterious new addition to the Resistance, and Dax Janner, her best friend. But with war on the horizon and a death sentence hanging over her, Blythe hardly has time to worry about her feelings… The Bionics Series is perfect for readers who enjoy futuristic science fiction, dystopian novels, science fiction romance, and genetic engineering science fiction. Filled with action and adventure, this series will appeal to fans of The Gender Game by Bella Forest and Secondborn by Amy A. Bartol.
Novels inThe Bionics Series by Alicia Michaels:
The Bionics
The Resistance
The Revolution (Available January 8, 2018)
Dawn of Eden
Julie Kagawa - 2013
What's worse strange things are happening to the remains of the dead the and by the time she befriends Ben Archer she's beginning to wonder if a global pandemic is the least of her problems....
Hare Moon
Carrie Ryan - 2011
And when she sneaks out, past the gates and down the path into the Forest of Hands and Teeth, she meets a boy who teaches her heart things she never knew. But love in a world surrounded by so much death doesn’t come without its sacrifices, and Tabitha gradually realizes just how much she’ll have to give up to live among the Unconsecrated. From New York Times bestselling author Carrie Ryan comes an original story of love after the Return.
Thomas’s First Memory of the Flare
James Dashner - 2011
Short flashback that occurs between "The Scorch Trials" and "The Death Cure."
The Living Dead
John Joseph AdamsHarlan Ellison - 2008
They have become the monsters that best express the anxieties and fears of the modern west. This collection gathers together zombie works by Stephen King, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, George R. R. Martin, Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman, Joe Hill, Poppy Z. Brite, Laurell K. Hamilton, and Joe R. Lansdale. These brilliant minds, and The Living Dead, cover the many types of zombie fiction. Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.
The Breakers Series #1-3
Edward W. Robertson - 2013
This collection includes the first three books and is over 1000 pages (350,000 words) of post-apocalyptic survival.BREAKERS (Book 1)In New York, Walt Lawson is about to lose his girlfriend Vanessa. In Los Angeles, Raymond and Mia James are about to lose their house. Within days, none of it will matter. A plague tears across the world, reducing New York to an open grave and LA to a chaotic wilderness of violence and fires. Civilization comes to an abrupt stop.Just as the survivors begin to adapt to the aftermath, Walt learns the virus that ended humanity wasn't created by humans. It was inflicted from outside. The colonists who sent it are ready to finish the job--and Earth's survivors may be too few and too weak to resist.MELT DOWN (Book 2)In upstate Idaho, Ness Hook is run out of his mom's house by his bullying brother Shawn. In Redding, California, Tristan Carter is graduating college, but with no job and no prospects, she'll have to move back in with her parents.Then the world ends: first with a virus, then with an alien invasion.Ness and Shawn take to the mountains to fight a guerrilla against the attackers. In California, Tristan and Alden are taken prisoner. Separated from her brother, Tristan crosses the ruins of America to track him down. She will stop at nothing to get Alden back--but her fellow survivors prove even more dangerous than the monsters who broke the world.KNIFEPOINT (Book 3)Raina was just a girl when the plague came. She survived. Her parents didn't. Neither did the world. As civilization fell, she took to the ruins of Los Angeles, eating whatever she could catch.After two years alone, she's found and adopted by a fisherman and his wife. Their makeshift family lives a quiet life--until a man named Karslaw sails in from Catalina Island with an army of conquerors. Driven by visions of empire, he executes Raina's new father as a traitor and takes her mother captive.But Karslaw's people aren't the only ones vying for control of the ruined land. As violence wracks the city, Raina joins a rebellion against Karslaw's rule. She will stop at nothing to free her mother--and to have her revenge.
Fire Country
David Estes - 2013
Due to toxic air, life expectancies are so low the only way the tribe can survive is by forcing women to procreate when they turn sixteen and every three years thereafter. It is their duty as Bearers.Fifteen-year-old Siena is a Youngling, soon to be a Bearer, when she starts hearing rumors of another tribe of all women, called the Wild Ones. They are known to kidnap Youngling girls before the Call, the ceremony in which Bearers are given a husband with whom to bear children with. As the desert sands run out on her life's hourglass, Siena must uncover the truth about the Wild Ones while untangling the web of lies and deceit her father has masterfully spun.
The Leftovers
Tom Perrotta - 2011
Because nothing has been the same since it happened — not marriages, not friendships, not even the relationships between parents and children.Kevin Garvey, Mapleton's new mayor, wants to speed up the healing process, to bring a sense of renewed hope and purpose to his traumatized community. Kevin's own family has fallen apart in the wake of the disaster: his wife, Laurie, has left to join the Guilty Remnant, a homegrown cult whose members take a vow of silence; his son, Tom, is gone, too, dropping out of college to follow a sketchy prophet named Holy Wayne. Only Kevin's teenaged daughter, Jill, remains, and she's definitely not the sweet "A" student she used to be. Kevin wants to help her, but he's distracted by his growing relationship with Nora Durst, a woman who lost her entire family on October 14th and is still reeling from the tragedy, even as she struggles to move beyond it and make a new start.With heart, intelligence and a rare ability to illuminate the struggles inherent in ordinary lives, Tom Perrotta has written a startling, thought-provoking novel about love, connection and loss.
Bloodchild
Octavia E. Butler - 1984
Butler’s shattering meditation on symbiosis, love, power and tough choices. It won the Hugo, Locus, Nebula and Science Fiction Chronicle awards and is widely regarded as one of her greatest works.Years ago, a group known as the Terrans left Earth in search of a life free of persecution. Now they live alongside the Tlic, an alien race who face extinction; their only chance of survival is to plant their larvae inside the bodies of the humans.When Gan, a young boy, is chosen as a carrier of Tlic eggs, he faces an impossible dilemma: can he really help the species he has grown up with, even if it means sacrificing his own life?Perfect for fans of the thrilling Arrival and the works of Ursula Le Guin.
Halfway to Free
Emma Donoghue - 2020
To offset the devastation of climate change, state-of-the-art birth control has made daycares and playgrounds things of the past. As tempting as the government inducements are to remain child-free, Miriam’s curiosity about the people who “drop out” of society to become parents grows. When she finds a like-minded partner, she must choose between the rewarding comforts she knows and the unknowable mysteries of being a mother.Emma Donoghue’s Halfway to Free is part of Out of Line, an incisive collection of funny, enraging, and hopeful stories of women’s empowerment and escape. Each piece can be read or listened to in a single thought-provoking sitting.
The Fireman
Joe Hill - 2016
Stay cool.No one knows exactly when it began or where it originated. A terrifying new plague is spreading like wildfire across the country, striking cities one by one: Boston, Detroit, Seattle. The doctors call it Draco Incendia Trychophyton. To everyone else it’s Dragonscale, a highly contagious, deadly spore that marks its hosts with beautiful black and gold marks across their bodies—before causing them to burst into flames. Millions are infected; blazes erupt everywhere. There is no antidote. No one is safe.Harper Grayson, a compassionate, dedicated nurse as pragmatic as Mary Poppins, treated hundreds of infected patients before her hospital burned to the ground. Now she’s discovered the telltale gold-flecked marks on her skin. When the outbreak first began, she and her husband, Jakob, had made a pact: they would take matters into their own hands if they became infected. To Jakob’s dismay, Harper wants to live—at least until the fetus she is carrying comes to term. At the hospital, she witnessed infected mothers give birth to healthy babies and believes hers will be fine too. . . if she can live long enough to deliver the child.Convinced that his do-gooding wife has made him sick, Jakob becomes unhinged, and eventually abandons her as their placid New England community collapses in terror. The chaos gives rise to ruthless Cremation Squads—armed, self-appointed posses roaming the streets and woods to exterminate those who they believe carry the spore. But Harper isn’t as alone as she fears: a mysterious and compelling stranger she briefly met at the hospital, a man in a dirty yellow fire fighter’s jacket, carrying a hooked iron bar, straddles the abyss between insanity and death. Known as The Fireman, he strolls the ruins of New Hampshire, a madman afflicted with Dragonscale who has learned to control the fire within himself, using it as a shield to protect the hunted . . . and as a weapon to avenge the wronged.In the desperate season to come, as the world burns out of control, Harper must learn the Fireman’s secrets before her life—and that of her unborn child—goes up in smoke.
The Last Librarian
Brandt Legg - 2015
In the year 2098, there is no more war, no more hunger and no more pollution. The world is secure and Earth’s 2.9 billion people are healthy and happy. There is also only one remaining library that still houses physical books. In addition to the dusty volumes, the library holds many secrets. But the government has decided to shut it down and burn the contents. Unless an unlikely trio can save the books, humanity will lose more than just what is printed on those antique pages. With a single government ruling the entire planet, one currency, one language and no religion, the population is unified and enjoying the prosperity that comes with more than seven decades of peace. Free healthcare for all and guaranteed employment make the future a dream. But this future may only be safe if they can hide the past. The books must be saved . . . the impossible task is up to an angry author, a brazen revolutionary and the last librarian. When everything is perfect, the only thing left to fear is the truth.
The Blackout
Stephanie Erickson - 2012
Molly is an English professor at a local liberal arts college when the world suddenly goes dark. Her husband, Gary, is a corporate pilot on the other side of the country. Grounded by what appears to be a catastrophic power outage, he has no way to communicate with his wife, let alone get home to her. Not knowing whether her husband is alive or dead, Molly struggles to adapt to her new environment: without power, running water, transportation, a stable food supply, or any long-distance means of communication. Without knowing the cause of the outage, Gary must decide whether to wait for things to go back to normal, or to make the long and dangerous journey home on foot. Both must learn to survive after the Blackout.
On the Merits of Unnaturalness
Samantha Shannon - 2015
This controversial piece of literature spread across the voyant underworld like a plague, revolutionising the syndicate but also creating discord in the form of brutal gang wars between the newly-divided categories, the scars of which can still be seen today.Revelatory and subversive, On the Merits of Unnaturalness is a must-read for any reader with a desire to further immerse themselves in the incredible world of Samantha Shannon's The Bone Season.