Book picks similar to
The Last Teacher by Chris Dietzel


short-stories
sci-fi
science-fiction
short-story

Run


Blake Crouch - 2011
    Brutal. Seemingly unconnected. A cop walked into a nursing home and unloaded his weapons on elderly and staff alike. A mass of school shootings. Prison riots of unprecedented brutality. Mind-boggling acts of violence in every state.4 D A Y S A G OThe murders increased ten-fold…3 D A Y S A G OThe President addressed the nation and begged for calm and peace…2 D A Y S A G OThe killers began to mobilize…Y E S T E R D A YAll the power went out…T O N I G H TThey’re reading the names of those to be killed on the Emergency Broadcast System. You are listening over the battery-powered radio on your kitchen table, and they’ve just read yours.Your name is Jack Colclough. You have a wife, a daughter, and a young son. You live in Albuquerque, New Mexico. People are coming to your house to kill you and your family. You don’t know why, but you don’t have time to think about that any more. You only have time to….R U NThis 80,000-word novel also contains a bonus interview with Blake, and excerpts from his other work.

The Past Is Red


Catherynne M. Valente - 2021
    Valente, the bestselling and award-winning creator of Space Opera and The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland returns with The Past is Red, the enchanting, dark, funny, angry story of a girl who made two terrible mistakes: she told the truth and she dared to love the world.The future is blue. Endless blue...except for a few small places that float across the hot, drowned world left behind by long-gone fossil fuel-guzzlers. One of those patches is a magical place called Garbagetown.Tetley Abednego is the most beloved girl in Garbagetown, but she's the only one who knows it. She's the only one who knows a lot of things: that Garbagetown is the most wonderful place in the world, that it's full of hope, that you can love someone and 66% hate them all at the same time.But Earth is a terrible mess, hope is a fragile thing, and a lot of people are very angry with her. Then Tetley discovers a new friend, a terrible secret, and more to her world than she ever expected.

Dust


Allison M. Dickson - 2011
    No life form stands a chance, but Clyde Jackson is tougher than most. He's seen war and he's been in plenty of foxholes. Now he's living through the end of the world one day at a time in a panic room that has become his only refuge.Originally featured in The Absent Willow Review, "Dust" is the haunting meditation of a man recalling the final days of a once mighty and hopeful planet now quickly eroding to nothing under drifts of gray.

Infinity Lost


S. Harrison - 2015
    Blackstone has the impunity to destroy—or create—as it sees fit.Infinity “Finn” Blackstone is the seventeen-year-old daughter of Blackstone’s reclusive CEO—but she’s never even met him. When disturbing dreams about a past she doesn’t remember begin to torment her, Finn knows there’s only one person who can provide answers: her father.After Finn and an elite group of peers are invited to Blackstone’s top-secret HQ, Finn realizes she may have a chance to confront her father. But when a highly sophisticated company AI morphs into a killing machine, the trip descends into chaos. Trapped inside shape-shifting walls, Finn and her friends are at the mercy of an all-seeing intelligence that will destroy everything to get to her.With no hope of help, Finn’s dream-memories may be the only chance of survival. But will she remember in time to save her own life and the lives of those around her?

3 a.m.


Nick Pirog - 2013
    Henry Bins is awake for one. He wakes up each day at 3 a.m. then falls asleep at 4 a.m. Life is simple. Until he hears the woman scream. And sees the man leave the house across the street. But not just any man. The President of the United States.

Radioactive and The Decay Dystopian Super Boxset- A Dirty Bomb and Nuclear Blast Prepper Tale of Survival


James Hunt - 2015
    Jim Farr, a former Naval Intelligence Officer, owns a maritime mechanics company and works as a contractor for the San Diego Naval Base. It’s a normal day on the job until explosions go off. With the Naval Base destroyed, and word of attacks happening around the country, Jim has to get to his sister in Phoenix… But that’s just the beginning. Follow Jim along in this three-part action packed series and find out just what happens when the bombs go off.The Decay-A nearby nuclear attack rocks a small town in Pennsylvania, sending one man, Paul, and his step-daughter, Julie, on a perilous journey of survival. What started out as a normal Friday afternoon soon shatters into a race for survival against the odds upon the loss of communications—cell phones, Internet and electricity—as a result of the nation’s downed power grids. Paul attempts to get in contact with his wife, Samantha, who is away on business in Colorado, but soon discovers that his only option is to travel cross country amidst the chaos of strategically timed nuclear attacks along the East Coast.

Rot & Ruin


Jonathan Maberry - 2010
    Benny doesn't want to apprentice as a zombie hunter with his boring older brother Tom, but he has no choice. He expects a tedious job whacking zoms for cash, but what he gets is a vocation that will teach him what it means to be human.

The Wilds


Donna Augustine - 2015
    When the virus first hit the world, it ravaged the human race. I thought I was lucky to survive it but survival comes at a cost. Ever since the sickness, I see things and I’m hunted for these visions. Some seek me out because they want to keep their secrets safe. They don’t want the world to know the truth of what they are. Others, like Dax, want my knowledge. Dax has secrets of his own but as long as he helps me evade the Dark Walkers, he can keep them. This book is for all the Plaguers, the truth sayers branded and marked as liars, often hunted and sometimes forgotten. This book is for the girl who was right.

The Legacy Human


Susan Kaye Quinn - 2014
    But Eli is a legacy human, preserved and cherished for his unaltered genetic code, just like the rainforest he paints. When a fugue state possesses him and creates great art, Eli miraculously lands a sponsor for the creative Olympics. If he could just master the fugue, he could take the gold and win the right to ascend, bringing everything he’s yearned for within reach… including his beautiful ascender patron. But once Eli arrives at the Games, he finds the ascenders are playing games of their own. Everything he knows about the ascenders and the legacies they keep starts to unravel… until he’s running for his life and wondering who he truly is. The Legacy Human is the first in a philosophical HopePunk sci-fi series that explores the intersection of mind, body, and soul in a post-Singularity world.

Free Fall


Peter Cawdron - 2015
    When he returns home, there’s no one to greet him. Earth has fallen silent. Now he must decide—stay in orbit, watching a dead planet roll slowly by beneath his windows, or land on Earth and fight for life?

The Heretic


Lucas Bale - 2014
    Centuries have passed since life ended on the blue planet. Humanity's survivors are now dispersed among distant colonies, thousands of light years from the barren, frozen rock that was once their home. At a time when power means everything, the ultimate power, the imperium, rests with the Consulate Magistratus. In return for its protection, citizens must concede their rights absolutely. The Magistratus controls interstellar travel, access to technology, even procreation. Every citizen is implanted with a device to monitor their location, health and emotions. Freedom, religion and self-determination are anachronisms. Humanity's true history survives only in whispers of a secret archive. Yet there are those who preach a new religion and who want to be free. In the cold of a winter's night, a small village is the subject of a brutal attack. A fourteen-year-old boy, Jordi, sees armed men approaching and manages to wake his family. He and a handful of survivors flee into the frozen, snow-covered forest to wait for the preacher who told them their way of life was based on lies.Shepherd, a freighter-tramp and smuggler, is commissioned to deliver illicit medical supplies to a hostile border planet near the Wall. He is dragged into a fight he does not believe in and a desperate struggle to protect his life, his ship and the lives of the persecuted few who seek only freedom.A revolution is coming...The Heretic is the acclaimed first book in an epic, hard science fiction space opera about the future of humanity and the discovery of the truth of its past.

The Caretaker


Jason Gurley - 2014
    She wakes to the sun breaking over Africa. She keeps watch over the experiments. She makes sure the station doesn't explode.And she's the only occupant of the space station when the world far below her comes apart in flame.

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)

The Testing Guide


Joelle Charbonneau - 2013
    He's graduated at the top of his class, and being chosen, like his father was before him, means a chance to attend The University and help lead the effort to revitalize postwar civilization. Cia is conflicted--she hopes Zeen is chosen, but dreads him leaving home. She also realizes that one day she too must set her mind on being chosen. But does she realize the deadly path she will have to take? THE TESTING GUIDE is the short story prequel to "The Testing, " the first novel in the stunning and epic Testing Trilogy.

Station Eleven


Emily St. John Mandel - 2014
    Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time—from the actor's early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains—this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor's first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet.