After the apocalypse, persecuted gay lovers fight homophobia and dragons ( Read more... )

A YA dystopia in which a computer arranges marriages for everyone. Since I spent much of my childhood in India and my own culture invented the yenta, the concept of the arranged marriage, despite being obviously horrible if non-consensual, does not exactly spell out “terrifying dystopia” to me.


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I am a connoisseur of the post-apocalypse novel. But what I like about the genre is the idea of the desperate struggle to preserve civilization and save the people you can, or, after the disaster, to re-create civilization from scratch. I am also a sucker for stories of disparate groups of people banding together and finding unsuspected heroism ( Read more... )

"Ann Halam" is the YA pen name of sf writer Gwyneth Jones. In this novel, teenage Taylor, who lives with her parents on an orangutan reserve in Borneo, learns that she is actually the clone of a scientist friend of theirs. Just as she's beginning to come to grips with that, the reserve is attacked by rebels and Taylor flees into the jungle with her ( Read more... )

Most Gratuitously Depressing Novel (involving an apocalypse)

( I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman )

Two hundred years ago, after a cataclysm whose causes have been lost with time, wolves went extinct. Or so the rag-tag remnants of humanity, living in isolated, damaged cities adrift in wastelands, think. In fact, the wolves only went underground. Their habitat gone, they learned to project the illusion that they're humans, and moved into the ( Read more... )

Let me quote the back cover ( Read more... )