By Arthur C. Clarke

Two astronauts find their journey into space and their very lives jeopardized by the jealousy of an extraordinary computer named Hal. 

By Albert Brooks
Recommended By Pam Martin, Assistant Library Director

“A near-future world struggles with the challenges of a dramatically aging population revitalized by the cure for cancer, a scenario that is challenged by an unprecedented natural disaster that drives the government into bankruptcy (From the Publisher).”

By Joe Haldeman

Working as a lowly research assistant at MIT, Matt fuller is working on a project to measure quantum forces related to time changes in gravity and electromagnetic force, when his calibrator is transformed into a time machine.

By Karen Thompson Walker
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

A painstakingly researched debut imagines the coming-of-age story of young Julia, whose world is thrown into upheaval when it is discovered that the Earth's rotation has suddenly begun to slow, posing a catastrophic threat to all life.

By Katsuhiro Otomo
Series Akira

In Neo–Tokyo, built on the former site of Tokyo after World War III, two teenagers are targeted by agencies after they develop paranormal abilities.

By Pat Frank

When a nuclear holocaust ravages the United States, a thousand years of civilization are stripped away overnight, and tens of millions of people are killed instantly. But for one small town in Florida, miraculously spared, the struggle is just beginning, as men and women of all backgrounds join together to confront the darkness.

By Elan Mastai
Recommended By Donna Burger, Readers' Services Librarian

Living in an alternate world of flying cars, moon bases, and plentiful food, aimless Tom Barren is blindsided by a time-travel mishap that lands him in our less-than-ideal 2016, where he discovers wonderful unexpected versions of his own life.

By Martha Wells
Series Murderbot Diaries

A team of scientists and their security android, who unbeknownst to the scientists has hacked its own governor module, must investigate a neighboring mission that has gone dark.

By Charlie Jane Anders
Recommended By Ralph Guiteau, Readers' Services Librarian

Reunited as adults, childhood friends Patricia Delfine, who is magically gifted, and Laurence Armstead, an engineering genius, discover that something bigger than either of them has brought them together to either save the world, or plunge it into a new Dark Ages.

By Omar El Akkad

Depicts a second American Civil War and devastating plague in the late twenty-first century that forces a family into a camp for displaced people, where a young woman is befriended by a mysterious functionary who transforms her into a living weapon.

By Margaret Peterson Haddix
Series Shadow Children

In a future where the Population Police enforce the law limiting a family to only two children, Luke has lived all his twelve years in isolation and fear on his family’s farm, until another “third” convinces him that the government is wrong.

By Scott Sigler

On a remote island in the Canadian Arctic, PJ Colding leads a group of geneticists who have discovered the holy grail of medicine—a computer-engineered living creature, whose organs can be implanted in any person, with no chance of transplant rejection. There’s just one problem: these “ancestors” are not docile.

By Ben H. Winters

When a secret cabal of radical scientific revolutionaries launches an attack on Russian high society's high-tech lifestyle, the classic love story's heroes--Anna Karenina and Count Alexei Vronsky--must fight back with all their courage, all their gadgets, and all the power of a sleek new cyborg model like nothing the world has ever seen.

By Jeff VanderMeer
Series Southern Reach Trilogy
Recommended By Cliff Hong, Library Page
With Stacey Mencher, Readers' Services Librarian

Monday, May 18, 2015. 7 PM.

Area X has claimed the lives of members of eleven expeditions. The twelfth expedition consisting of four women hopes to map the terrain and collect specimens, to record all their observations and, above all, to avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.

By Ayn Rand

Classic tale of a future dark age of the great "We" - a world that deprives individuals of name, independence and values.

By Ernest Cline
Recommended By Stacey Mencher, Technology and Applications Manager
With Stacey Mencher, Readers' Services Librarian

Monday, April 8, 2019. 7:30 PM.

Struggling to complete his final month of high school only to glimpse a UFO that exactly resembles an enemy ship from his favorite video game, Zack Lightman questions his sanity before becoming one of millions of gamers tasked with protecting the Earth during an alien invasion.

By Ayn Rand

A woman struggles to manage a transcontinental railroad amid the pressures & restrictions of massive bureaucracy.

By Jeff VanderMeer
Series Southern Reach Trilogy

John Rodriguez, head of the secret agency Southern Reach, is charged with exploring Area X, a remote area sequestered from civilization, as his team exposes disturbing truths about the area, with far-reaching consequences for himself and his agency.

By Suzanne Collins
Series Hunger Games Trilogy

In a prequel to The Hunger Games, eighteen–year–old Coriolanus Snow prepares to mentor the female tribute from District 12 in the tenth Hunger Games, with the fate of his family hanging on the slim chance that he can help her win the Games.

By Jim Butcher
Series Dresden Files #17
Recommended By Stacey Mencher, Technology and Applications Manager

When the Last Titan, a being more dangerous than anything humanity has faced in a millennium, declares war on the city of Chicago, professional wizard Harry Dresden embarks on a defense that permanently transforms the mortal world.

By Kōshun Takami
Recommended By Jessikah Chautin, Community Engagement Specialist, Meghan F., Children's Services Librarian

A group of ninth–grade students are confined to a small isolated island where they must fight each other for three days until only one survivor remains, as part of the ultimate in reality television.

By Connie Willis
Series Oxford Time Travel Novels
Recommended By Donna Burger, Readers' Services Librarian

Stranded in World War II England, three researchers from the future investigate period behavior and seek each other out in a shared effort to return to their own time.

By Samantha Shannon
Series Bone Season
Recommended By Jessikah Chautin, Community Engagement Specialist

A first entry in a planned seven-part series is set in the mid-21st century where major world cities are controlled by a formidable security force and where clairvoyant underworld cell member Paige commits acts of psychic treason before being captured by an otherworldly race that would make her a part of their supernatural army.

By Cynthia Swanson

Loving her unconventional single life in 1962 Denver, a bookshop owner begins experiencing powerful, reality-challenging dreams of an alternate life where she is a wife and mother.

By Aldous Huxley
With Lisa Caputo, Assistant Library Director

Tuesday, February 28, 2012. 1 PM & 7:30 PM.

The story of a futuristic World State where all emotion, love, art, and human individuality have been replaced by social stability.

 

Became the movie: Brave New World.

By Alisa Kwitney
Series New Avengers
Recommended By Megan Kass, Systems Manager

"When Clint Barton accompanies the Russian spy known as the Black Widow to the super-villain prison known as the Raft, a breakout occurs within the prison, and the pair, along with Spider-Woman and Luke Cage, must stop the breakout (From the Publisher)."

By Edan Lepucki

After escaping the crumbing ruins of L.A. for a shack in the wilderness, Cal and Frida realize they are pregnant and seek refuge on the nearest settlement - a guarded, dark and paranoid community.

By Suzanne Collins
Series Hunger Games trilogy
Recommended By Megan Kass, Systems Manager

By winning the annual Hunger Games, District 12 tributes Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark have secured a life of safety and plenty for themselves and their families, but because they won by defying the rules, they unwittingly become the faces of an impending rebellion.

By P.D. James
Recommended By Stacey Mencher, Technology and Applications Manager

In 2021, with the human race becoming extinct due to the infertility of all males, Theodore Faron is drawn into the schemes of an unlikely group of revolutionaries out to save society.

By Alexander Weinstein
Recommended By Sonia Grgas, Reference Librarian

A collection of short stories takes place in an unsettling future where humans growing dependence on new technologies results in social media implants, memory manufacturers, harmfully immersive virtual reality games, and disturbingly intuitive robots.

By Alex Hughes
Series Mindspace Investigations
Recommended By Megan Kass, Systems Manager

Working with Homicide Detective Isabella Cherabino to put killers behind bars, an interrogator with the ability to get inside the twisted minds of suspects must stop a serial killer stalking the city while trying to kick his drug habit.

By Anthony Burgess

In Anthony Burgess's nightmare vision of the future, where criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, who talks in a brutal invented slang that brilliantly renders his and his friends' social pathology. A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil, and the meaning of human freedom.

 

Became the movie: A Clockwork Orange.

By David Mitchell
Recommended By Meghan F., Children's Services Librarian

Recounts the connected stories of people from the past and the distant future, from a nineteenth-century notary and an investigative journalist in the 1970s to a young man who searches for meaning in a post-apocalyptic world.

By Anthony Doerr
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk

Follows five young dreamers and outcasts through time and space, from 1453 Constantinople to the future, as they discover resourcefulness and hope amidst peril.

By John C. Wright
Series Count to a Trillion Series

Tired of living out life in dystopian Texas after the collapse of the world economy, a young hired gun decides to try his hand at space travel, only to be catapulted far into the future, a time when humanity and Artificial Intelligence have both evolved to frightening new levels.

By Neal Stephenson

More than fifty years after Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse and Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe are assigned to Detachment 2702, a secret cryptographic mission, their grandchildren, Randy and Amy join forces to create a “data haven” in the South Pacific, only to uncover a massive conspiracy with roots in Detachment 2702.

By Shannon Hale
Series Daisy Danger Series
Recommended By Sharon Long, Assistant Library Director

When aspiring astronaut Maisie Danger Brown and the other space camp students get the opportunity to do something amazing in space, Maisie must prove how dangerous she can be and how far she is willing to go to protect everything she has ever loved.

By Timothy Zahn

When Grand Admiral Thrawn takes command of what is left of the Imperial fleet and launches a massive campaign against the New Republic, Han and Lando Calrissian race to find proof of treason inside the highest Republic Council.

By Blake Crouch
Recommended By Ralph Guiteau, Readers' Services Librarian

Kidnapped and drugged at gunpoint for inexplicable reasons, physics professor Jason Dessen awakens in a lab and is informed that his entire life has been an illusion and that he is being hunted by a deadly adversary.

By Alexandra Bracken
Series Darkest Minds

Sixteen-year-old Ruby breaks out of a government-run “rehabilitation camp” for teens who acquired dangerous powers after surviving a virus that wiped out most American children.

By Jeffrey Brown

In this comic reimagining, Darth Vader is a dad like any other – except with all the baggage of being the Dark Lord of the Sith.

By S.M. Stirling

When a strange electrical storm over the island of Nantucket suddenly causes all electronic devices to cease to function, the world is faced with an unimaginable transformation.

By Veronica Roth
Series Divergent
Recommended By Sharon Long, Assistant Library Director, Megan Kass, Systems Manager, Ralph Guiteau, Readers' Services Librarian

In a dystopian future–era Chicago, 16-year–old Beatrice Prior must choose among five predetermined factions to define her identity for the rest of her life, a decision made more difficult when she uncovers powerful secrets and truths about her identity, her family and the order of her society.

By Veronica Roth

In a future Chicago, sixteen-year-old Beatrice Prior must choose among five predetermined factions to define her identity for the rest of her life, a decision made more difficult when she discovers that she is an anomoly who does not fit into any one group, and that the society she lives in is not perfect after all.

By Philip K. Dick

Rick Deckard is an officially sanctioned bounty hunter tasked to find six rogue androids. They are machines, but look, sound and think just like humans - clever and most of all dangerous humans.

 

Became the movie: Blade Runner.

By Peter Heller

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.

By Jonathan Maberry
Series Joe Ledger Novels

“Joe Ledger and the Department of Military Sciences face their deadliest threat yet when they go up against two competing groups of geneticists bent on world domination (From the Publisher).”

By Stephen King

Four men who reunite every year during hunting season in the woods of Maine, encounter a disoriented, incoherent stranger who drags the men into a terrifying struggle with a creature from another world, and their only chance for survival lies in their shared past.

 

Became the movie: Dreamcatcher.

By Peter Hamilton
Series The Void Trilogy

In a high-tech, far future world, a great mystery remains, what lies inside the Void, a massive black hole lying at the center of the Intersolar Commonwealth universe and an area of space from which mysterious dreams are being projected that are transforming the lives of those who experience them. Genres: Science Fiction; Space Opera; Series Series: The Void Trilogy

By Frank Herbert
Series Dune Saga
Recommended By Megan Kass, Systems Manager

Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of the boy Paul Atreides, who would become the mysterious man known as Muad'Dib. He would avenge the traitorous plot against his noble family - and would bring to fruition humankind's most ancient and unattainable dream.

 

Became the movie: Dune and Mini-Series: Dune.