unusual utopia/dystopia

[Rowan]

I'm sick of every dystopian novel i pick up being the same. I'm a fan of YA fiction but they all end up following the same path. Please could anyone suggest unusual (eg strange concepts, less love triangle) dystopian (preferably stand-alone) novels or even hints of utopia i don't know i just like that style of novel but am finding myself at a dead end...and I'm also fed up of books that have unecessary sequels when the first one should stay alone. but yeah, this is very longwinded for such a simple request but whatever i was on this group so i thought id post it haha. thanks in advance

[Lobstergirl, au gratin]

The Road

The Drowned World

High-Rise

All adult, not YA.

[Joseph]

Check out these adult, 5 star dystopias:

[Rowan]

Thankyou very much!

[Aerulan]

Biting the Sun by Tanith Lee

[Lobstergirl, au gratin]

The Curfew. Warning: literary, postmodern.

[Tytti]

Memory of Water
Stand-alone, no romance, not YA even though marketed as such, Philip K. Dick nominee.

[Rowan]

Adding all of these to my to-read, thankyou!

[BookWoman]

The Unit - Ninni Holmqvist (adult).

[Michele]

Here are a few suggestions. None of them have a romance, or if they do, it's peripheral to the story, and all of them have a different take on dystopia/apocalypse than the usual:

Unicorns in the Rain

The Testament of Jessie Lamb

Genesis

Into the Forest

Gibbon's Decline and Fall

Childhood's End

House of Stairs

Feed

The Hauntings of Playing God

[Empress]

Classics are always a good option:
The Handmaid's Tale,
The Gate to Women's Country
The Giver
The World Inside

I've heard Little Brother is also good.

[Rowan]

I've read The Giver and loved it but want enthused by the idea of a film of it...I'm adding the rest, classics are a good call, thank you

[Valerie]

How about: The House of the Scorpion
Ship Breaker
Uglies it's a four book YA series though
California
Archetype

I second The Handmaid's Tale, great book.

[Rain_of_stars]

Rootless
Earth Girl
Orleans
Angelfall

No love triangles, cool concepts.

[Elizabeth]

Love Angelfall! can't wait for book three. It comes out the last day of my exams.

[Lobstergirl, au gratin]

This is definitely an unusual utopia/dystopia - MC travels from Britain to a planet trillions of miles away to be a Christian missionary partly to the other humans living in the compound there, but mainly to the native alien population. He leaves his wife back home but they're able to communicate by email. It's literary fiction, not genre fiction or Christian fiction. In his absence, Earth becomes quite dystopian, and the people developing the alien planet are trying to make it utopian.

The Book of Strange New Things

[Elias]

The Knife of Never Letting Go, of course.

[Ket]

The weirdest dystopia I've ever read was A Plague of Angels. It's many things, but definitely not "more of the same."

[Maria]

Perdido Street Station
The Windup Girl
Brave New World

[Brittney]

Turns out, this is book 1 in a trilogy, but I've had this book for years without knowing about the other two. It's a very good book, very interesting concepts

Ashes of Twilight

[Justanotherbiblophile]

How about a standard dystopia / PA - but not the love-triangle thing?

_Star Man's Son_

[Lobstergirl, au gratin]

Station Eleven is a standalone, the narration goes forward and back in time, pre- and post-apocalypse (a flu wipes out 99% of the earth's population). Mostly centers on 1) the lives of several characters pre-, and 2) 20 years later catches up with some of the characters, one of whom is an actress in a traveling Shakespeare troupe in the area previously known as Michigan.

[Kaion]

Native Tongue - you can skip the sequels though

[Jen]

Unwind by Neal Shusterman

3rd for Handmaid's Tale

[Eya]

How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff. There is a bit of romance but it's handled fairly unusually; it doesn't have that formulaic feel.

[Lobstergirl, au gratin]

I don't know if it's unusual, but it's definitely original - supposedly the first dystopia written. 1984 is based on it.

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

It kind of does have love triangles, though...at least two.

[Anna]

Dystopia with a dash of humour

Moscow 2042 by Vladimir Voinovich

The War With The Newts by Karel Čapek

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

[Michele]

Anna wrote: "Dystopia with a dash of humour
The War With The Newts by Karel Čapek"

OMG YES! I'd totally forgotten about the newts lol

[Rainbowheart]

I thought The Scorpion Rules was pretty unique.

[Lobstergirl, au gratin]

The Flame Alphabet. Very unusual.

[Sara]

Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde is not much like any dystopia you're likely to come across. I liked it a lot.

[Lobstergirl, au gratin]

On Wings of Song

[Jen]

Enclave - Ann Aguirre. Sequels are good as well.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7...

[Jaye]

From Publishers Weekly:
"Under its original title, The Sea and Summer , this book recently received the Arthur C. Clarke Award as the best SF novel published in England in 1987. Australian writer Turner envisions a 21st century nightmare that is the result not of war but of economic and climatic forces already underway. Massive unemployment has combined with the greenhouse effect (raising global temperatures and the sea level) to produce a society in which nine-tenths of the population lives in high-rise ghettos, jobless and demoralized. The social fall of the Conway family and their sons' desperate fight back up the ladder through scholarships and government service expose the viscera of the system. Although his story contains some romantic notions about poverty, and characters such as tower boss Billy Kovacs, a knight in tarnished armor, Turner also asks hard questions and is particularly skillful in his examination of a major Thomas Disch theme: the problems and responsibilities of intelligence in such a milieu. A fine, thoughtful novel."

Drowning Towers
by George Turner
(sorry, the add book thing isn't working for me)

[Nente]

Seconding Fforde.
It's just very bad luck that it had to be called Shades of Grey.

[Michele]

Lobstergirl wrote: "The Flame Alphabet. Very unusual."

I just read the preview for this and am hooked. Wow, VERY different.

[Michele]

Drowning Towers for the click.

[Scott]

Not sure if it qualifies, but City might be worth a look.

[SarahBeth]

Wool by Hugh Howey Wool Omnibus and Hollow World by Michael J SullivanHollow World

[Edie]

You didn't ask for short stories, but as a committed proselytizer I'm going to ignore that and mention a few collections I enjoyed:


A collection of YA short stories written by popular YA authors. Rather conventional.


Diverse stories written by a diverse group of authors. Not YA.


My favorite of these collections. I don't know that they are unusual in that Paolo Bacigalupi often returns to the same settings and stories. If you've read other stuff by him then this is more of the same. But if you are new to his world then it is unique and interesting.

[Fiona]

There's a new one for the list! The Last One by Alexandra Oliva. Just read that and loved it :)

[Michelle]

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Utopia-Vampi...

Utopia Vampires: War of Destruction

[cali 𖡼.𖤣𖥧𖡼.𖤣𖥧]

I'd recommend Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde if it hasn't already :)

[Anny]

On Such a Full Sea painted a picture of the world similar to the Giver (class and job segregation) but with a more adult feel to it and so was the romance (no mr.hunk stepping out of the limelight).

[Courtney]

Station Eleven. It's about a travelling symphony 20 years after a virus decimated the earth.

However, a large portion of the book takes place in the past and it doesn't necessarily have to do with the dystopic world.

[Lobstergirl, au gratin]

The Natural Way of Things

[Lobstergirl, au gratin]

The Memoirs of a Survivor

[Kate]

What if the end of the world came and you didn't know it had?
The Last One

[Aru]

Rowan wrote: "I'm sick of every dystopian novel i pick up being the same."

If you want strange utopias/dystopias, try the novels and stories of Christopher Priest. Most of them (except The Prestige) concern u-/dystopias that are very strange indeed! (Not YA in particular, though.)

A few more to add: Neal Stephenson's Anathem, Seveneves, and Snow Crash. Also, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and Anthem. And don't forget George Orwell's 1984!

[D.M.]

Can't link easily on mobile.

City of Endless Night by Milo Hastings
The Purple Cloud by M.P Shiel
A Strange Manuscript Found In A Copper Cylinder by James DeMille

Some very early dystopia novels