Related books: Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi, The Maze Runner by James Dashner, Divergent by Veronica Roth With its release in 2008, the book became a major bestseller and media franchise, and unleashed a floodgate of dystopian-themed YA novels that explored the darker parts of modern society. Set in a dystopic future where the United States has collapsed and been replaced with Panem, children are selected for a brutal competition every ten years from each of the country’s twelve districts, in which they fight to the death, as punishment for a failed revolution.Ĭollins’ book deals with pressing issues of brutality and trauma, as well as wealth inequality, poverty, and revolution. It’s a nonsensical barrier, and Suzanne Collins’ book T he Hunger Games is a good demonstration that the YA designation doesn’t necessarily mean that an author is talking down to its audience.

Image: Scholastic The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (2008)Īdult and YA science fiction are often marketed to very different audiences, with both sides looking down on the other. Related books: The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu, Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang, Embassytown by China Mieville It’s a groundbreaking novel that helped break authors away from human analogs and into more stranger, introspective territory about our place in the cosmos. Where many science fiction adventures deal with humanity’s introduction to a galactic civilization in which we become an equal partner/citizen, Watts posits something far stranger: interstellar intelligence that’s genuinely alien, and to which humanity is providing to be a major nuisance and threat.

What they discover is indeed alien: a sort of hive-mind intelligence that’s part of a much larger diaspora. When scientists receive another transmission from a comet outside of the solar system, they dispatch an expedition composed of five trans-human specialists, including a vampire. Peter Watts’ novel Blindsight stars after the planet is bombarded by a strange cluster of objects that release a single broadcast before going dark. First contact between humanity and an extraterrestrial civilization are a cornerstone of science fiction, ranging from aliens with funny noses to the genuinely alien.

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