Dystopian Comedy

'Hilarious and unhinged.' Lisa Sparkle 'The story draws you into a brilliantly realised world full of compelling characters and adventure.' Tim Evans Janice craves a simple cup of coffee while an earth-shattering email looms. But her wait is disrupted by an alien spaceship landing in the Australian Outback, catapulting her into a bizarre war over coffee and kidnappings. She must conquer her deep-seated insecurities and find her inner courage to rescue her friend. Across town, Logan Fury seeks redemption by helping four strangers. As they navigate freeways and suburbs, their greatest threat ...

Is this what's in store? June 12, 2030, started out like any other day in memory---and by then, memories were long. Since cancer had been cured fifteen years before, America's population was aging rapidly. That sounds like good news, but consider this: millions of baby boomers, with a big natural predator picked off, were sucking dry benefits and resources that were never meant to hold them into their eighties and beyond.

Christina Sanders, an archeologist and professor in history, is fascinated with the past. As a modern woman of year 2437 she knows that women are better off without men, but longing for an adventure, she makes a spontaneous decision and volunteers for a job no one else wants. Now she's going to lead an archeological excavation in the Northlands, the most secluded place on earth where the mythical males live who are rumored to be as brutal and dangerous as the men Christina has read about in her history books. What will happen when Christina crosses into the men's territory?

Werewolves! They're everywhere! In a world infested by monsters, new rules must be obeyed. Jack's job is to protect werewolves from vigilantes. He's good at his job, if a tad reckless. As he discovers what caused the initial outbreak fifty years ago he also uncovers an intricate plot to eradicate what's left of mankind...and it involves his bloodline. Jack is vicious, gifted, and lucky but that might not be enough to stop the end of mankind.

With these 13 transfixing, ingenious stories, Ben Marcus gives us timely dystopian visions of alienation in a modern world - cosmically and comically apt. Never has existential catastrophe been so much fun.

Tens of thousands of species are going extinct every year. And a whole industry has sprung up around their extinctions, to help us preserve the remnants, or perhaps just assuage our guilt. For instance, the biobanks: secure archives of DNA samples, from which lost organisms might someday be resurrected. But one day, a mysterious cyber-attack hits every biobank simultaneously, wiping out the last traces of the perished species. Karin Resaint and Mark Halyard are concerned with one species in particular: the venomous lumpsucker, the most intelligent fish on the planet.

Three years have passed since the Jamaicans caused the apocalypse, and things in post-Armageddon Chicago have settled into a new kind of normal. Unfortunately, that "normal" includes collapsing skyscrapers, bands of bloodthirsty maniacs, and a dwindling cache of survival supplies. After watching his family, friends, and most of the non-sadistic elements of society crumble around him, Patrick decides it's time to cross one last item off his bucket list. He's going to Disney World.

When Sam’s wife first tells him about Vitek, a twenty-first-century fertility lab, he sees it as the natural next step in trying to help their future child get a “leg up” in a competitive world. But the more Sam considers the lives that his child could lead, the more he begins to question his own relationships and the choices he has made in his life.

When a listless office employee (the narrator) meets Tyler Durden, his life begins to take on a strange new dimension. Together they form Fight Club - a secretive underground group sponsoring bloody bare-knuckle boxing matches staged in seedy alleys, vacant warehouses, and dive-bar basements. Fight Club lets ordinary men vent their suppressed rage, and it quickly develops a fanatical following.

Zoey Ashe wakes up every day feeling like she’s trying to steer a battleship while tied to the propeller. The twenty-three-year-old heiress to a criminal empire is navigating a futuristic world of high-tech liars and cutthroats, forced to learn the rules of a devious game she never asked to play. Now she’s facing a crisis that is both bigger and stranger than all that came before: The gleaming new city of Tabula Ra$a is hosting its massive annual music festival, which every year precedes the equally massive annual drunken riot.

S.T., a domesticated crow, is a bird of simple pleasures: hanging out with his owner Big Jim, trading insults with Seattle's wild crows (i.e. "those idiots"), and enjoying the finest food humankind has to offer: Cheetos®. Then Big Jim's eyeball falls out of his head, and S.T. starts to think something isn't quite right. Even the slobbering affection of Big Jim's loyal but dim-witted dog, Dennis, fails to cure Big Jim's debilitating malady. S.T. is left with no choice but to abandon his old life and venture out into a wild and frightening new world with his trusty steed Dennis.

The new book censor hasn't slept soundly in weeks. By day he combs through manuscripts at a government office, looking for anything that would make a book unfit to publish-allusions to queerness, unapproved religions, any mention of life before the Revolution. By night the characters of literary classics crowd his dreams, and pilfered novels pile up in the house he shares with his wife and daughter. As the siren song of forbidden reading continues to beckon, he descends into a netherworld of resistance fighters, undercover booksellers, and outlaw librarians.

Every Winter, the human population hibernates. Your name is Charlie Worthing, and it's your first season with the Winter Consuls, the committed but mildly unhinged group of misfits who are responsible for ensuring the hibernatory safe passage of the sleeping masses. You are investigating an outbreak of viral dreams which you dismiss as nonsense; nothing more than a quirky artifact borne of the sleeping mind. When the dreams start to kill people, it's unsettling. When you get the dreams, too, it's weird. When they start to come true, you begin to doubt your sanity.

The irreverent author of the cult classic Syrup hits his target in this satire on the wages of big capital. In Max Barry's hilarious vision of the near future, the world is run by giant American corporations, and employees take the last names of the companies they work for; The Police and The NRA are publicly traded security firms, and the U.S. government may only investigate crimes if they can bill a citizen directly.

It all comes down to this: the final battle for the soul of Pacific City. We've eliminated each and every one of our enemies. All but one...Caius Rossi: the kingpin of the Eclipse. He's been trafficking omegas for decades and no one has stopped him, but I'm about to take him down. The one omega he thought he could crush...and I'll be the end of him. All my pieces are on the board, ready to play. And on the other side of this, Pacific City will be free.

Qualityland, Marc-Uwe Kling's first book to be translated into English, is a brilliantly clever, illuminating satire in the tradition of Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, and George Orwell that offers a visionary, frightening, and all-too funny glimpse at a near future we may be hurtling toward faster than it's at all comfortable to admit. So why delay any longer? TheShop already knows you're going to love this book. You may as well head to the cash register, crack the covers, and see why that is for yourself.

Senator Jim MacVeagh is proud to serve his country - and his president, Mark Hollenbach, who has a near-spotless reputation as the vibrant, charismatic leader of MacVeagh’s party and the nation. When Hollenbach begins taking MacVeagh into his confidence, the young senator knows his star is on the rise. But then Hollenbach starts summoning MacVeagh in the middle of the night to Camp David. There, the president sits in the dark and rants about his enemies, unfurling insane theories about all the people he says are conspiring against him.

I played all those cool video games. I watched all those movies. I even read the books. In most of 'em, the hero shoots the bad guys, drives a sweet car, never gets hungry, and always seems to get laid by the end. Yeah. Whatever. I gotta be straight with you about why I wrote this journal, and it comes down to one thing, the apocalypse kinda sucks. It doesn’t meet my expectations at all.

Months after the Waterless Flood pandemic has wiped out most of humanity, Toby and Ren have rescued their friend Amanda from the vicious Painballers. They return to the MaddAddamite cob house, newly fortified against man and giant pigoon alike. Accompanying them are the Crakers, the gentle, quasi-human species engineered by the brilliant but deceased Crake. Their reluctant prophet, Snowman-the-Jimmy, is recovering from a debilitating fever, so it's left to Toby to preach the Craker theology, with Crake as Creator.

This world isn't safe for a baby, especially when you're leading a revolution. Our pack is broken, our home in ruins. We thought we were about to win this war, but now the stakes are higher than ever. And Aisling is pregnant. We've fled to Aisling's former prison, an island where we think we might be safe. At least…we hope so. But there are enemies everywhere, and danger lurks in the most inconspicuous places. We'll stay here until the baby is born, then we have to decide. Will we go back to Pacific City…or give up on this war for our family?