The Exile Waiting

Yours for the Taking

Gabrielle Korn2024

In 2050, women seek refuge in Inside, a weather-controlled city, while the world freezes. The story follows several women as the utopia fails.

Same bleak register, still dystopian

pace0·prose0·bleak0

Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace1996

A sprawling narrative centered on a tennis academy, a halfway house, and a lethal film. The text includes hundreds of pages of detailed endnotes.

bleak → sardonic, still dystopian

pace-1·prose+2·bleak0

Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

William S. Burroughs

A series of nonlinear vignettes follow a drug addict's hallucinations and travels. The prose is fragmented and satirical.

bleak → sardonic, still dystopian

pace-1·prose+2·bleak+1

Dhalgren

Samuel R. Delany1975

An amnesiac wanderer enters Bellona, a city cut off from the world where time and geography shift. He joins a gang and writes poetry.

bleak → dreamlike

pace-2·prose+2·bleak0

The Butterfly Kid

Chester Anderson1967

Hippie protagonists in Greenwich Village discover that a new drug allows them to manifest hallucinations into reality to fight an alien invasion.

pace0·prose-1·bleak-2

Star Nomad

Lindsay Buroker2016

A fighter pilot and a small crew of strangers attempt to escape a system-wide war in a freighter. It is a character-driven space adventure.

bleak → playful

pace0·prose-1·bleak-2

The 4-Hour Workweek

Timothy Ferriss2006

A guide to lifestyle design that explains how to automate a business and outsource life tasks to achieve a four-hour workweek.

bleak → wry

pace0·prose-1·bleak-2

The Test

Sylvain Neuvel2019

An immigrant takes a British citizenship test that turns into a high-stakes psychological simulation. It is a short, dialogue-heavy novella.

bleak → tense, still dystopian

pace+1·prose0·bleak0

The Kaiju Preservation Society

John Scalzi2022

A food delivery driver joins a secret organization that travels to an alternate Earth to care for massive, dinosaur-like creatures.

bleak → playful, still science fiction

pace+1·prose-1·bleak-2

Get Jiro!

Anthony Bourdain2012

In a future Los Angeles, master chefs rule as warlords. A sushi chef who kills rude customers is caught between two warring food factions.

bleak → sardonic, still dystopian

pace+1·prose-1·bleak-1

Invisible Cities

Italo Calvino1972

Marco Polo describes fifty-five imaginary cities to Kublai Khan. The book is a series of short, prose-poem meditations on urban existence.

bleak → meditative

pace-2·prose+2·bleak-1

Translated Accounts

James Kelman2001

Anonymous witnesses describe life under a military regime. The prose uses broken, bureaucratic syntax to mimic a literal translation.

Same bleak register, still dystopian

pace-2·prose+2·bleak+1

Gödel, Escher, Bach

Douglas R. Hofstadter1979

An exploration of how cognition emerges from hidden neurological patterns. It uses math, art, and music to explain self-referential systems.

bleak → playful

pace-2·prose+2·bleak-2

Hard to be a god

Аркадий Стругацкий2014

An observer from a technologically advanced Earth lives undercover on a planet stuck in a medieval state. He must watch atrocities without helping.

Same bleak register, still science fiction

pace-1·prose+1·bleak+1

The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood1985

In a totalitarian state with a plummeting birth rate, a woman is enslaved as a reproductive vessel. She records her daily life and memories.

bleak → cold, still dystopian

pace-1·prose+1·bleak+1

Watchmen

Alan Moore1986

Retired masked vigilantes investigate the murder of a former teammate. The story takes place in an alternate 1985 on the brink of nuclear war.

Same bleak register, still dystopian

pace0·prose+1·bleak+1