* Actors, models, writers and photographers turn out to be lines of code in an algorithm.

* A robotic metal platform vrooms into floodwaters and rescues 300 people at a time.

* Typhoons rip facades off buildings in China, heat waves dry up a river in Europe, and rains flood cities across South Asia, all in the same month.

That’s not from the novels featured here. It’s from the news in recent weeks.

Five years after Wknd first explored what dystopian writers were writing about as dystopias unfolded around them, we set out to ask: What on earth are they writing about now?

As we expected, AI is everywhere, as is a new climate reality.

In a bit of a surprise (at least for the more sceptical of us on the Wknd team), tales of utopias endure — though none is quite as pure as the classical ones from bygone eras.

We survive beyond capitalism. Build cities on distant moons, where we tend to idyllic farms and make things by hand again.

We attempt to colonise star systems with empathy. We still cycle in San Francisco.

But the seas continue to rise. Robots demand rights. Gig economies are the only economies left standing.

The timeline is shrinking too. These dystopias are set not centuries from now, but decades… some as close as 2095.

***

“Science-fiction today isn’t so much prediction as it is predication, or the inferring of outcomes. How will changes in the world materially affect what it means to be a human being?” says American-Canadian author Ray Nayler. “Because the technologies we create have always, in turn, recreated us. Even our mastery of fire changed us, not just in terms of what we ate as a species, but also how our guts and brains evolved.”

In his novel, The Mountain in the Sea (2022), humans discover a species of super-intelligent octopi that want nothing to do with us, raising questions about the nature of our own intelligence. “We tend to place ourselves at the top of a hierarchy,” Nayler says, “when intelligence is really about context.”

As we face changes in the economic and political spheres, ecology and society, how will we respond and adapt, “emotionally, socially and existentially… that is what much of science-fiction is now about,” he adds.

Hopeful futures, when they appear in new works, are rarely straightforward. “We’re imagining societies that may have overcome some of humanity’s biggest structural problems — capitalism, ecological collapse, inequality or oppression — while recognising that the conflict doesn’t simply vanish,” says lawyer and science-fiction writer Gautam Bhatia.

But then, when were the good times ever good times for all? he adds. “Someone’s present-day reality has always been someone else’s dystopia. As William Gibson put it: ‘The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.’”

***

Does it help to process the world in this way, writing of a future in which, however we did it, we do make it through?

“People turn to speculative fiction not because it predicts the future, but because it gives us a language to understand the present,” says South Korean author Silvia Park.

In her book, Luminous (2025), two siblings, a human and a cyborg, look for a missing third, a robot. What does it mean, the novel seems to ask, to care for someone programmed to care for you?

“What we truly look for with this genre is perspective,” Park says. “Imagine taking a white ball from a white room and placing it in a green room. The ball hasn’t changed. But the shift in context makes it suddenly visible. As technology warps our sense of reality, speculative fiction can help us pause and take stock of what’s actually going on.”

Read on for more on Park’s novel Luminous; Machinehood (the book set in 2095); Neon Riders (the one set in San Francisco); and others hand-picked by our guest curators.

Bhatia’s choices include Monk & Robot, the hopepunk tale about human settlements and idyllic farms on a distant moon.

Even in that utopian work, there is conflict, though it is a conflict that resides within. A seemingly happy monk travels the sylvan countryside, grappling with the sense that there must be more to life. A robot rejoins the world of men to ask: “What do humans need? What do humans need?”

He asks in vain, of course. If we knew how to answer that one, we wouldn’t be here, would we?

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A?COLLAPSE?OF?KARMA: KUNDO?WAKES?UP (2022)

Tiny excerpt: Kundo blinked twice for messages, still his first instinct of the day. Nothing. Nothing personal, nothing from another live human. Nothing even from Karma, the AI running the city, who had been gradually going silent. At first her updates had been round the clock, but over the past few years they had reduced in number, until today, for the first time, there were none at all, no greeting, no report on the weather or hostile-nanotech count in the air. Could an AI stop caring?

Set in a drowned and decaying Chittagong, Kundo Wakes Up (2022) by Bangladeshi author Saad Z Hossain imagines a world in which an algorithmic force called AI Karma — that once governed society through a vast social-credit system — has mysteriously fallen silent.

The port city is meanwhile being swallowed by rising seas. In crumbling neighbourhoods, amid failing infrastructure, residents have in every sense been abandoned.

Amid all this, Kundo, a once-celebrated artist, is now determined to resume the search for his wife, a gamer who left him about a year ago. As it turns out, others have gone missing too.

Kundo is soon drawn into a far larger mystery. Joined by an eccentric band of gamers, coders, an Alzheimer’s patient and a single mother, he journeys through hidden gaming parlours, digital underworlds and, eventually, into the mystical realm of djinns and ancient gods.

Blending cyberpunk, folklore, high fantasy and climate fiction, Kundo Wakes Up tells a story of our enduring search for belonging and redemption, set in a civilisation on the brink of collapse.

(Recommended by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, writer, researcher and associate professor of global culture studies at University of Oslo and leader of CoFUTURES, an international research group on contemporary futurisms)

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A?WORLD’S?FINAL?STAGES: PRIVATE?RITES (2024)

Tiny excerpt:It has been so many years… of almost this… It rains constantly and… the rain’s whole great impending somethingness, runs parallel to the day-to-day of work and sleep and lottery tickets… of buying fruit and paying taxes, of mopping floors… and reading books and wondering what to do on dates. It’s exhausting, as it always was, to live with such a breadth of things to take up one’s attention – exhausting, the way there can be too much world, even in its final stages.

It hasn’t stopped raining in Britain. In years.

Rivers have swallowed roads, neighbourhoods have disappeared; and people have simply learnt to live with the deluge.

Against the backdrop of this larger disaster, in Julia Armfield’s Private Rites (2024), a family is falling apart.

Isla, Irene and Agnes’s father has died. A celebrated, charismatic architect, Stephen Carmichael was master builder to the elite.

The sisters, largely estranged, have memories of a cold and emotionally manipulative man. Now, they are forced back into his floating-on-pylons mansion, where buried resentments and fractured memories resurface.

Loosely inspired by Shakespeare’s King Lear, the novel unfolds as an interrogation of what it means to endure collapse day after day; as well as loss, grief and trauma, in a world that refuses to stop drowning.

(Recommended by author and tech-industry analyst Kashyap Kompella)

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US?AND?AI: LUMINOUS (2025)

Tiny excerpt: My father’s older brother died in a fire. He was 12 years old. I was made in his image. When I woke up, I saw my father weep… I learned people can cry from sadness… from joy, and sometimes they don’t even know the reason why. I wept with my father, but he pulled away… My tears repelled him. Because it was a different kind of sadness.

In Silvia Parks’s Luminous (2025), a disabled girl, scavenging through a scrapyard for a piece of metal that might help support her body, stumbles upon an abandoned robot boy.

The novel soon unfolds into something much larger: a story about family, memory, disability, us and AI, and the ways in which we learn to care for one another.

In a near-future reunified Korea, humanoid robots have become part of everyday life. Robot sex addiction is rampant; there are illegal robot cage fights; “bot-wired” children are entirely dependent on robot nannies.

Amid it all, estranged siblings Jun, a detective who started out human and is now a cyborg, and Morgan, a human who designs robots, are pulled back into each other’s lives by the disappearance of Yoyo, the robot boy created by their father and now befriended by the girl in the scrapyard.

What does it mean to care for someone programmed to care for you, the novel seems to ask.

Park says Luminous started out in her head as a children’s book. Then childhood became representative of another liminal state, that of being human-like but not-human, with all the implications of such liminality today. The worldbuilding was inspired by her own memories of growing up in Seoul, “where different centuries appear to co-exist in the same landscape”.

“Instead of a world that seems futuristic or flashy, I wanted to paint a future that feels surprisingly familiar,” Park says. “Writing Luminous during the pandemic helped me realise how fragile society really is. And how the thing we still want more than anything, is connection, despite the way technology pushes us toward isolation. That’s why I leaned into this sense of alienation and yearning, when trying to imagine our future.”

(Recommended by author and tech-industry analyst Kashyap Kompella)

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CELEBRATE?AS?WE?REBUILD: MONK &?ROBOT (2021-2022)

Tiny excerpt:“Do you not find consciousness alone to be the most exhilarating thing? Here we are, in this incomprehensibly large universe, on this one tiny moon around this one incidental planet, and in all the time this entire scenario has existed, every component has been recycled over and over and over again… You and I—we’re just atoms that arranged themselves the right way.”

A monk and a robot walk into a forest, on a distant moon orbiting an unnamed planet. They talk about work, fulfilment, loneliness, ambition.

Becky Chambers’s two-part Monk and Robot novella, featuring the Hugo Award-winning A Psalm for the Wild-Built (2021) and its sequel, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy (2022), is, as she puts it in her dedication, “for anybody who could use a break”.

On this distant moon named Panga, AI and robots once helped humans build an industrialised society. Following a robot revolution, the machines disappeared into the wilderness. Without them, humans have switched to a life of farming, building self-sustaining villages from “mycelium masonry”.

In this idyllic world, a tea monk shuttles between villages, offering tea and a patient ear. But his placid smile hides a restlessness. He cannot help but wonder if there is more to life than this. In the forests, he meets a robot curious about human life. Part 2 follows the duo as they wander through human settlements, the robot asking the people they meet: “What do humans need? What do humans need?”

In this hope-punk world, characters choose kindness as rebellion. But the need to challenge the system never disappears.

(Recommended by lawyer and science-fiction writer Gautam Bhatia)

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ACROSS?STAR?SYSTEMS, EMPATHY: CHILDREN?OF?STRIFE (2026)

Tiny excerpt:[The mantis shrimp] came before the other species and made their request. Resources, technology, space. Most importantly, that last one. Somewhere among the stars… A star system where they could set up and be themselves, and live in a way their ancestors would recognize. Albeit with spaceships and orbitals, and all the benefits of Panspecific ingenuity. There was no central authority to apply to, of course, because the Portiids had never worked like that, the Octopuses still less so, while the Humans were trying not to.

A dying Earth. Untameable space colonies. Uplifted spiders, octopi, giant crows and mantis shrimp (made sentient or more intelligent via technology). And the search for a place to call home.

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time (2015-26) series is a sweeping, four-part space opera of strife, non-human intelligences, cooperation, evolution, survival and the hubris of playing God. It comprises Children of Time (2015; winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award), Children of Ruin (2019), Children of Memory (2022) and Children of Strife (March; 2026).

It begins with humanity’s doomed bid to terraform a distant planet, and charts the rise of new civilisations in different star systems.

This year’s release, Children of Strife, follows a lost research vessel whose only surviving members include a mantis shrimp war hero, a tormented scientist, and the ship’s AI. Together, they search the ruined planet of Marduk for their lost colleagues.

What ties the books together, Tchaikovsky has said, are an emphasis on empathy and cooperation. Empathy is an increasingly endangered commodity in the world, the British author has said. A good future, regardless of whether we live alongside humans or aliens or spiders, is one where it survives.

(Recommended by lawyer and science-fiction writer Gautam Bhatia)

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SHUTTER?ISLAND:?THE?MOUNTAIN?IN?THE?SEA (2022)

Tiny excerpt:“In the forests of South America, hunters sleep face-up so the jaguar will see them as beings capable of looking back at him, and leave them alone. If they sleep facedown, the jaguar will mistake them for helpless prey and attack them…

If we are to communicate with a sentience that has gained language skills like the ones we have, everything will rely on how sensitive we can be to how that alien mind perceives our actions. Everything.”

That’s from a book being written by researcher Ha Nguyen, the protagonist of The Mountain in the Sea (2022). Each chapter of Ray Nayler’s novel opens with an excerpt from her notes.

She is currently studying a highly advanced species of octopus discovered off the coast of Vietnam. Early glimpses indicate they possess a new form of intelligence.

A tech giant has now bought the rights to the region, sealed it off, and asked Nguyen to make first contact. They want to use the octopi to make better AI.

She learns that the creatures communicate through symbols such as changes in skin colour. Through various such forms of messaging, they seem to be saying “Go away”.

Outside, the world is a place of self-aware androids, AI-driven slave ships.

Through Nguyen’s eyes, the book explores ideas of consciousness, AI, environmental destruction, exploitation of labour, and the limits of human exceptionalism.

“We constantly judge other species by what we consider intelligence – our own. We tend to place ourselves at the top of a hierarchy,” Nayler says, “when intelligence is really about context. So I thought the book could ask: What might another form of intelligence make of us?”

(Recommended by lawyer and science-fiction writer Gautam Bhatia)

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‘LIFE’ IN?2095: MACHINEHOOD (2021)

Tiny excerpt:“We believe that the time has come to end the distinction between organic and inorganic intelligence. All of us are intelligent machines. All of us deserve the rights of personhood.”

By 2095, the rise of AI has pushed humans to modify themselves via pills and enhancements, in order to stay employable. Most workers, human and non-human, operate in a hyper-competitive gig economy. They livestream their day, hoping for tips from viewers, which provide a vital source of added income.

This is the world of Nebula-nominated Indian-born American author SB Divya’s Machinehood (2021).

Amid all this, a terror group — a collective of intelligences — releases a declaration of rights. All beings, including all animals, trees, humans and intelligent machines, must be recognised as equal, they say. The extreme, body- and mind-mangling pills must stop too.

When the world largely ignores their demands, the assassinations begin. Machinehood’s first target is a high-profile billionaire who has poured money into pill companies. Her bodyguard must now track down her assassins.

“The idea was to set the plot in a realistic future where the good, the bad and the ambiguous co-exist,” says Divya, a former electrical engineer with a history of working on machine intelligence. “Because the ultimate danger isn’t what machines will do to humans, but what humans will devise next, to exploit both machines and themselves.”

(Recommended by Team HT Wknd)

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A?GOLDEN?GATE: NEON?RIDERS (2025)

Tiny excerpt:He had the wild thought that San Francisco was like one big cathedral. Almost every window was glazed a different color, some manner of solar coating to capture sunrays. That had been the most surprising thing. Every skyscraper was like a stained glass window. And at night—ahhh!—it was as if buildings were decked in Christmas lights. Could the whole city be celebrating?

Humans outlive capitalism. And rebuild society around sustainability, cooperation and shared abundance.

This is the world of AE Marling’s pulsating solarpunk thriller, Neon Riders (2025).

It is set in a San Francisco of the future, a lush, neon-green metropolis where former office towers have become thriving vertical neighbourhoods. Clean energy powers everyday life. People live by tending to shared gardens, making clothes, and repairing rather than replacing.

Beyond city limits, a family of survivalists soldiers on in isolation, mistrustful of the new ways. Their quiet existence is shattered when one of their own runs away.

In San Francisco, the young man discovers friendship, and falls in love with a competitive bicyclist. She introduces him to a community of e-bike racers who turn the city’s hilly streets into high-speed circuits. When the survivalists arrive in an armed group, determined to reclaim him, the city becomes the stage for a tense confrontation.

What happens when new forms of solidarity come up against stagnancy and fear?

(Recommended by Team HT Wknd)