5 Near-Future YAs Set in Awesomely Altered Worlds

More Happy Than Not, by Adam Silvera
Silvera’s debut is set in the Bronx projects, in a recognizable summer world of street games and comic books, crappy part-time jobs and family strife. But lurking at the story’s edges is the Leteo Project, offering the grieving and the guilty a seemingly perfect fix: a memory-altering (or erasing) procedure that allows them to move forward with their lives after trauma. Aaron Soto, who has a girlfriend who loves him and a new male best friend he’s falling for, dreams about getting the procedure to help him forget he’s gay, but complications lurk that will blindside him and crush your heart like a paper lantern.

Hit, by Delilah Dawson
Dawson imagines a world in which a fatally indebted United States hands the reins over to financial savior Valor National Bank—which is now using indentured assassins to go after its individual debtors. Patsy is a debtor’s daughter, and to save her mother she agrees to spend five days as a Valor assassin, working her way through a 10-person kill list. She moves through a world suddenly robbed of hospitals and police intervention, in which society is breaking down fast. When her first kill comes with unexpected baggage—the dead man’s intriguing son, who becomes her unwitting partner in survival and crime—her deadly task becomes even more complicated.

Falls the Shadow, by Stefanie Gaither
In this dark debut, death is not the end for a select group of early adopters of a new cloning technology. When Cate’s sister, Violet, dies, Cate doesn’t just have to get used to a perfectly identical clone interloper taking her sibling’s place. As the daughter of a prominent politician, she also has to put a happy face on, for both the anti-cloning protesters and paparazzi. But growing suspicions about the differences between old and new Violet send Cate down a rabbithole, into the heady sci-fi world of both the nefarious team behind the clone tech and their enemies, the Clone Control Advocacy group.

Noggin, by John Corey Whaley
In Whaley’s sophomore novel, we’re dropped into a brave new world alongside 16-year-old Travis, who has just become the second person to receive a successful full-body transplant. Five years ago, his head was removed from his cancer-ridden body and cryogenically frozen. What feels to him like moments later, he wakes up with a new donor body attached. Combining elements of science fiction and bildungsroman with an immense amount of heart, Noggin will continually surprise you with how thoroughly it imagines the implications of waking up to a world that’s moved on without you.

Denton Little’s Death Date, by Lance Rubin
Denton Little lives in a recognizable U.S. with one crucial difference: through a combination of diabolical scientific discovery and legal requirement, nearly everyone in the U.S. knows what day they’re going to die. We follow Denton through his funeral and death party (held on your second-to-last day on earth), then through his death date, as he grapples with unanswered questions, impending doom, and the development of an 11th-hour mystery. Rubin tucks a surreal thriller into a funny-sad contemporary story you won’t be able to resist.