Book One of Another "I Won't Read Book Two" Trilogy -- The Park Service

The Park Service - Ryan Winfield

Aubrey van Houten’s is your average post-apocalyptic world, one in which the last surviving humans live in a manmade cavern several kilometers below the surface. Space and resources are limited, so their society has made “adjustments.” The citizens come of age at fifteen, at which time an algorithm assigns them their careers based on a day-long test. But wait: they get to retire at thirty-five! Except that retirement means they’re sent to Eden… apparently some sort of “cloud storage” of their minds. All that and algae crisps at every meal…

With his father just weeks from retirement, Aubrey turns fifteen and receives his (yes, Aubrey’s a boy) assignment; the first person in memory sent up to level I. But on the way to his assignment, the maglev train crashes and Aubrey finds himself both miraculously alive and on the park-like surface of the world he’d always been told was a radioactive ruin. Lie #1… And there are other humans on the surface, too – but they live in hiding, in constant fear of “the Park Service.” As Aubrey learns when a Park Service drone murders an entire community, they’ve been hiding for good reason. But Aubrey will come to find that everything he learned as a child comprises lies #2 through about #1,000,000 – and the hits just keep on coming.

MaddAddam: Margaret Atwood Completes the Crake Trilogy... Maybe

Who is MaddAddam? Or, perhaps more to the point, who was MaddAddam? After all, the waterless flood (as the Crakers call it) is so “last year,” and already the kudzu has started to bury all that is left of mankind’s many wonders, not to mention its many failures.

Once the BlyssPluss plague engineered by Crake had run its course, the few survivors peeked out of the rubble of the compounds and the plebelands and began to scratch together a new life in a new world. MaddAddam picks up where The Year of the Flood left off; as a handful of former God’s Gardeners have started a post-apocalyptic commune of sorts at the cobb house in the abandoned parklands. They’ve fortified the grounds to keep liobams (lion-lamb crossbreeds) away from their flock of Mo’Hairs (sheep genetically engineered to grow human hair) and keep the piggoons (super-smart giant pigs modified to grow human body parts) out of the garden. As for the roving painballers – a soft of dehumanized killing machine – they can do little but stand guard.