5. Oryx And Crake - Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake is very like the kind of dystopias that most gamers (particularly of the Fallout series) will be used to. Oryx and Crake is the first of a tour-de-force trilogy in which humanity has been wiped out by a plague, dubbed "the waterless flood" by a remaining religious group, and the world has been taken over by vicious man-made animal splices. In Oryx and Crake we follow Jimmy, who has come to believe he is the only human left alive. He survives, rather than lives, and only really with the help of the Crakers, a bizarre human-esque lab-engineered race that believes Jimmy is a prophet. Margaret Atwood creates a wholly absorbing tale in Oryx and Crake, and in the sequels Year of the Flood and MaddAddam. The world she creates is so familiar and so easy for the reader to inhabit that it is then impossible to view the "real world" without experiencing shades of it. Atwood has said, time and again, that every scientific advancement described in the book (such as using pig's bodies to grow human organs for transplant) could conceivably and scientifically happen. Disturbingly, scientists in Japan are currently working on exactly how to grow human organs in pigs, and if we learn anything from Margaret Atwood, it's that this is very unlikely to end well...