Girl meets boy in a world where illness has ruined the speech/reading center of the human brain.

(from Wastelands)

From a sci-fi standpoint, it doesn’t get much cooler or more intense than this. Nobody can talk or write or read, so communication between two people is pretty much impossible. Government and a whole bunch of other things break down right along with it, as humans become angry grunting monsters. It’s actually kind of brilliant the way Butler creates a reality that should be so different from our own, and yet it’s really jut an exaggeration of the current state of things.