I have used Among the Hidden as well as The City of Ember for lit. circles in the past. I was using a common way of structuring lit. circles where each student has a specific job: Discussion Director, Super Summarizer, Literary Luminary, etc. This is a really generic method that can be used with any novel at all, so I wasn't focusing specifically on science fiction. If you're wanting to go that way, you could focus the assignments a bit more, instructing the students to look for specific features related to that genre.
Are you planning to have each group read a different novel, but all of them science fiction? That's a cool idea. Then the groups could compare the ways in which their different novels fit the genre. Some questions along the way could be things like: How does the world portrayed in your novel differ from our own? Is the world in the novel possible? What would have to happen to cause our world to turn into a world like that? Would you have made the same decisions as the governing authorities in the book? It would be great to have the groups share with each other as a culminating project.
Both the novels you mentioned are futuristic, so you could have the kids explore different ideas of what the future will be like and have them come up with their own predictions. This could be a really cool unit.
Hope that helps. Good luck!
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