The third season of Black Mirror has everything that fans have come to expect: hackers with questionable moral lessons, out-of-control sci-fi technology, and plenty of twists. As the name implies, Black Mirror presents dark reflections of our own world—mostly by conjuring nightmare visions of how our present technology may control us in the not-too-distant future.
The biggest downside of Black Mirror? The entire series only thirteen episodes long, so if you’re a fan, chances are you’ve already binge-watched the new episodes and now don’t know what to do with yourself. There’s nothing else quite like Black Mirror on TV, but luckily there is a wealth of fantastic books that can sate your hunger for genre-bending satires and near-future dystopias.
A long-time master of the satirical speculative fiction—her preferred term—Atwood has several books that could fit this list. My favorite is Oryx and Crake, book one of her dystopian MaddAddam trilogy. Set it a post-apocalyptic world overrun by genetically manipulated animal hybrids like pigoons (pig creatures that can grow human organs) and rakunks (skunk-raccoon hybrids without the smell). Much of the novel is in flashbacks to the pre-apocalyptic time when Jimmy and his genetic genius friend Crake work in corporate research compounds like OrganInc and HelthWyzer to create genetically manipulated food and medicine for the public. Published in 2003, the novel tackles a plethora of issues from global warming to wealth inequality that have only grown more relevant in the last 13 years.
Ishiguro’s 2005 novel is such a perfect companion to Black Mirror that it could be easily adapted by the series in the future. Never Let Me Go is a heartbreaking, character-driven story with science fiction trappings. It follow a group of students in a boarding school that the reader slowly begin to realize is creepily off. The big sci-fi twist is one that I won’t spoil here, but suffice to say that you’ll remember it long after you finish.
The first episode of season three, “Nosedive,” imagines a dystopian near-future that’s only a shade different than today: everyone is obsessed with their social media profiles, constantly monitoring their star rating and never wanting to offend anyone. If that episode spoke to you, try Moxyland, the debut novel of acclaimed South African author Lauren Beukes. Like “Nosedive,” Moxyland takes place in a near future where people are slaves to their cellphones and social media presence. Beukes’s novel focuses on the corporations who benefit from and rule this future. If you rebel against this technological dystopia, the Big-Brother-by-way-of-Snapchat government will impose the ultimate punishment: “disconnection” from the internet.
One of 2016’s best science fiction novels, Version Control is set in a college town just a couple of years the future when self-driving cars are finally on the road and humans are (even more) obsessed with social media metrics to the point we each become a “little marionette made out of data.” In this almost mundane setting, Palmer tackles one of the trickiest of sci-fi tropes: time travel. A novel of ideas, Version Control should be on the reading list of every fan of smart sci-fi.
Black Mirror episodes often feel like nightmare visions of how our world might change, but The Lathe of Heaven tells the story of a man who can literally change the world with his dreams. When an egotistical scientist named William Haber discovers George Orr’s ability, he forces Orr to allow Haber to manipulate his reality-shaping dreams with his machine. Like the best Black Mirror episodes, Le Guin’s concerns are more philosophical than technological, and she explores how quickly human attempts at utopia can turn dystopian. For example, when Haber forces Orr to dream a world without racism the result is a dull world where everyone is a monochromatic grey. Le Guin has described the novel as her attempt to imitate Philip K. Dick, and The Lathe of Heaven is every bit the fantastic paranoid nightmare of Dick’s classic science fiction novels.
Speaking of Dick, no list of mind-bending science fiction books would be complete without him. Inspired partly by Dick’s own experiences with drug subcultures, A Scanner Darkly follows an undercover police officer, Bob Arctor, who has infiltrated a group of druggies who use a dangerous new drug called “Substance D.” The novel includes thought-provoking sci-fi concepts, like the “scramble suits” that project dozens of different photographs of people to preserve the wearer’s anonymity, as well as a conspiratorial twist at the end.
Murakami isn’t normally a name associated with science fiction—his work tends to take place in either realistic or magical realist worlds—but this novel is an exception. Hardboiled mashes up noir, fantasy, and science fiction to tell two intertwining tales. The first follows a “Calcutec” human data encryptor working for the System government against criminal “Semiotec” data thieves. The second is a surreal fantasy adventure involving libraries where unicorn skulls are used to read dreams. The two tales meet up in a satisfying twist, and will leave you thinking about the meaning of perception and identity.
Black Mirror’s third season focuses on how data is controlled and especially what happens when that data is manipulated by the wrong hands, whether social-climbers (“Nosedive”) or trolling hackers (“Shut Up and Dance”). Older’s debut novel looks at a different controlling hand: the government. This SF thriller takes place in a future where a search engine company called Information has reshaped the world as series of microdemocracies. As a look at how information shapes government policy and elections, it’s the perfect book to read in an election year that feels even more surreal than even the scariest Black Mirror episode.
If your favorite Black Mirror episodes are the horror ones like “Playtest” or “White Bear,” then you should run out and read Brian Evenson as soon as possible. A master of literary horror, Evenson’s books mix literary sentences with science fiction and fantasy tropes and tie them together with a thread of uncanny dread. You put any of Evenson’s collections on this list, but his most recent, A Collapse of Horses, is as good a place to start as any and includes a great sci-fi horror mini-novella called “The Dust.”
In the story collection The Wilds, Julia Elliott mixes science fiction visions with a Southern gothic style—think Black Mirror by way of Flannery O’Connor. Elliott enters her dark worlds from surprising angles. “LIMBs,” for example, takes place in a depressing nursing home where residents move around with Leg Intuitive Motion Bionics limbs. Other stories look attempts to make robots experience love by downloading sonnets and novels into their brains and a horrifying spa resort where the vain rich try to prevent aging through “controlled” diseases. While the premises of these stories are captivating, the real star of Elliot’s work is her lyrical and loopy Southern gothic prose.
Ted Chiang has built an entire career and won almost every major science fiction award around just a handful of stories; that’s how good his short fiction is. If tightly-written, thought-provoking science fiction is what you seek, you can’t do better than Chiang’s only book (so far), Stories of Your Life and Others. The stories in this collection often have “what if?” premises—what if there was an actual Tower of Babel? what if we learned mathematics didn’t work? what if experimental drugs made someone impossibly intelligent?—but in every story Chiang is rigorously rooted in the science of these alternate worlds and never loses sight of the characters. Ted Chiang has long been one of science fiction’s best-kept secrets, but that’s likely to change this year with the Hollywood adaptation of the collection’s titular story, Arrival, coming to theaters this fall.
As the most celebrated writer of literary sci-fi satires, Saunders is an obvious pick. Saunders work is rarely as horrifying as the series, and is often far more hilarious (Black Mirror’s few humorous forays, like “The Waldo Moment,” are typically the weakest episodes). Still, Saunders writes brilliant and surprising short stories that frequently imagine how technology, corporations, and politics will continue to corrupt us. In Persuasion Nation isn’t his best collection (that would be Pastoralia), but it is the collection most interested in technology. “I CAN SPEAK!TM” is about robotic masks that parents strap over their babies’ heads to pretend they can speak. “My Flamboyant Grandson” imagines a world where everyone wears tracking devices that allow corporations to summon customized ads everywhere they walk. “Jon” follows a group of orphans who are raised as corporate testers, and if they remove their implants they can only speak in word salads of advertising copy. Like the best Black Mirror episodes, Saunders manages to find the humanity in even his most far-out conceits.
