Richard Morgan, back in 1998, planted an image the genre never quite shook off: consciousness as a transferable file, the body as a container you buy over the counter, social standing readable in the quality of flesh you can afford. Takeshi Kovacs investigates a world where dying is an administrative inconvenience and where the real luxury is waking up in a decent body.
Anyone looking for other novels built on that idea will find a strand older and wider than the Netflix series suggests. These five cross it from different angles.
1. Old Man’s War, John Scalzi (2005)
John Perry turns seventy-five and enlists in the Colonial Defense Forces. The bargain is stated plainly: Earth hands him a young body, and in exchange he fights alien species on planets he will never leave. The new body is grown from his own DNA and then modified, green skin capable of photosynthesis, artificial blood, a neural implant in the brain.
Scalzi keeps the tone light and the dialogue quick for most of the book, which is exactly why the arithmetic underneath lands so hard: of one thousand and twenty-two recruits, the officer who greets them announces that after ten years at least seven hundred and fifty will be dead. The best body of your life arrives with the expiry date already written into the contract.
2. The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi (2009)
Bangkok, twenty-third century. Oil is gone and energy is stored in springs. The calorie companies have released genetic plagues to force the world onto their resistant seed stock. Thailand holds out by sealing its borders and guarding a seedbank.
Emiko is the windup girl of the title, an artificial human produced by Japanese bioengineering, built to serve as a geisha and abandoned in Bangkok by her owner. Bacigalupi refuses to use her as a metaphor: he writes the psychological blocks and the genetic modifications that keep her servile directly into her, then shows what happens when those blocks give way. The novel took the Hugo, the Nebula, the Campbell and the Locus in a single run.
3. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)
Kathy, Tommy and Ruth grow up in an English boarding school that looks perfectly ordinary. The reader works out what they are for before they do, and that is the hard part of the book: watching them discover it calmly, without revolt, inside a domesticated vocabulary in which the true words never appear.
Ishiguro keeps the science fiction out of frame and leaves onstage only the daily life of people manufactured as spare parts. It is the book on this list that describes the market in bodies without ever showing it, and perhaps that is why it hurts most.
4. Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood (2003)
Jimmy, who now calls himself Snowman, may be the last human being alive. Around him live the Crakers, a species designed on a drawing board by a genius named Crake to be better than us, and in several respects they are.
Atwood builds the before and the after by alternating timelines, and the before is a world of corporate compounds where biotechnology grows organs on genetically modified pigs while outside the gates people fend for themselves. First volume of the MaddAddam trilogy.
5. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley (1932)
The ancestor of the whole strand. In the London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre human beings are mass-produced, sorted into castes at birth and conditioned to love the position assigned to them. Nobody sells their body because nobody ever owned one.
Ninety-four years on it still works, and it holds up against everything that followed precisely because Huxley grasped something later dystopias often missed: a system that manufactures people has no need to repress them, it only has to keep them satisfied.
And then
H.O.M.S., the space opera trilogy I wrote for Demy Publishing, moves across the same ground. The starting point was a Wall Street Journal article of 31 March 2022 on the first complete map of the human genome, and the question that followed from it: what happens to coexistence when genetic modification stops being therapy and becomes an inherited condition.
In the colonised Solar System of these novels there are the Homs, Homo Origenis Mutatae Sapiens, human beings modified with physical or aesthetic capacities well beyond the ordinary range. A social stratification has grown around them, with its own institutions and its own slang: a dedicated police force called the Inclusive Police, which in practice controls rather more than it includes, an outer district known as Freak Side that no officer dares enter, and the word «normo», which the Homs use for unmodified Sapiens. The slur travels from the minority towards the majority, which is not the direction most readers expect.
The first volume, Space Conspiracy, opens with a suspicious accident at a lunar mine and turns into an investigation of an attack on Internodal Station Three. Marvin Hale, a patrol officer whose investigative career was interrupted by a bereavement, is called back into service and finds himself aboard the ship Blue Whale alongside Blondie, a second-generation Homs, and a crew that never asked to be involved.
A note for English-language readers: the novels were written in Italian and are available here in translation. The trilogy is complete and available on Amazon, Kindle Unlimited included: H.O.M.S. Phase One: Space Conspiracy.
If this list was useful, the blog also has books like Black Mirror and novels about genetically modified humans.
