What people remember about the X-Men is the costumes and the powers. What actually drives the series is a word. The majority has a name for the people who are different, and the name stings. Strip away the uniforms and the school for gifted youngsters and you are left with a problem that prose science fiction has been working on for eighty years. A group of people acquires abilities the rest do not have. Society reorganises itself around that difference, and it rarely does so kindly.
These five novels work the same material without capes.
Slan, A. E. van Vogt (1940)
The ancestor of the lot. Slans are telepaths, identifiable by two thin tendrils on the forehead, descended from a race that ruled Earth briefly before being driven out. Jommy Cross is nine years old when the tyrant Kier Gray’s men shoot his mother in front of him, and he spends the rest of the book hiding among people who want him dead.
Van Vogt lays down the pattern everyone else will reuse: power as a visible mark, persecution as ordinary policy, a hunted child who will eventually have to decide what to do with his own species.
The Chrysalids, John Wyndham (1955)
After the nuclear catastrophe, a farming community has turned genetic purity into a religion. Any deviation from the official human shape is burned, exiled or sterilised. David Strorm has one finger more than the rulebook allows, and something considerably more dangerous: he talks to other children without opening his mouth.
Wyndham writes the rural, claustrophobic version of the problem. Here the power is invisible, so the minority can hide, and hiding has a price. The novel also appeared in the United States as Re-Birth.
More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon (1953)
Six outcasts. A man with severe learning difficulties, a mute girl, twin toddlers who teleport, an infant who computes. Individually they amount to nothing. Together they form a single organism, which Sturgeon calls Homo gestalt, and which runs straight into the most uncomfortable question available: if you are the next species, do you still owe anything to the previous one?
It is the tenderest and the most unsettled book of the group. Sturgeon’s superman is assembled out of the people his society threw away.
Beggars in Spain, Nancy Kress (1993)
The closest to the science fiction being written now. A prenatal genetic modification produces children who never need to sleep. They gain eight hours of life a day, every day, for good. They grow up smarter, healthier and richer. The American society that bought them discovers it made them and can no longer reach them.
Kress starts from an almost technical premise and arrives squarely at the political question: what does someone who received an advantage owe to someone who did not. The title comes from a parable about beggars asking for alms in a public square.
The Power, Naomi Alderman (2016)
Teenage girls across the world discover they can deliver electrical charges from their hands. Within a few years the geography of power is rewritten: the people who used to walk home at night with keys between their knuckles are now the ones others are afraid of, and they find out that fear is usable.
Alderman inverts the mechanism of the other four books. Here the enhanced minority becomes the majority, and the novel watches what happens immediately afterwards.
And the trilogy I wrote myself
Full disclosure, since these are mine: H.O.M.S. is my own trilogy, published by Demy Publishing between December 2025 and May 2026, and written in Italian before being translated into English and French.
The acronym stands for Homo Origenis Mutatae Sapiens. They are human beings modified in a laboratory, now into their second generation, and in the colonised Solar System of the novel they form a biological class of their own. States have set up a dedicated police force, called the Inclusive Police, whose inclusiveness lives mostly in the name. There is an outlying district where no police force dares go, and the city calls it Freak Side.
The detail I care about most is linguistic, and it is the one that genuinely connects these books to the X-Men. In the comics it is ordinary people who say “mutant”. In my novel the slang travels the other way: normo is the epithet the Homs use for unmodified Sapiens. The minority has coined a name for the majority, which tends to happen once a minority has stopped thinking of itself as a guest.
The first volume, Space Conspiracy, is an investigation into a bombing, run by a detective of the Inclusive Police and a second-generation Homs who goes by Blondie. Start there: H.O.M.S. Phase One: Space Conspiracy. Then Phase Two: Beyond the Singularity and Phase Three: The Shadow of War.
If the theme interests you, the blog also has science fiction about genetically modified humans and books like Altered Carbon.
Background photo in the featured image: Hubble Peers into the Storm. ESA/Hubble & NASA (NASA Goddard), via NASA Image and Video Library
