Do Androids really dream of any sheep at all? What do you think? What would you dream about, if your body never stopped changing (and trust me, your body really does never stop)? I am a deep lover of science fiction. I love vast and crazy worlds and impossible spaceships and improbably polite robots.
But most of all, I love stories about the way people learn to adopt and embrace change, about the ways characters in science fiction often find themselves and reaffirm themselves through the processes of transformation, and through exposure to forms of life — whether aliens or human — that approach being a body differently than what had been thought of before.
This is just one of the enthusiasms that started me down writing The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits, my 2024 novel of a killer cyborg who goes on a journey of wild transformation, after being exposed to an alien pathogen seemingly capable of resurrecting the dead. But science fiction has a long history of such Storytelling! Here are five phenomenal reads, all about navigating the body differently than before.
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
An undisputed grandmaster of speculative fiction for the ages, The Left Hand of Darkness is a great example of just how ahead of her time Le Gun could be, even writing this article, I almost put its publication at 1999, it’s hard to believe this was a book written and published in the late 1960s.
The fourth book set in Le Gun’s Hainish Cycle, Darkness is an exploration of gender and sexuality which sees Genly Ai, a cismale envoy of a federation of worlds from Earth, to the planet Gethen, hoping to convince their governments to join the other world’s alliance of cultural exchange and trade. On Gethen, Ai finds a world where all it’s people have no fixed sex or gender characteristics and are ambisexual.
The Left Hand of Darkness remains a great piece of feminist literature, and pairs these explorations with a political thriller and slick commentary on the idea of terraformed worlds, settled by human beings who drift farther apart from one another across the galaxies and centuries.
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
The first entry in what was VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy (which is now his Southern Reach tetralogy!), Annihilation is the sometimes frightening, often uncanny, always beautiful story of a biologist assigned to the 11th expedition into Area X, an area of US coastline that has been cut off from the rest of the world by a mysterious border. Inside Area X, everything is not as it seems, and the Biologist must reconcile her own past and fractured marriage as other members of the expedition are picked off one by one, and her body begins undergoing an unstoppable transformation into something unknowable and strange.
(Read BookTrib’s review of the movie adaptation.)
Dune by Frank Herbert
I know it’s all the rage right now because of the excellent two-part movie adaptation, BUT. The golden path to the future is clear. Abandon your beautiful home. Go to the desert. Drink the weird blue juice. Engage in a thousand-year parable which is a critique of power, colonialism, and environmental control. Become confused by the sexual politics of Herbert’s dense, rich oasis. Become one with the worm. Have a great time with it.
The Employees: a workplace novel of the 22nd century by Olga Ravn
(translated into English by Martin Aitken 2022)
Perhaps a slightly out-of-the-box pick, but since Buckrider Books senior editor Paul Vermeersch put me onto it last year, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about The Employees. When the Six Thousand Ship, crewed by a mixture of humans and artificially created humanoids picked up a series strange objects from the planet New Discovery, a slow breakdown in worker morale begins to occur as the objects stir new or long-forgotten desires in the crew, all cataloged and recorded via sessions with the ship psychologist, as everything careens towards mutiny against management and the company in charge. There’s nothing quite like The Employees out there right now. Go get it.
The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
Sometime in the near future, a new species of Octopus is discovered, one which, unlike the solitary seafaring animals we know today, have developed language and culture all their own. Brimming with animals, scientists, fishermen, androids, The Mountain in the Sea is absolutely brimming with imagination, the kind of novel I am always seeking and not often finding, blending its high-concept ideas with elegant and compelling prose.
