Do androids really dream about sheep? What do you think? What would you dream about if your body never changed (and believe me, your body really does). never I’m a huge science fiction fan. I love huge and crazy worlds and impossible spaceships and incredibly polite robots.
But what I love most are stories about how people learn to embrace and accept change. And about how science fiction characters find themselves and affirm themselves through transformation processes and through encounters with life forms – be they extraterrestrial or human – that deal with the body differently than previously thought.
This is just one of the enthusiasms that led me to write The years will pass like rabbits, my 2024 novel about a killer cyborg who embarks on a wild journey of 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 that focus on navigating your body differently than before.
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
An undisputed grandmaster of speculative fiction for all time, The Left Hand of Darkness is a great example of how Le Gun could be ahead of her time. Even as I was writing this article, I almost estimated its publication date to be 1999. It’s hard to believe that this book was written and published in the late 1960s.
The fourth book is set in Le Guns Hainish Cycle, Darkness is an exploration of gender and sexuality in which Genly Ai, a cis-male envoy from a federation of worlds from Earth, travels to the planet Gethen to convince their governments to join the otherworld’s alliance of cultural exchange and trade. On Gethen, Ai finds a world where all people have no fixed gender or sexual characteristics and are ambisexual.
The Left Hand of Darkness remains a great piece of feminist literature, combining these explorations with a political thriller and a clever commentary on the idea of terraformed worlds populated by people whose lives are becoming increasingly distant from each other across galaxies and centuries.
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
The first entry in VanderMeers Southern Reach Trilogy (this is now his Southern Reach Tetralogy!), Annihilation is the sometimes frightening, often scary, always beautiful story of a biologist who is sent to the 11th expedition in Area Xa stretch of coastline in the USA that is cut off from the rest of the world by a mysterious border. In Area X, not everything is as it seems, and the biologist must confront her own past and her broken marriage, while other members of the expedition are gradually picked up and her body undergoes an unstoppable transformation into something unknown and strange.
(Read BookTrib’s review of the film adaptation.)
Dune by Frank Herbert
I know it’s all the rage right now because of the excellent two-part film adaptation, BUT. The golden path to the future is clear. Leave your lovely home. Go to the desert. Drink the strange blue juice. Immerse yourself in a millennial parable that is a critique of power, colonialism and environmental control. Be confused by the sexual politics of Herbert’s dense, rich oasis. Become one with the worm. Enjoy it.
The Employees: A 22nd Century Workplace Novel by Olga Ravn
(translated into English by Martin Aitken 2022)
Perhaps a somewhat unusual choice, but since Paul Vermeersch, senior editor at Buckrider Books, brought it to my attention last year, I have not been able to stop thinking about it. The employees. If the Six thousand ships, The crew is a mix of humans and artificially created humanoids and has picked up a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery. The morale of the workers slowly begins to crumble as the objects awaken new or long-forgotten desires in the crew, all of which have been catalogued and recorded in sessions with the ship’s psychologist, as everything heads towards a mutiny against management and the company responsible. There is nothing like The employees out there. Get it.
The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
At some point in the near future, a new species of octopus is discovered that, unlike the solitary sea creatures we know today, has developed its own language and culture. It is teeming with animals, scientists, fishermen, androids, The mountain in the sea is a novel of fantasy, the kind of novel I’m always looking for but don’t often find. It combines lofty ideas with elegant and captivating prose.
(Read the review on BookTrib)
