All my life, I have been drawn to the dark, twisty, unconventional, rebelliousstories; I was always a little disappointed with the Disney-fied fairytales, always enthralled by the dark imaginings of the originals. As I grew older, I recognised that these dark fables were not just confined to stories of fantasy, but present as seeds of discontent and destruction in our own reality—in the injustices of the present, and disasters of our potential future. As an author, I use these modern parables and prophecies—in dystopian, weird, and gothic science fiction—as a way to explore and critically reflect on our humanity and its future.
The original gothic science fiction novel and a classic in its own right, Shelley’s Frankenstein is brimming with human need, trauma, disgust, and the tragic folly of seeking perfection. The quintessential blend of grotesque and sublime, the story turns the mirror on the worst parts of humanity and forces us to both confront the misery and appreciate the tainted beauty. And Shelley, with her incomparable prose, leads us to this with her opening page, as our frame narrator, Robert Walton, remarks: “I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks, which braces my nerves, and fills me with delight.” The ultimate expression of gothic science fiction.
One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'
'That rare story to pass from literature into myth' The New York Times
Mary Shelley's chilling Gothic tale was conceived when she was only eighteen, living with her lover Percy Shelley on Lake Geneva. The story of Victor Frankenstein who, obsessed with creating life itself, plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, but whose botched creature sets out to destroy his maker, would become the world's most famous work of horror fiction, and remains a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity. Based on the third…
I fell in love with this book the moment I read its opening pages, and the love affair continued up to the final pages and still to this day. China Miéville does weird like no one else. And in this, his multi-award-winning sophomore novel and the first book in the Bas-Lag series, Miéville intelligently fuses a stunning array of genres and modes, from steampunk science fantasy to dystopian and gothic science fiction. So much of this book has lived in my subconscious for decades, inspiring a love for bug-punk, gangland-dystopian worlds with complex and flawed characters. The best book to read when looking to enter the world of weird fiction and gothic sci-fi.
Winner of the August Derleth award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Perdido Street Station is an imaginative urban fantasy thriller, and the first of China Mieville's novels set in the world of Bas-Lag.
The metropolis of New Crobuzon sprawls at the centre of its own bewildering world. Humans and mutants and arcane races throng the gloom beneath its chimneys, where the rivers are sluggish with unnatural effluent, and factories and foundries pound into the night. For more than a thousand years, the parliament and its brutal militia have ruled over a vast array of workers and artists, spies, magicians,…
You can’t talk about weird, gothic science fiction, without mentioning Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation. The first in the Southern Reach trilogy, VanderMeer’s novel is a complex, surreal, and terrifying tale of four scientists who brave the uninhabited, quarantined, and inexplicable ‘Area X’ in search of answers. Annihilation expertly blends science fiction with the terror and mystery of the gothic: fusing scientific inquiry (“Remember that we are to put our faith in your measurements…The measurements do not lie”), with hallucinations, temporal ambiguity, and mind manipulation. The lush, sentient, and menacing ecosystem is the quintessential gothic setting, and the story, revealed through the journal of the protagonist, is a perfect throwback to the original gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto. A standout example of modern, intelligent, gothic sci-fi.
THE FIRST VOLUME OF THE EXTRAORDINARY SOUTHERN REACH TRILOGY - NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY ALEX GARLAND (EX MACHINA) AND STARRING NATALIE PORTMAN AND OSCAR ISAAC
For thirty years, Area X has remained mysterious and remote behind its intangible border - an environmental disaster zone, though to all appearances an abundant wilderness.
The Southern Reach, a secretive government agency, has sent eleven expeditions to investigate Area X. One has ended in mass suicide, another in a hail of gunfire, the eleventh in a fatal cancer epidemic.
Animal/human hybridisation is ripe for gothic sci-fi stories. Whether the sentient flora of Annihilation, the insectoid-human khepri of Perdido Street Station, or the brutal stitching together of human and animal in The Island of Doctor Moreau—each offers its own shade of terror, grotesque beauty, and ethical complications. Don’t let the clusterf*ck of its movie adaptation dissuade you; H.G. Wells’ classic is a beautiful exploration of the grotesque and terrifying—a darker, twistier version of Orwell’s allegory, Animal Farm, where humanised animals tell the story of mankind’s descent from humanity.
Having started this list with the titan of gothic science fiction, Mary Shelley, it is appropriate to close out the list with another titan, Octavia Butler. Dawn is the first book of the Xenogenesis series, which—though long-recognised as a science fiction classic—has deep connections to the gothic genre with its “A live! Still alive. Alive…again” (surely a contender for the best opening to a novel), and its captors, strange Awakenings, creatures covered in writhing tentacles, and hybridisation of the human and alien. Underneath all of this, is the complex interrogation of what it means to be human—an exploration suited exceptionally well to both gothic fiction and science fiction.
'One of the most significant literary artists of the twentieth century' JUNOT DIAZ
'Octavia Butler was playing out our very real possibilities as humans. I think she can help each of us to do the same' GLORIA STEINEM
One woman is called upon to reconstruct humanity in this hopeful, thought-provoking novel by the bestselling, award-winning author. For readers of Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison and Ursula K. Le Guin.
When Lilith lyapo wakes in a small white room with no doors or windows, she remembers a devastating war, and a husband and child long lost to her.
A dark biopunk thriller of gothic proportions. Solari wasn’t alive when the radiation rained down, but she’s living with the consequences—the mutations, the gangland war, and the wall that divides Tasmania’s affluent North from its contaminated South. Alone in the southern reaches, Solari survives by cooking wildly addictive snowrock for the local crime lord and avoiding the city’s mutants.
But, when a bad deal turns worse, Solari is forced to run—escaping retribution with a stolen van and a pair of giant wings cleaved from a mutant moth. Grafting the wings to her body will disguise Solari as one of Tasmania’s most reviled, and set her on a dangerous journey through gangland strongholds to get to the Border Wall, and safety, in the north.
Edge of the Known World is a near-future love and adventure story about a brilliant young refugee caught in era when genetic screening tests like 23AndMe make it impossible to hide a secret identity. The novel is distributed by Simon & Schuster. It is a USA Today Bestseller and 2024 American Fiction Awards Winner in multiple categories, including Best New Fiction, Political Thriller, and Science Fiction: General.
Alexandra is a gifted student, adoring daughter, and exuberant prankster. She is also hiding in the open. After a blissful childhood, Alex learned she’s an illegal refugee from a brutal regime, smuggled into…
Fans of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake will be swept away by this riveting speculative fiction adventure and love story about family, genetic privacy, and the onrushing future of surveillance technology.
2024 American Fiction Awards Winner in multiple categories, including Best New Fiction, Political Thriller, and Science Fiction
Alexandra Tashen is a brilliant student, adoring daughter, merry wit, and exuberant prankster. After a blissful childhood on a Texas ranch, she learns the truth: She is a refusé, an illegal refugee smuggled into the Allied Nations as an infant. Everyone from her birth region carries a harmless but detectable bit of…
