The best thriller books that combine medicine with technology

This classic 1966 movie and the novelization by SF icon Isaac Asimov really hooked me on science fiction. So much so that I later felt compelled to write an hommage to it. Travelling through the human bloodstream? Being attacked by antibodies and white blood cells? Irresistible! One of the things SF does best is to show us familiar things from an entirely new perspective, and Fantastic Voyage did that in spades with a premise that was outlandish but completely serious and groundbreaking. Although Asimov wrote the novel version from the screenplay, it was released before the movie and it’s difficult to separate the two. I really recommend enjoying both.

Asimov later wrote a novel of his own (not a sequel) called Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain published in 1987, but it isn’t all that memorable.

This was one of my first fiction favourites, and you can’t talk about medical technology in fiction without talking about the book that started it all. Frankenstein is often called the first science fiction novel, and I completely agree, but let’s not forget that secondary title: The Modern Prometheus, proclaiming a modern mythology that equates science with stealing fire from the gods. A cautionary message about the promise and perils of the search for knowledge, the essence of the story will never be outdated: a would-be-creator reaching too far, ultimately failing his/her creation and being destroyed by it.

If you only know Frankenstein from monster movies, you owe it to yourself to read the original. It’s a masterpiece.

Michael Crichton is the author that readers most often compare my own novels to, set in the present day or near future, offering high-concept plots, and providing lots of suspense and action. But I don’t claim to reach that standard, because Crichton was a master and this early novel of his blew me away. In coldly understated prose, its account of an instantly deadly unknown pathogen in a small town is terrifying. The bleeding-edge Wildfire laboratory tasked with stopping the organism is geek-heaven. And Crichton ruthlessly cranks up the tension with daunting puzzles, a nuclear threat, and an inexorable timetable to prevent humanity’s extinction. The Andromeda Strain is a must-read.

The 1972 novel Cyborg probably isn’t well-known now, but everyone knows the mid-70s TV show it inspired, The Six Million Dollar Man. The show often dealt with serious subjects, but (much as I loved it) its sometimes cartoonish sound effects and slow-mo undercut its dramatic punch. Caidin’s novel plays it straight. Steve Austin survives a horrendous plane crash and is rebuilt with super-advanced prosthetics without his permission, and his reaction is anything but heroic. He’s recruited as a special operative against his will, and the story is an earnest examination of psychological pain and divided loyalties. Cyborg wasn’t the first story to describe the military application of high-tech prosthetics, but it does create a pretty cool James Bond vibe in its second half that’s much more adult than the TV version.

Cloning is a medical technology with terrific dramatic potential, and The Boys from Brazil was one of the first novels to involve cloning a major historical figure. The bad guy behind this plan is the infamous Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death,” so no points for guessing who he’s trying to recreate, but the plot is still exciting as an aging Nazi hunter races against time to stop the madness. The book notably pointed out that a cloned human would only be a physical copy of the original unless they were provided with a similar series of life experiences to shape their psyche.

It might feel a little dated now—on the other hand, with the recent rise of neo-Nazis and other hard-right extremists, it might also be very timely.