96 books like Next

I loved this book because it was so gripping. It made me long to be a writer. Although it was written over a hundred years ago, the dark story spoke directly to me.

I read it at the darkest time in my life. I was fourteen, and my alcoholic father had become a terrifying force in our home, just like Dr. Moreau, who rules his island with vicious power. I had never dreamed that a crazed leader could break an entire population, but the idea seems shockingly prescient now.

The book made me realize that I, too, could escape from the trap around me, just like the book’s hero, and learn to use my imagination to tell stories.

This story and its questions of eugenics and our place in society really horrified me, not because it was unbelievable, but precisely because it was far too real. The genetic superiority/inferiority, coupled with social indoctrination into our “advanced” society, made me meditate a great deal on what it means to be human.

What are humans without societal pressures? The way Huxley looked at the costs of freedom was really compelling. And in so many ways, he accurately predicted the destructive side of the social microscope that we all live in today under social media.

Michio Kaku’s Visions inspired me to write my first novel focusing on artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and Androids.

Kaku interviewed one hundred and fifty peers in the scientific community to predict what the future might be like. Genetic Elites will roam the earth as well as Humanoid Robots, where Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Computing lead the way to seemingly impossible breakthroughs.

Kaku’s Visions is fast becoming our reality.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading James Patterson’s and Neil McMahon’s Toys.

Patterson doesn’t delve into science fiction often, but when he does, thought-provoking ideas are present that question the social consequences of those imaginary worlds. In Toys, Genetic Elites rule and ordinary humans being the subjugated class.

The Elite Agent of Change, Baker, thinks he’s an Elite only to learn that he’s an ordinary human. He searches for his true origins while being hunted by the very Elites he protected from ordinary humans.

This novel is even more compelling today than when was written due to the advancement of Artificial Intelligence and Genetic Engineering.

A plausible prophetic future for those willing to listen.

This book starts and ends with the story of Dr. Jiankui He, the infamous Chinese researcher responsible for the first CRISPR experiment resulting in genetically modified children.

It chronicles Dr. He’s “meteoric rise to fame” followed by his “dramatic fall from grace.”

In telling this story Kirksey, a cultural anthropologist, entertains the reader with details about interesting characters he meets and places he visits in his quest to both situate this debacle in relation to earlier efforts at genetic engineering and cell therapy in the United States and to confirm some of the contested details about what did or did not happen in China in the years leading up to this “first”.

Along the way, Kirksey lays bare salient facts about conflicts of interests among scientists, the corporate world’s vaunted pursuit of profit, and the ways in which nationalistic aspirations seed unhealthy competition.

I have the 1971 paperback printing of More Than Human, with the Robert Pepper cover art. The book has a special significance for me; although unrelated in plot, it has similarities to my book: it is science fiction, has an unusual structure, a complex timeline, deals with psychology, and features investigation and discovery. The fact that it was written in 1953, before the Internet, Earth satellites, personal computers, and cell phones, facilitates the reader’s attention to the rather complex story. Seven individuals, Lone, Janie, twins Bonnie and Beanie, Baby, Gerry, and Hip, are exemplars of inequality, with peculiar capabilities and shortcomings. The German word gestalt, meaning the forming of a pattern, describes how, together, they embody the next step in human evolution.

The Chrysalids – my inaugural dive into science fiction in the late sixties – hooked me from the first paragraph.

Wyndham creates a dystopian world of post-nuclear destruction where genetic mutations abound, and if discovered, culled from a civilization steeped in a stark biblical ideology. The Chrysalids track protagonist David Strorm as he safeguards his six-toed friend, Sophie, and ultimately connects with a band of telepaths offering new world hope.

I loved this book because of its adolescent hero and his defiance against a society that was morally corrupt. 

I will admit I came to this book for the author. David Koepp is a renowned screenwriter whose credits include Jurassic Park and Mission: Impossible, among many others. Screenwriters have to work within the confines of a 120-page format, so it’s no wonder that this novel moves at a lightning pace. I love that it features a deadly fungal organism that could end humanity, but the story is really about the three people desperately trying to contain it. 

It’s a powerful update on Noble’s book, zooming in on the workings of the biomolecular circuits surrounding the DNA.

Some of the circuits are studied in great detail, looking closely at how they work, and at how they evolve in response to mutations in the DNA. A disadvantageous mutation is eliminated by natural selection. But as well as advantageous mutations it turns out that ‘neutral’ mutations, conferring no immediate advantage, are important and indeed crucial. That resolved one of the dichotomized disputes noted in Wills’ book.

At the other extreme from Contact, Greg Benford’s COSM involves very small wormholes. Or at least, a wormhole that starts out small. In his variation on the theme, an experiment on Earth accidentally opens a wormhole which in effect creates a new universe, which the experimenters can study and eventually communicate with through the wormhole. Again, real science, but technology a little (this time only a little!) beyond our present capabilities. And it raises the intriguing question of whether our Universe might have been made in this way by a race of superior beings (gods?) in another universe.