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- Brave New World
series8 books1932
similar byscience fiction+2 more
Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel imagines a future World State where reproduction, social caste, and desire are all engineered before birth, and the population is kept content through conditioning, sleep-hypnosis, and a mood-altering drug called soma. The story follows the disruption this seemingly stable order suffers when an outsider raised beyond its reach is brought into it, exposing what the society traded away for comfort and order. Some editions pair the novel with Huxley's own 1958 nonfiction essay collection, Brave New World Revisited, which reassesses the book's ideas rather than continuing its story.
- Beyond This Horizon
Robert A. Heinleinstandalone novel1948
similar bygenetic engineeringscience fictionour world
From the front flap of a 2001 Baen reprint: "Utopia has been achieved. For centuries, disease, hunger, poverty, and war have been things found only in the history tapes. And applied genetics has given men and women the bodies of athletes and a lifespan of over a century. They should all have been very happy... But Hamilton Felix is bored. And he is the culmination of a star line, each of his last thirty ancestors chosen for superior genes. Hamilton is, as far as genetics can produce one, the ultimate man. And this ultimate man can see no reason why the human race should survive, and has no intention of continuing the pointless comedy. However, Hamilton's life is about to become less boring. A secret cabal of revolutionaries who find utopia not just boring, but desperately in need of leaders who know just What Needs to be Done, are planning to revolt and put themselves in charge. Knowing of Hamilton's disenchantment with the modern world, they have recruited him to join their Glorious Revolution. Big mistake! The revolutionaries are about to find out that recruiting a superman was definitely not a good idea..."
- Stand on Zanzibar
John Brunnerstandalone novel1968
similar bygenetic engineeringscience fictionour world
Stand on Zanzibar is a dystopian New Wave science fiction novel written by John Brunner and first in part published in New Worlds magazine in 1967 and in book form in 1968. The book won a Hugo Award for Best Novel at the 27th World Science Fiction Convention in 1969, as well as the 1969 BSFA Award and the 1973 Prix Tour-Apollo Award.
- Slan
series2 books1946
similar byscience fictionour world+1 more
Slan (1946) is A. E. van Vogt's science fiction novel about slans, a persecuted race of telepathic superbeings living hidden among ordinary humans, first serialized in Astounding Science Fiction before its Arkham House hardcover edition. More than sixty years later, Kevin J. Anderson completed Slan Hunter (2007), an authorized sequel built from van Vogt's notes to continue the story left unfinished at the original author's death. The two novels together bracket a single continuing narrative rather than an ongoing series.
- Blood Music
Greg Bearstandalone novel1985
similar bygenetic engineeringscience fictionour world
Blood Music is a 1985 science fiction novel by American writer Greg Bear. It is an expanded version of a short story of the same title, originally published in the June 1983 issue of Analog and the winner of both the 1983 Nebula and 1984 Hugo awards for Best Novelette. The novel won the 1986 Prix Apollo Award, given to the best science fiction novel published in France during the preceding year, under the title La Musique du sang.
- The Eyes of Heisenberg
Frank Herbertstandalone novel1966
similar bygenetic engineeringscience fictionour world
Tens of thousands of years in the future, Earth is ruled by the Optimen, a genetically engineered aristocracy that has made itself functionally immortal, while ordinary people, the Folk, live under strict reproductive control. When Harvey and Lizbeth Durant arrive to have their embryo genetically screened, the examining doctor finds something in the child no one has seen in a very long time: real potential for both fertility and life span, traits the Optimen have arrogated to themselves. Rather than destroy the embryo as policy demands, the doctor hesitates, setting off a chain of surveillance, suspicion and resistance. A tightly wound Frank Herbert thriller about genetic caste and rebellion.
- Kairos
series11 books1962
completed
similar byscience fiction+1 more
The Time Quintet is a science fantasy series of five young adult novels written by American author Madeleine L'Engle and made up of A Wrinkle in Time (1962), A Wind in the Door (1973), A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978), Many Waters (1986), and An Acceptable Time (1989).
- Patternist
series6 books1976
completed
similar bygenetic engineeringscience fiction+1 more
The Patternist series is a group of science fiction novels by Octavia E. Butler that detail a secret history continuing from the Ancient Egyptian period to the far future that involves telepathic mind control and an extraterrestrial plague. A profile of Butler in Black Women in America notes that the themes of the series include "racial and gender-based animosity, the ethical implications of biological engineering, the question of what it means to be human, ethical and unethical uses of power, and how the assumption of power changes people."
- The Dreaming Jewels
Theodore Sturgeonstandalone novel1950
similar bygenetic engineeringscience fictionour world
The Dreaming Jewels (1950), also known as The Synthetic Man, is a science fiction novel by American writer Theodore Sturgeon. It was his first published novel.
- The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth
H. G. Wellsstandalone novel1904
similar bygenetic engineeringscience fictionour world
The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth is a science fiction novel by H. G. Wells that was first published in 1904. Wells called it "a fantasia on the change of scale in human affairs. ... I had hit upon [the idea] while working out the possibilities of the near future in a book of speculations called Anticipations (1901)".
- Darwin
series2 books1999
completed
similar bygenetic engineeringscience fiction+1 more
Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio imagines a dormant retrovirus in human DNA activating worldwide, triggering an accelerated leap in human evolution that governments respond to as a plague. The 1999 novel won the Nebula Award; its sequel Darwin's Children follows the first generation of changed children as society decides what to do with them. Together they're speculative near-future science fiction grounded in genetics rather than space opera.
- 2312
Kim Stanley Robinsonstandalone novel2012
similar bygenetic engineeringscience fiction+1 more
In the eponymous year, when Earth's ecology is degraded and humanity has settled throughout the solar system by terraforming and genetic engineering, mysterious disasters strike some human communities and an assortment of human types from throughout the system seek to find and eliminate the cause.
- Ender's Shadow
series5 books1999
part of Ender's Game Universe
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Orson Scott Card's Ender's Shadow retells the events of Ender's Game from the perspective of Bean, a physically stunted but ferociously intelligent street child recruited into the same Battle School program as Ender Wiggin. It launches the Shadow series, which follows Bean and other secondary Battle School characters into the political aftermath of the Formic Wars back on Earth, running parallel to and eventually past the timeline of Card's main Ender Quintet.
- Snake
series5 books1973
completed
similar byscience fiction+2 more
Vonda N. McIntyre's Dreamsnake (1978) follows Snake, an itinerant healer in a post-nuclear world who treats patients with venom from three genetically altered serpents, including an alien 'dreamsnake' that eases the dying. When her dreamsnake is killed early on, Snake sets out across a fractured, tribal far-future Earth to find a replacement. The novel grew out of McIntyre's 1973 novelette 'Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand,' which became its opening section.
- Last and First Men
series14 books1930
completed
part of Last Men Universe
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Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men (1930) traces two billion years of human evolution through eighteen successive species, framed as a text somehow dictated back to the author by the last of those species; civilizations rise and fall across the span, marked by genetic engineering and interplanetary colonization, before the final humans are wiped out by a supernova. Stapledon followed it with the more obscure Last Men in London (1932), which revisits similar far-future material from a narrower, more personal angle.
- Ender Wiggin
series14 books1977
part of Ender's Game Universe
similar byscience fiction
Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game (1985, expanded from his 1977 novella) follows child prodigy Andrew "Ender" Wiggin as he is recruited into a military training program built to prepare Earth's defenses for an anticipated third war against an insectoid alien species known as the Formics. The saga continues years later through Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide, following an older Ender as he confronts the moral weight of his role in that earlier conflict, and concludes the core arc in Children of the Mind, with Ender in Exile filling in the years between the first two books. Set within the wider Ender's Game universe, the series shifts from military coming-of-age story to slower, more philosophical science fiction as it progresses.
- Odd John
Olaf Stapledonstandalone novel1935
similar bygenetic engineeringscience fictionour world
Odd John: A Story Between Jest and Earnest is a 1935 science fiction novel by the British author Olaf Stapledon. The novel explores the theme of the Übermensch (superman) in the character of John Wainwright, whose supernormal human mentality inevitably leads to conflict with normal human society and to the destruction of the utopian colony founded by John and other superhumans.
- The Werewolf Principle
Clifford D. Simakstandalone novel1967
similar byscience fictionour world+1 more
From the back cover of the first DAW printing: "Andrew Blake, found in a space capsule on a distant planet, was brought back to an unfamiliar Earth, where antigravity devices had replaced the wheel and houses talk and even fly! Yet nothing was as strange as Blake's own feelings. Tormented by eerie sensations and a loss of memory, he didn't know who he really was nor exactly where he came from. His destiny only began to grow frighteningly clear when he met a weird, tassel-eared creature who darkly hinted at the truth about Blake's origins. Slowly Blake became aware of the long hushed-up "Werewolf Principle," a scientific theory buried in the past, which held the key to Blake's own fate - and the future of the human race..."
- Dune
series20 books1963
part of Dune Universe
similar byscience fiction
Frank Herbert's Dune Chronicles opens with 1965's Dune, set on the desert planet Arrakis where House Atreides takes control of the only source of the vital spice melange and young Paul Atreides is pulled into a struggle over its politics and religion. Herbert carried the story forward across five further novels — Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, and Chapterhouse: Dune — following Paul's line over the following millennia, before Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson later extended the saga. Many other editions of these six novels are omnibus and box-set repackagings rather than separate stories.
- The White Plague
Frank Herbertstandalone novel1982
similar bygenetic engineeringscience fictionour world
The White Plague is a 1982 science fiction novel by American author Frank Herbert about an engineered disease which kills only women. It was nominated for a best science fiction novel Locus Award in 1983.
- The World Jones Made
Philip K. Dickstandalone novel1956
similar byscience fiction+2 more
The World Jones Made is a 1956 science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick, examining notions of precognition, humanity, and politics. It was first published by Ace Books as one half of Ace Double D-150, bound dos-à-dos with Agent of the Unknown by Margaret St. Clair.The story takes place after a nuclear war in which society is dominated by relativism, which rejects absolute truths and preaches tolerance as the highest principle. The mutant Floyd Jones, who can see into the future, plans to overthrow the system and colonise space. The story ends with the defeat of Jones, whose plans fail despite his ability to see the future due to the immutability of fate.
- Colony
Ben Bovastandalone novel1978
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Colony continues the story Ben Bova began in Millennium, following astronaut-turned-administrator Chet Kinsman years later as the head of an orbiting space habitat that has become Earth's only real refuge from a planet buckling under overpopulation, food shortages and unrest. Getting a place in the habitat is a matter of life and death for millions who will never be chosen, and as Earth's governments grow more desperate to control or dismantle the colony outright, Kinsman has to decide how far he'll go to protect the world he's built off-world. Bova later folded both novels together into the omnibus The Kinsman Saga. Part of Ben Bova's Chet Kinsman series.
