The first heatwave of the year is finally easing in the UK, and I spent the sweltering weekend tucked away in my flat, working through the sci-fi reading list I put together last year.
As the list grows thinner and thinner (it may be melting as well!), I’ve pulled together a fresh selection: 10 more bio/biotech sci-fi books from the past decade!
Enjoy a cool bionerd read in this boiling summer.
1 MORPHOTROPHIC, by Greg EDAN
In a world governed by an alternate biology, cells are not bound to a single body. Instead, cells – and the organs they make up! –can be swapped and traded between organisms. And they can even jump from organism to organism as they wish…
Year of publication: 2024
2 DARKOME, by Hannu Rajaniemi
A woman is hunted by the government and by a network of bio-terrorists. Both factions are after the mRNA chip that enables her to change gene expression and reprogram her cells in real time.
Year of publication: 2024
3 GENEFIRE, by James Flanagan
A PhD student decrypts a sinister warning: Earth will be destroyed. The ominous message comes from the future, and is coded in a young girl’s DNA.
Year of publication: 2023
4 IN ASCENSION, by Martin Macinnes
How did life on Earth begin? The discovery of an ancient microorganism in an oceanic trench upheavals what we know. The search for an answer may not be found on this planet but in the depths of space.
Year of publication: 2023
5 THE KAIJU PRESERVATION SOCIETY, by John Scalzi
A delivery guy joins a secretive organisation voted to protect animal rights. The animals protected? Giant dinosaur-like beings, the kaiju, living on an alternate Earth.
Year of publication: 2022
6 UPGRADE, by Blake Crouch
As his body and his mind begins to change, one man embarks in a desperate search for answers: why was his genome hacked? and by whom?
Year of publication: 2022
7 HOW HIGH WE GO IN THE DARK, by Sequoia Nagamatsu
An ancient virus is unleashed from the melting Antartica. Across generations and hundreds of years, mankind is reshaped, from funerary skyscrapers to talking pigs.
Year of publication: 2022
8 VENOMOUS LUMPSUCKER, by Ned Beauman
Biobanks preserve the DNA of extinct species. Or so they did, until they were attacked. Now a misfitting duo is in search of the smartest fish on the planet, the venomous lumpsucker. Has it gone extinct as well?
Year of publication: 2022
9 TO BE TAUGHT, IF FORTUNATE, by Becky Chambers
In the 22nd century, space colonists have abandoned the attempts yo terraform planets. Instead, they adapt their bodies to the hostile conditions of the new worlds, using synthetic biology.
Year of publication: 2019
10 UNDER THE EYE OF THE BIG BIRD, by Hiromi Kawakami
The human race is on the verge of extinction, and it lives fragmented in small tribes peppering the Earth. Humans are evolved by AI agents, produced in factories by mixing their cells to those of other animals.
Year of publication: 2016
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