The best literary fiction about cyborgs and bioengineering

Truly a book for the ages, how could I not recommend this? It is THE iconic book about a constructed being and his consequent travails.

Made by Victor Frankenstein from all sorts of collected detritus, when the monster opens his “yellow, watery eyes,” the scientist flees from him and never looks back. The monster is left to negotiate the world on his own, but much like a newborn baby, he is ignorant and unequipped to do so.

I love how, unlike the popular concept of the monster, he is, in fact, a vegetarian, and at the start, very vulnerable and peaceful. He learns to read by sitting outside a cottage where he can hear the cottagers teaching a foreigner to read.

I wrote a whole novel about him, A Monster’s Notes, which transports him into the 21st century.

I love the exquisite writing and haunting narrative in this book—Ishiguro’s prose is masterful, his imagination precise and engrossing. He creates characters that are poignant, complex, and caught in a world beyond their control. Issues of bioengineering, of empathy, of powerlessness, are beautifully woven through the whole.

I am moved by how this book marries technology and deep emotion, the dystopian with the palpable reality of today’s world, and the rapidly changing technological milieu we live in.

Deadpool is an amazing, compelling character with a stunning story. I am probably among the last people—a middle aged woman—one would think of as responding to this comic, but it’s a brilliant and thought-provoking look at bioengineering and cruelty.

Deadpool, a powerful mercenary, gets struck down by a terrible disease. Weapon X offers to cure him—but at a price. Deadpool’s immune system becomes so over-active that he develops disfiguring lesions all over his body and must wear a body suit and mask to cover his now repulsive-looking face and body.

I found this comic very smart about the costs of technology and the complex feelings that arise from being on the receiving end of a biomedical experiment.

Although technically not about Cyborgs, this brilliant novel traces scientific experimentation and investigation through the 20th century—employing a tantalizing mixture of fact and fiction.

It opens with the strange fact of the Nazi commander Hermann Goring’s fingernails which are “stained a furious red” from his prolonged ingestion of dihydrocodeine, which “William Burroughs described as similar to heroin…”, and goes on to track how the gas, Zycone B, used in the concentration camps to kill the Jewish prisoners was in fact developed as an insecticide to preserve crops and save the lives of millions of people who would have otherwise died of starvation.

The terrible irony is that the scientist who developed Zyclon B received the Nobel Prize for his life-saving work against famine. You can’t make this stuff up.

Like Frankenstein, this is another iconic work about transformation, power and powerlessness, monstrousness and isolation.

Each time I read it, I am struck by how vivid the central image is, and how sad and stark: Gregor Samsa, who is a young salesman living with his parents and sister, wakes up one day to find that he is a giant cockroach.

Kafka is brilliant at inhabiting this bug-like man, all the details are convincing—what he likes to eat, how he moves. It is a powerful allegory about being shunned and different, and about family dynamics. I have read it many times and each time I am engrossed and filled with awe and admiration.