100 Books Like Fantastic Voyage

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.

This is my favorite book in the world.

In someone else’s hands, the tale of a global Nazi conspiracy to restore the Third Reich to its former glory by cloning Adolf Hitler would probably come off as utter insanity. But Levin makes you believe every word of it, funneling the story through the eyes of Nazi hunter Yakov Liebermann (based on Simon Wiesenthal) and infamous doctor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, Josef Mengele.

I really enjoyed this book firstly because of the complete plausibility of the scenario, an extraterrestrial pathogen that comes to earth about which we are powerless to do anything.

Crichton’s medical background is on solid display here, and it is intriguing to experience the author’s very first fiction effort, knowing, as we do, the many great stories to come in the ensuing years (Jurassic Park, etc.). I also very much enjoyed the idea of a group of talented people from a wide range of disciplines working together to tackle a challenge of immense importance. 

This is the novel that birthed television icon Steve Austin of The Six Million Dollar Man. It represents everything that makes the merger of man and technology worth reading about. As a young boy, I loved The Six Million Dollar Man—to the point that I wanted to write something like it. But as a young writer, I was enthralled by the technological expertise and human psychology that author Martin Caidin brought to the novel. This is the standard by which the melding of man and machine should be measured in literary fiction.

Steve Austin is practically the best that mankind has to offer: athlete, intellectual, astronaut, and test pilot. And while flight testing a sub-orbital lifting body, Austin is horribly injured. With skull and skeletal damage, the loss of both legs, an arm, an eye, and numerous other injuries, his life is essentially over. And it is only… show more.

Experimental Medicine is a classic, a clear and simple account of physiological research, well-illustrated with comprehensible examples (no molecular biology needed).

It is well worth reading if only because so many of the principles that French physician Claude Bernard pioneered have been largely forgotten. Most important is his demand for certainty: “Science permits no exceptions,” an injunction now more often forgotten than obeyed. Bernard would have been appalled by, for example, a famous choice experiment in which 60% of a large group of subjects choose a less-profitable option.

The experimenters concluded that individual humans (not just groups) show risk aversion, ignoring the 40% who did not. In a similar situation, Bernard would always seek the conditions that yield a 100% result. He gives an example where he was able to resolve uncertainty concerning the sensitivity of spinal roots.

We’re still waiting for any serious effort to achieve a Bernardian certainty… show more.

Known only to true devotees of medical ethics and the history of human research, Jay Katz’s hefty volume (1,150 pages) is a comprehensive encyclopedia of humans used as research material. Information-packed chapters cover everything from Chester Southam’s use of senile hospital patients in cancer cell injection studies during the 1960s, and the legal fallout from such indiscretions, to the ethical obligations of researchers, and the evolution of informed consent as a pillar of ethical human research. Impressive in both detail and scope, this imposing piece of scholarship is a valuable resource for anyone looking to learn the many moral and legal issues inherent in experimenting on humans. 

In this gripping courtroom drama, an explosion in Miracle Creek, Virginia, destroys the business of South Korean immigrants Pak and Young Yoo and puts their daughter Mary into a monthslong coma. As arguments mount against the woman accused of starting the fire, Young struggles with a question many immigrants must face. Maybe she shouldn’t have brought her child to the US, where Mary struggles as a teenager and where she was almost killed. The tension between the two generations resonated with me as a parent and immigrant. As Young hopes to discover who caused the explosion that killed two other people, she must also help Mary imagine a future in their adoptive country.

This book was such fun to read! It's really unusual in that it's told entirely by letters, emails, and text messages. It has no chapters and invites lots of flicking pages back and forth to go back and check things, so it's super interactive (I was glad I got the paperback!). I really liked that most of the characters are unlikeable, and none of them seem to like each other very much, either. I LOVE unlikeable characters.

On top of that, much of the information they give in the letters is unreliable at best or completely untrue at worst. This book is a murder mystery, but it takes ages to find out who's dead, and by the time I found out, I'd wanted most of the characters to have been killed off–they really are a nasty lot! This book was totally original and very clever, and I adored it from… show more.

I recommend these short stories for both younger and older readers. In the latter case, they may well be re-reads and if so, they are essential reading in that they lead the reader to reevaluate past aspirations and ambitions. Chekhov’s medical training is immediately apparent in his uncanny ability to dissect both personal and societal issues. 

Though the diagnosis is frequently abrupt and unexpected, the treatment is less obvious. For example, in Gooseberries, written in 1898 as part of a trilogy, the reader is left with no doubt about the diagnosis of the social pretentiousness and even cruelty of the central character, but the possibility that happiness is elusive lingers like the pervasive smell of tobacco on the armchair. These stories are a must-read by the fireside on a rainy night, with the wind howling outside.  

This superb biography is an engrossing account of the mysterious title surgeon and the doctor’s fascinating world. James Miranda Barry joined the British Army in 1813 as a regimental surgeon and served in colonial posts for the next fifty years. But Barry had been born Margaret Bulkley, an anatomical female—a surprise revealed after the doctor’s death.

Was Barry’s masquerade strategic, the doctor’s only route to a medical career? Was Barry a transgender person? I wondered if the “truth” would remain a mystery. Rachel Holmes persuaded me that the probable answer lies in a document “gathering dust” in Edinburgh’s medical school archives, a revelation she saves for the last chapter.