Good biology sci-fi

As someone who loves science fiction and works on biology, I’ve long been disappointed how little famous science fiction engaged with interesting extrapolations of biological technologies. Over the past few years (as of 2024), I’ve made a concerted effort to find and read a good fraction of hard(ish) science fiction with a focus on or central conceit based on biotechnology. In the process, I’ve read a good amount of mediocre stuff and a smaller amount of good stuff. This post is a living catalog of the latter.

These are all books I personally liked and recommend. That said, despite being a small niche, biology-themed science fiction has a few sub-niches, which will appeal to different audiences. For example, action movies are my guilty pleasure, so I have a soft spot for books like Upgrade based on the “genetically enhanced supersoldier” premise (even if they eventually subvert it). In blurbs, I try to point out which niche certain books fall into, but as always, YMMV.

If you have other books you’d recommend that aren’t listed here, send me an email or comment!

Two other disclaimers:

1. I am using Amazon Affiliate links here.

2. I try to avoid explicit spoilers in these mini-reviews but where necessary to make my point, I will include them.

Recommendations

Books

• Darkome by Hannu Rajaniemi: I was lucky enough to get to read this early and it is far and away the best in the genre (and therefore on this list). Hannu is the rare combination of a great writer — The Quantum Thief series is one of my all time favorites — and working expert in the domain — Hannu has spent the past decade working on bio, and it shows. The main character, the antagonists, and nearly everyone in between act like 3-dimensional people with realistic motivations and actions dictated by those motivations. As a result, characters on both sides of the philosophical through line of the novel come off sounding persuasive.
  
  The science is also great. Much of the book revolves around what ubiquitous, wearable mRNA technology would unlock, and here Hannu just absolutely crushes it. All the possibilities Hannu describes are based off of scientifically grounded extrapolations of what better mRNA delivery and near realtime synthesis would enable. He just makes you realize how big a deal this would be. My personal favorite are the senses, but I don’t want to spoil them so will just leave as a placeholder.
  
  I wrote up a Twitter-ized version of this take here in case you want even more gushing.
  

• Morphotrophic by Greg Egan: Greg Egan is one of, if not the best, hard science fiction writers out there and his first real foray into biology does not disappoint. In general, many hard sci-fi books start from the kernel of, “what if this one scientific fact were different?” But I haven’t seen many authors do this for biology as opposed to physics. (The Left Hand of Darkness may be another example, but I embarrassingly haven’t read it yet.)
  
  Morphotrophic is a very successful entry in this category. It takes the premise of a world in which cells don’t “make permanent commitments” to their organisms of origin. Instead, in Morphotrophic, cells will ‘decide’ to leave an organism and migrate to another. The book explores various implications of this as well as showing parts of the scientific journey to understand it.
  
  In terms of scientific accuracy, while Egan had the idea for Morphotrophic independently, he put off writing it because he couldn’t figure out how to make it plausible until he stumbled upon Michael Levin’s work. If you know where to look for them, Levin’s ideas pop up throughout the book. As a result, given the premise, the rest of the science felt logically sound to me.

• The Quiet War series by Paul McAuley: I really like The Quiet War. That’s why it’s on this list of “books I like enough to recommend.” The thing I like most is the ecological worldbuilding. The books take place in a world where a mix of frontier types, environmentalist techno-optimist synthetic biologists, and transhumanists have left Earth to live on a mix of other planets and asteroids in the solar system. McAuley does an awesome job of sketching out these diverse habitats and showing how synthetic biology could enable such terraforming. McAuley’s training as a botanist really shines here, describing biology at a level of technical depth and detail that I’ve only seen Peter Watts compare to.
  
  Unfortunately, McAuley’s strengths with worldbuilding are offset by his deficits in plot and character development. In both The Quiet War and his other books, McAuley’s supposedly highly intelligent characters are painfully naive. I recognize this is capturing a trope about a certain type of intellectual but, especially in The Quiet War, this applies for entire groups of people to a degree that drove me absolutely nuts. I also found some of the characters simultaneously unlikeable and relatively shallow. This is a common sci-fi issue, but it’s exacerbated by the fact that these books are quite long and written from multiple viewpoints, so you up stuck trudging through certain characters’ chapters just to make sure I knew what happened.
  
  Still though, I like these books and would recommend them, just with reservations. I think they’re great for someone who just wants to geek out over how waste disposal on a moon of Mars might work and can trudge through some not great character arcs. On the other hand, I’d recommend starting with something shorter and potentially easier to a novice sci-fi fan who is neither desperately looking for another biology-centered sci-fi book nor a space and/or ecology geek.

• Children of Time and Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky: If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if we uplifted other, non-mammalian species, these are the books for you. Tchaikovsky explores this question for (slight spoiler) one species in each book. For me, the highlight was seeing Tchaikovsky extrapolate how key features of each species’s cognition would affect their social organization when combined with roughly human level intelligence. Unlike some of the others, besides the premise, these books aren’t that heavy on in the weeds biology so much as cognitive psychology and social organization. Tchaikovsky also writes relatively compelling characters, although there were one or two duds.
  
  There is a third book in the series, Children of Memory, but unfortunately I barely got through it and so am not including it on this list. It may have been a wrong place, wrong time situation, but I still can’t recommend it given my experience.

• Blindsight and Echopraxia by Peter Watts: I love Peter Watts’ writing¹. He’s unmatched when it comes to turning scientific research into horrifying science fiction premises/characters. Unlike other authors, he has range, spanning alternative cognition (in both biological and artificial beings) as well as plain old biology. The books are easy to spoil, so I won’t say too much, but one of the many cool ideas Watts manages to make seem plausible is, “what if vampires were a real, ancient, hyperintelligent, sapient predator that humans managed to mostly kill off by taking advantage of their perceptual adversarial examples and murderous introversion? And then, what if we brought them back to function as human trading algorithms for hedge funds?” This might sound ridiculous or suspension of disbelief breaking, but it’s totally not. Watts is trained as a biologist and relies on that training to make it all feel (at least to me) surprisingly possible.
  
  On top of that, Watts has something so many sci-fi writers lack, style. I mean, who else could start a book with a description of waking up from coldsleep and have the reader on the edge of their seat?² It’s important to be aware though that Watts’ style comes with a certain vibe that’s not for everyone. By that I mean, Watts is bone chillingly dark. We’re talking body horror plus existential nihilism plus a fair bit of plain old violence grimdark. If you want to get a taste, check out some of the short stories I linked in the footnote. So, if that’s the sort of thing you can’t handle (or just don’t want to), then you may want to stay away.

• House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds: a dynasty of clones running around in generation ships. Less hard sci-fi than Reynolds’ other stuff but one of the more interesting takes on the challenges of coordination over galactic time and space scales as well as the psychological effects of living through entire civilizations rising and falling.

• Upgrade by Blake Crouch: Upgrade is a total guilty pleasure for me. It’s a near future thriller in a world where genetic engineering has been criminalized after a catastrophe, and a Homeland Security like agency goes around busting underground bio labs. While there is a strong element of wish fulfillment and the science is not hard in the way Greg Egan’s physics is hard, the scientific terms used are usually reasonably accurate. Combined with the fast-moving plot, this is enough for me to highly recommend this to anyone who enjoys action movies and likes biology.

• Change Agent by Daniel Suarez: I intentionally put Upgrade and Change Agent next to each other because they’re surprisingly similar. Keep the thriller genre and underground biolabs but now, instead of a Homeland Security like agency in the US, we have Interpol in Southeast Asia. In my opinion, Change Agent’s key scientific conceit — a genetic payload that alters appearance — is less plausible, and if I was going to pick one of the two to recommend, I’d recommend Upgrade. That said, it’s a pretty easy read and I still enjoyed it enough to include it here.

Classics

• Blood Music by Greg Bear: This is an old one, and frankly not my favorite, but I’m including it out of respect to Greg Bear, one of the science fiction greats (RIP). The premise is: what if you gave bacteria cognition, injected them into a person, and then they kept getting smarter? It’s a zany idea with cool descriptions and some fun sub-ideas but uncompelling, flat characters and questionable science. If you want to understand the lineage of biology-themed sci-fi, you may want to read it, but otherwise I’d skip it.

• Schismatrix Plus by Bruce Sterling: Based on the premise of a future in which “Shapers” — genetically and mentally enhanced humans — and “Mechanists” — heavily modified cyborgs — battle for political control of the solar system, Sterling’s writing influenced at least several of the other authors on this page. Similar to Blood Music, this one isn’t my favorite, as I didn’t love the characters and found the science a bit shallow. It is definitely influential and a ‘classic’ though, so if you’re going for comprehensiveness, you should probably at least try it.

Short stories

• 0wnz0red: This stories a little hokey and the science is pretty unrealistic but it’s one of the things that got me and kept me excited about bio, so I have to include it. I’ve been told by others who haven’t been reading message boards since they were 13 that they find the l33t-speak extremely annoying, but it doesn’t bother me.

• Vaccine season by Hannu Rajaniemi (for purchase as part of this anthology): In my mind, a spiritual precursor to Darkome. Explores a world in which COVID level or worse plagues are common and must be stopped by seasonally updated vaccines. The story is told through the lens of a family conflict. Like all of Hannu’s stuff, I highly recommend it, although I suspect for some having to buy the whole anthology may be a blocker.

• Models of Life by Abhishaike Mahajan: Awesome fictional vision piece on the endgame of predictive models in biology.

1. If you want short story samples before jumping into the deep end, I’m a fan of Malak and The Things.

2. “Imagine you are Siri Keeton. You wake in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty days. You can feel your blood, syrupy with dobutamine and leuenkephalin, forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months on standby. The body inflates in painful increments: blood vessels dilate, flesh peels apart from flesh, ribs crack in your ears with sudden unaccustomed flexion. Your joints have seized up through disuse. You’re a stick man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae.”