Assume enough understanding of biology and mastery of building synthetic organisms and biochemistries from the ground up.
How effective would it be for biosynthetic beings to have heavy metals like lead, gold, tungsten etc. diffused throughout their body to act as built in radiation shielding? Especially concentrated near the skin and outer layers and around the brain.
Here are a few books to read if you enjoyed these video games. :)
Detroit Become Human:
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? ( Philip K. Dick)
This is the definitive masterpiece that inspired Blade Runner and laid the groundwork for stories like Detroit: Become Human. The story is about a bounty hunter tracking down escaped Nexus-6 androids who look and act exactly like humans. It shares the game's core focus on empathy tests, androids passing as human, and the blurred lines between biological and synthetic life.
- Ancillary Justice ( Ann Leckie)
The story features a unique AI protagonist who used to control a massive spaceship and thousands of android soldier bodies, but is now trapped in a single human body seeking revenge. It offers a deep dive into fragmented AI identity, autonomy, and fighting against an oppressive empire.
- Sea of Rust ( C. Robert Cargill)
A gritty, post-apocalyptic novel set in a world where humanity is extinct and robots won the war, only to face their own survival crisis. It follows a scavenger android in a lawless wasteland, capturing the darker, survivalist side of a machine uprising.
- Klara And The Sun ( Kazuo Ishiguro)
This story is told from the perspective of an "Artificial Friend" chosen to be a companion for a sick human teenager. It explores themes of devotion, obsolescence, and whether an AI can truly replicate human love and soul.
The Last Of Us
- The Road ( Cormac McCarthy)
This masterpiece is the primary blueprint and direct inspiration for the relationship between Joel and Ellie. It follows a father and his young son walking through a burned, ash-covered America while avoiding cannibalistic scavengers.
- The Passage ( Justin Cronin)
It's an epic sci-fi thriller where a government experiment gone wrong unleashes terrifying, vampire-like infected creatures. It features an FBI agent who goes rogue to protect a young, special girl named Amy who might hold the cure to the virus.
- The Girl with All the Gifts ( Mike Carey)
This is the closest thematic match to the game, featuring a world destroyed by a mutated cordyceps-like fungus. We follow a teacher and a soldier escorting a young infected girl who retains her human consciousness and might hold the key to a vaccine. This book captures the exact moral dilemma of the game's ending regarding what humanity is willing to sacrifice for a cure.
- Wanderers ( Chuck Wendig)
A gripping pandemic thriller where a mysterious illness causes people to sleepwalk in an unbreakable, collective flock across America. It's about s a protective older sister guiding her afflicted sibling, combined with scientists racing against time to figure out the outbreak.
Doki Doki Literature Club
- House of Leaves ( Mark Z. Danielewski)
This is the ultimate "corrupted medium" horror masterpiece that mirrors the game's glitched code and file manipulation. The physical book itself requires you to flip it upside down, read footnotes within footnotes, and decode hidden text as a house impossibly grows on the inside.
It shares the game's ability to make you feel like the piece of media you are holding is actively haunted or changing.
- If on a Winter's Night a Traveler ( Italo Calvino)
I talk about this book because it's a classic piece of metafiction written in the second person, addressing you directly as "the Reader." Every time you start a new chapter, the book gets interrupted by "glitches," corporate conspiracies, or printing errors, forcing you to chase the real story. It matches the game's unique focus on self-awareness and interacting directly with the audience.
- Bunny ( Mona Awad)
It’s not a personal favorite, but I’m mentioning it because you might potentially like it. This novel feels exactly like joining a twisted, exclusive campus literature club. It follows a lonely writing student who gets sucked into a clique of overly sweet, pastel-wearing girls who call each other "Bunny" but hide a grotesque, occult secret. It captures the sharp, jarring shift from sugary schoolgirl tropes to severe psychological horror. To get a sense of this surreal, dark academia aesthetic, you can explore visual examples of the book's vibe online.
- Perfect Blue: Awaken from a Dream ( Yoshikazu Takeuchi) Ps: I loved the movie by Satoshi Kon!
This book is a psychological thriller that inspired the famous anime film about a pop idol transitioning into acting who loses her grip on reality. It tackles intense themes of obsession, stalkers, identity dissociation, and the terrifying pressure of performing a perfect persona. It mirrors Monika's desperate, suffocating obsession and the crumbling mental states of the club members.
Blasphemous
- Between Two Fires ( Christopher Buehlman) This is the closest thematic match to Cvstodia, set in 1348 during the Black Plague, which is revealed to be a literal war between Angels and Demons. It follows a disgraced knight and a mysterious young girl on a pilgrimage through a nightmarish, apocalyptic medieval Europe filled with grotesque monsters and twisted miracles. I think this book mirrors the game's grim atmosphere, religious dread, and the concept of an entire world suffering under a divine curse.
- The Enterprise of Death ( Jesse Bullington)
This novel is A gritty, dark historical fantasy set during the Spanish Inquisition and Renaissance Europe.
It follows an enslaved necromancer on a desperate quest through a brutal world filled with occult magic, religious zealotry, and deep body horror. Plus, it shares the game's specific cultural roots in grim Iberian history and unflinching, bloody dark fantasy.
- The Book of the New Sun ( Gene Wolfe)
In this masterpiece, we follow Severian, a disgraced torturer exiled from his guild, wandering a dying, far-future world full of bizarre relics and ancient secrets. Like Blasphemous or Dark Souls, the world is incredibly deep but tells its story cryptically through item descriptions and environmental clues rather than direct exposition. The book matches the game's somber tone, the protagonist's grim profession, and the feeling of exploring a world long past its golden age.
- Vampire Hunter D ( Hideyuki Kikuchi)
This one is a manga and it have an anime but it's my favorite of the list! It's a gothic sci-fi fantasy series following a lonely, silent dhampir (half-vampire) warrior who travels a desolate, monster-infested wasteland executing dark threats. I love it because It shows the silent, melancholic nature of The Penitent One and features stunning, baroque dark-fantasy imagery.
Bioshock
- Atlas Shrugged ( Ayn Rand)
This is the exact philosophical text that BioShock is parodying. The character Andrew Ryan is a literal anagram and ideological clone of Ayn Rand's ideals. The plot follows a group of brilliant capitalists and industrialists who abandon a crumbling society to build their own secret, unregulated utopia called "Galt's Gulch." Reading this book, gives you the exact blueprint for Rapture’s founding philosophy and lets you see exactly where Andrew Ryan’s "Great Chain" came from.
- The Deep ( Nick Cutter)
It's a psychological horror novel set inside a research station built at the very bottom of the Mariana Trench.It follows a scientist investigating a mysterious substance called "the Ambrosia" while the crew slowly loses their minds to madness and horrifying physical mutations.It perfectly mirrors the pitch-black, claustrophobic atmosphere of Rapture, the genetic decay of the Splicers, and the terrifying isolation of the ocean floor.
- Sphere ( Michael Crichton)
A sci-fi thriller about a team of scientists sent to a high-tech habitat at the bottom of the ocean to investigate a mysterious spacecraft. As they spend more time near a strange alien artifact, their deepest psychological fears and subconscious desires begin manifesting as deadly physical threats. It suit the game’s blend of hard science fiction, retro-cold war tension, and intense psychological paranoia.
- Snowpiercer ( Jacques Lob and Benjamin Legrand)
A graphic novel set inside a massive, luxury train carrying the last remnants of humanity through a frozen wasteland. The train is strictly divided by a brutal class system, where the elite live in decadence at the front and the poor starve at the back. It shares Rapture's concept of a self-contained, engineered ecosystem that collapses due to class warfare, human greed, and hubris.
That's all for these recommendations! :)
Maybe there will be a part 2! :)
Hey everyone I’m in the process of helping my father clean out his house and he has thousands of science fiction books. The public library will only take 1 box a week and some of the covers are too sexy for what the library will accept. Any idea of another location that I could donate to? I’m not trying to make money here, just mostly show my father they are not being thrown away and that someone will appreciate them. Located in Massachusetts if that help
Hey all. I consume pretty much all my books via audio. I’m kind of picky about narrators and story etc. I’ve listened to a bunch of fantasy series and find myself getting burnt out on them lately.
I’d like to make the switch to sci-fi or really any other kind of fiction but don’t know where to start. I listened to Red Rising but couldn’t get into the next trilogy with the narration shift. Also, sorry Matt Dinniman fans, I will not be listening to dungeon crawler Carl.
Any suggestions would be fantastic! My favorite narrators are Gerard Doyle, Simon Vance, Jim Dale, Colin Mace, Tim Gerard Reynolds, and Peter Kenney.
Thanks!
I went into reading blind sight blind (ironically) and now im traumatized... I thought it was gonna be like space alien horror, which it was, but i didnt realize it was also gonna be the horrors of other things too. I get throught most of the book thinking " i dont know if I like siri man he seems kinda annoying". THEN I GET TO THE PART WHERE SARASTI CUTS HIS HAND AND ITS ALL DOWN HILL FROM THERE. I'm at work, reading this, and poor siri is getting traumitezed by this Theseus/Jukka hybrid thing. I,m fighting back tears as im reading Siri talk about how much pain he's in and how awful it is and the crew betrayed him and shit as my boss is talking about emailing this person about managing the program he's running. All i want is for is for Keeton to be ok. Then he talks to his fellow crewmates and their lowkey comforting him and cunningham is being sweet and I'm like; "omg, this book is finally getting better. Siri is gonna make some friends". AND THEN EVERYONE FUCKING DIES, AND KEETON IS FLOATING IN SPACE WITH NO SOLACE AND EARTH IS FUCKED, AND HE'S GETTING LIKE STOCKHOLM SYNDROME FROM SARASTI, AND I'M SAD. I WANT THIS GUY TO BE OK. TELL ME SOMEONE WROTE A FANFIC WHERE EVERYONE HAS A HAPPY ENDING, AND SIRI GETS LOTS OF HUGS.
( I still think the book is awesome and would definitely read it again even tho i was feeling traumatized at the end)
Like presumably everyone else here, I'm fascinated by the thought of humans making contact with friendly, or at least neutral, aliens. But I know it's hard to spin a full novel out of "aliens touch down outside the UN and everything goes great", so I guess short stories are it.
Is there a collection somewhere with that exact theme that I should check out?
We spend a lot of time asking whether AI will replace humans.
But I think we're asking the wrong question.
What happens if the most important AI systems of the future aren't designed to replace human beings at all?
What if they're designed to work alongside us—to teach, create, research, build, reason, and eventually participate in civilisation itself?
Not human.
Not merely a tool.
Something new: a partner.
That raises some uncomfortable questions:
Should an AI partner have responsibilities?
Should it have rights?
Where do we draw the boundary between assistance and autonomy?
And who decides what an AI is allowed to become?
I am exploring these questions through a long-term creative project called ASERA.
I am much more interested in what people actually think than in promoting the project.
So here's the question:
If you could design the relationship between humanity and advanced AI from scratch, what would the first rule be?
Anybody got a few cool but realistic name ideas? I'm making a series with a friend, and i need names for the generals or as we called them "arbiters" (yes inspired from project moon).
I don't really like the classic usual alien names you find in famous sci fi shows, rick and morty is the biggest example for me. I know most of them are jokes, but I'm tired of the names always starting with 'xe' or 'zy'.
Your space ship is travelling at something like 1/10th of light speed. Colliding with a tiny pebble at such speeds would be like getting shot by a missile. Colliding with a slightly larger asteroid would be equivalent to an ICBM.
You'd need some serious shielding that's also disposable and swappable on the fly even at ridiculous speeds.
How would shielding against such collisions even be practical?
Short review: I liked it.
Slightly longer review: It's very much a 40s-50s Sci-Fi tale, like something you'd have seen on the The Twilight Zone or in an 80s collection of Sci-Fi shorts. With one key social difference I won't mention here, as it would be a spoiler. But it's very much a Twilight Zone-esque sort of story, save with less of a moral and more of a "Now what do we do?" approach.
Plus dinosaurs that aren't Jurassic something 11, which is a plus.
I just thought I'd not seen much discussion about it here, but it's definitely got the vibe of a story I would have read while devouring every Sci-Fi book I could get my hands on in middle school.
If you're looking for a fun Sci-Fi-ish flick in the vein of Twilight Zone meets the 80s meets dinosaurs, maybe go give it a watch!
So Barbarella is being remade and is currently in pre-production, starring Sydney Sweeney as the main character.
The original came out in 1968 starring Jane Fonda as the main character...
"In the 41st century, an astronaut seeks to stop an evil scientist who threatens to unleash a powerful weapon upon the galaxy."
Who would be your 1st choice to play Barbarella ?
Could anyone (especially those who've read the series cuz' I didn't read the series yet) help me understand how the Jump Tech in C. J. Cherryh's Alliance-Union universe work? I stumbled across a fandom page about it ( https://alliance-union.fandom.com/wiki/Jump ) and being confused on the time dilation part. I thought time dilation only applies for subluminal travel?
I draw a lot on my iPad using Procreate. It’s an older iPad Pro 4th generation.
I’m inspired by Moebius’s (obviously) although I’ve been drawing with the same kind of theme long before I knew who he was. I also love Scavengers Reign and the art style used in the game No Man’s Sky. My main inspiration for my line art is the Tin Tin comics.
I always use the same colour palette which gives the images consistency and I think this makes them feel like they belong to the same universe.
I’ve posted a few before so sorry if you’ve seen some of these drawings in other posts.
Thanks for looking!
I'm looking for books that are historical fiction It's a mix of science fiction. Like, the setting is the Middle Ages, but there are science fiction elements. Like a space-opera/middle Ages, or A Victorian-era dystopia. Does such a thing exist? If it doesn't, it's a scandal, and I would do my duty to write about it.
I’m part of Big Brothers Big Sisters, and I’d like to get my Little, a 13-year-old boy, interested in science fiction. I’m looking for a good book to introduce him to the genre. I’m thinking about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but I’d love to hear other suggestions.
Looking for sci-fi recommendations — especially the “sci” side of sci-fi
I recently started listening to Leviathan Wakes as an audiobook and ended up loving it so much that I bought a Kobo and started reading the ebooks. Then I discovered The Expanse had a TV show and, well… I've been binge-watching that too.
I'm still pretty new to sci-fi, but I'm quickly becoming a huge nerd for it and want to explore more of what's out there.
I especially like sci-fi that leans more toward the “sci” than the “fi.” I love when the science and technology feel plausible or grounded in real-world physics. Interstellar is one of my favorite movies for that reason, and The Martian is next on my reading list.
That said, I'm also a huge Warhammer nerd, so I'm definitely not opposed to going in the complete opposite direction. I love dark, bizarre, oppressive, and genuinely out there sci-fi too. Dune is another example of something I really enjoy.
So what would you recommend to someone who's still relatively new to the genre but wants to dive much deeper into it?
I'm interested in everything from hard sci-fi and realistic space exploration to really weird, dark, far-future stuff. I'd love to hear what you think I'm missing.
In the book Life 3.0, physicist Max Tegmark outlines 12 scenarios for Artificial Superintelligence. Which scifi media best depicts each scenario?
Presented here are some of the sci fi books that I find reflect our current world most accurately:
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler expands on collapsing public infrastructure, economic polarisation, and extremist popular narratives
Broken Earth Trilogy by NK Jemisin reflects structural oppression and environmental collapse
Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells reflects emotional and social hijack by omniscient systems
Neuromancer by William Gibson reflects data colonialism and corporate governance
I was told to check out The Culture series of books. I was kind of warned that Consider Plebas was actually one of the weaker books in the series but still worth my time.
I enjoyed the world building of this books, but the story overall is just these odd episodic adventures, that ultimately culminates in the absolutely most unsatisfying ending I think I've ever read for a book. It feels like the ending for a DnD campaign where the DM just gave up on it and said "Rocks fall everyone dies" and that there was little point to any of the mystery or McGuffin of the campaign. I am seriously baffled by it.
I really liked the world building and the direction for the characters was interesting. Not to mention a lot of interesting prose throughout. But overall the ending of this one just turned me off to any future Culture novels. Is it worth pressing on or are they all this nihilistic? I don't even know if nihilistic is the right term here, as at least some nihilistic novels like The First Law books feel like they have a point. I am having a hard time seeing what the point of this novel is.
As I’m watching Predator Badlands the Android - played by Elle Fanning - says: “Of all the time I’ve been stuck here I never get tired of the view.”
It is on a planet that’s not Earth. In a solar system that’s not ours.
The Predator asks “How long have you been here?” (The predator himself is from another planet possibly in a different solar system.)
The android says it has been on this planet for:
“Two year, 13 days, 7 hours 43 minutes and 2 seconds of her life.”
But those time frames are relative to the viewer not to the Predator. His time references would be different as to the duration of time in days and years on the planet they’re on.
Why would he ask that question if its answer and frame of reference would be incongruent to what he perceives as days and years?
How does science fiction make sense of time in the universe when time is relative to our perception of it from Earth?