Being Human in Dehumanising Worlds

by Cy Dethan
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5 books
I’m always drawn to outsiders and outcasts in fiction. Unreliable narrators at odds with their worlds and themselves, struggling to come to terms with an everyday existence that alienates them. The worlds these characters inhabit pressure them to share themselves ever more broadly, even at the risk of losing whatever grip they still hold on their own identity. It’s an itch in my brain that I scratch at constantly in both my reading and writing, and this list is a cross-section of books where I’ve felt that itch acutely.
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Darkly Dreaming Dexter

Jeff Lindsay, 2005
If you only know Dexter Morgan from the TV adaptations, then you don’t really know Dexter Morgan. He’s a monster, an ultimate outsider whose insincere interactions with the world are entirely mediated through the carefully constructed identity he hides behind. At the same time, he clings with a fanatic’s desperation to a second false reality, the lie that he can control the ‘Dark Passenger’ version of himself by directing its attention toward only the truly deserving. He lashes himself to that frail fiction even when presented with a shadow of his own mind that’s out there doing what he only dreams of, and this first volume of his story shows that struggle in its purest form.

When Gravity Fails

George Alec Effinger, 2014
Marîd Audran is a rarity in cyberpunk fiction. In a genre that tends to treat physical bodies as replaceable inconveniences in need of constant upgrade, Audran prides himself on using only his natural gifts and abilities to survive. He has spent his life systematically dropping out of the religious, social and technological conventions of his time, until he’s finally made an offer he dare not refuse. The impact of this fundamental shift in Audran’s circumstances ripples through all of his business and personal relationships, and his very sense of self becomes something pliable and slippery in his grasp. In a society where personal identity is a matter of plug-and-play technology, Audran’s evolution comes at the cost of becoming a stranger to his own mind.

The Electric State

Simon Stålenhag, 2018
Simon Stålenhag’s artwork is breathtaking, and The Electric State is one of his most powerful and persuasive books. Taken on a head-spinning road trip through a world in terminal decline, we’re presented with a flurry of snapshots featuring decommissioned war robots, abandoned towns and a thinned-out human population that’s increasingly retreating into the hypnotic pseudo-realities offered by neurocaster technology. Along the way, we’re shown what it takes to hold onto your humanity in a lost society where people willingly waste away to bones or dissolve their consciousnesses into drone-like gestalts rather than remove their headsets and face the world as it is.

Leviathan Falls

James S. A. Corey, 2021
You’d be within your rights to cry foul for the slotting of the ninth entry in a long-running series into a list like this. However, you could needle-drop on any book in the Expanse set and find justification for its inclusion here. The Expanse deals explicitly throughout its run with what it means to retain our essential humanity as our species fragments and transforms. Generations of people live their entire lives in space, alien super-weapons deconstruct and repurpose our biology and a lone madman attempts to unite us all as a single collective consciousness in the face of absolute extinction.

Metal Made Flesh

A Cyberpunk Anthology
Jeremy Biggs, 2016
Full disclosure: I know the creators of this book and have contributed stories to some of its spin-off comic anthologies. That said, there’s no way I could have made this list without allocating a slot to Metal Made Flesh. A fallen soldier determined to cut out every last cell of human frailty within her. A psychopathic assassin trapped in a child’s body. A playboy prince transformed into a deformed war machine. Each of them living on borrowed time, wrestling with the last scraps of their own humanity as humanity itself hangs on the verge of extinction. Transhumanist science fiction at its most ferociously inventive.