If you need to take a break from the dystopian horrors of the news, why not watch the dystopian horrors of Black Mirror on Netflix? Season Four of the science fiction anthology series dropped today, and the six new episodes feature more dark twists on contemporary life. It's science fiction, sure, but set just a short clock tick in the future. In Black Mirror you can visit a museum of high-tech crime, use a dating app that controls exactly how long your date will last, or drop out of the world into your personal virtual reality game. If you're looking for more science fiction tales in the vein of Black Mirror, here are eight great books to read that pair nicely with some of the best episodes the series has ever produced.
While Black Mirror is often described as a satire, the show is rarely funny. That is until this season’s stand-out, "USS Callister," which wraps a creepy dystopian conceit inside of a hilarious Star Trek spoof. Jesse Plemons is a picked-on loser known in the real world, but in his virtual reality video game he's a Kirk-esque captain of a "Space Fleet" ship. Everyone onboard loves and adores him. Or, rather, they pretend to, as they are actually the enslaved digital mind clones of the co-workers he hates. It is a tyrannical yet sanitized world where the women wear skimpy space outfits, yet all genitals have been erased to keep things wholesome. The feature-length episode is a timely attack on toxic nerd masculinity and a pretty good send up of Star Trek.
Charles Yu's debut novel is a hilarious homage of science fiction tropes with a moving story at its core. Charles Yu (the character) is a time machine repairman who travels through spacetime to save people who messed up things trying to jump back in time and change the past. Yu himself lives in Mirror Universe 31, which is "not big enough for space opera and anyway not zoned for it.” When he’s not fixing time machines, he’s jumping through the multiverse trying to find his lost father.
A woman wakes up in a strange house, confused and scared. People in animal masks record her with their cellphones yet refuse to offer any help. Many Black Mirror episodes are dark and creepy, but "White Bear" is the show's purest descent into horror. The science fiction twist at the end might feel a little cheap, although it is done better than the similar "Shut Up and Dance," but there’s no doubt that "White Bear" is the stuff of nightmares.
A young girl wakes up in a cave, confused and injured. Although she's not actually a girl. Shori is a 53 year-old Ina—Butler's spin on vampires—in the body of a young girl, and she needs to feed. Shori has to scramble to survive and discover her past while fleeing flame-wielding assailants. Like the best Black Mirror episodes, Butler uses science fiction metaphors for social commentary while never forgetting to tell a great tale.
The first (and so far only) Black Mirror Christmas special is just the thing to dampen your yuletide celebrations. This very dark episode is brightened by Jon Hamm, who charms you before sliding in the knife as he relates three different stories that all weave together into one truly shocking ending. The stories revolve around two pieces of fictional technology: the "Z-Eye" device that augments one's vision and allows you to block out the existence of other people and the "cookie" that can clone one's mind.
Karen Russell is widely celebrated for her fabulist fiction like Swamplandia! and St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, but don't sleep on her novella Sleep Donation. In this Black Mirror-esque future, humans are so burnt out from our screen addictions that most of us simply can't sleep. The plague of insomnia is held at bay by technologically assisted "sleep donation" that transfers the ZZZs from those who can nap to those who desperately need to. Like "White Christmas," though not as dark, Sleep Donation contemplates the morality of fictional technology .
Black Mirror isn't exactly known for its subtlety, and the social media satire "Nosedive" is about as, er, on the nose as you can get. Still, the season 3 opener about a world where everyone is faux-nice to keep their social media rating intact—ratings that can determine what car you drive and where you live—is one of the most memorable episodes. Filmed in colors as bright as the most brilliant Instagram filter, the episode is filled with absurdities that are only slight exaggerations of our current social media obsessed age.
Pastoralia was written before Tinder swipes or Facebook likes existed, but stories like "Sea Oak"—about a man working at a gender-flipped Hooters whose employment is dependent on scoring "Honeypie" on his customer "Cute Rating"—similarly skewer our modern corporate-controlled world with both humor and heart. The rest of the stories are excellent as well, especially the titular story about the drudgery of working in a caveman exhibit in a dystopian theme park.
The first Black Mirror episode to win an Emmy is also the only episode to portray a positive technological future. The episode follows a shy young woman named Yorkie who falls in love with party girl Kelly, following her from one dance club to the next in different decades. Soon we realize that they aren't part of our reality, but a digital world where the living can interact with the deceased. It's a sweet, melancholic episode that gives fans a little breathing room between the sci-fi horrors.
While the characters in "San Junipero" travel freely through (digital) decades, Clare Abshire is forced to live a sequential existence while her husband, Harry, is thrown through time randomly. Yet their passion for each other survives the tangled timelines. Like "San Junipero," Niffenegger weaves a memorable and unconventional love story out of a science fiction idea.
"The Entire History of You" is the only Black Mirror episode without a writing credit from series creator Charlie Brooker, yet it is somehow the quintessential episode. It takes our world as we live in it, but introduces one new piece of technology and sees how that one change might affect how we live, work, and love. In this case, the technology is the "grain," an implant that records everything a person sees, allowing them to replay their memories in perfect detail.
This year's Nobel prize winner, Kazuo Ishiguro, wrote one of the most moving science fiction novels of recent decades in Never Let Me Go. Like "The Entire History of You," Ishiguro's world is our banal reality with one science fiction element thrown in.... although I won't spoil the twist. Exploring the memories of a "carer," Kathy, as she reflects back on the friendships at a mysterious boarding school in the British countryside, the novel's terrible conceit slowly dawns on the reader.
Modern dating lives are already ruled by apps like Tinder and OkCupid, but in "Hang the DJ" the dating apps have become tyrants. Here, singles are told exactly how long their date can last. Georgina Campbell and Joe Cole have great chemistry as two people getting along swimmingly on their first date… until the system tells them they only have twelve hours to be together. A cousin to "San Junipero," "Hang the DJ" is a sweet sci-fi rom-com with a Black Mirror edge.
Alissa Nutting's 2017 novel explores the intersection of love and technology in a novel about a woman fleeing her controlling tech bro husband. Hazel is a poor nobody, but her husband is the CEO of Gogol Industries, a gigantic technology company intent on running every aspect of everyone’s lives. He's implanted a chip in Hazel’s brain to let him download everything she sees. Sex dolls and dolphin attacks are also involved. It's both a weird and wacky thriller and a clever meditation on relationships and techno-surveillance in the digital age.
Although it's hard to forget Black Mirror's opening pig-fucking episode—and lord knows we've tried—it was the second episode, "Fifteen Million Merits," where the show really hit its stride. Set in a far-off future dystopia of degrading reality TV, pointless video games, and corporate control of every surface, "Fifteen Million Merits" shows us a dark reflection of our late capitalist society. It also features a great performance from Daniel Kaluuya, who you probably know from the brilliant science fiction horror film Get Out, which itself would be a great Black Mirror episode if the show was as smart about race as it is about capitalism.
Gary Shteyngart’s dystopia depicts an America where the government is crippled by debt, only High Net Worth Individuals can afford health care, white "murricans" rant about immigrants, and the public is driven rabid by extreme right wing news channels like FoxLiberty-Ultra. So, it's more or less a nonfictional account of 2017. But Shteyngart's 2010 novel isn't just eerily prescient, it's also hilarious and the perfect lens to look at America's troubling present and possible future.
