8 Books About Technology Run Amok

Player Piano, by Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut is a master at presenting horrific, dystopian, and disturbing premises with so much cranky humor, you almost forget how awful his imagined worlds were. In Player Piano, automation has made human labor in almost any form obsolete. While that sounds pretty good on a Monday morning when the alarm goes off, what it means in practice is billions of people all over the world living on welfare and bored out of their minds. In a world where self-driving trucks are delivering our beer, we’d all best start making plans for how to fill our spare time when all we have is spare time.

Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace
You may not think of this book as a story of technology—but at its heart, the premise cuts right to our modern-day, streaming-addicted lifestyle: a film that is so entertaining people can’t stop watching it, and in fact, would rather starve to death than do so. The Entertainment, as its called, is one of those simple ideas that haunts you, especially when you’re about to cue up your fifth Black Mirror episode of the day instead of standing up and accomplishing something (something aside from watching all of Black Mirror, I guess).

The Island of Doctor Moreau, by H.G. Wells
More than a century after its publication, Wells’ classic novel retains its power to horrify—a power that only increases as medicine advances. The question of whether or not we should do some of the things medical science is now capable of—or will shortly be capable of—will never be an easy one to answer. While Moreau’s insane experiments on animal/human hybrids may be a bit far-fetched no matter how far genetic science advances, the story demonstrates in horrific fashion just how much suffering awaits us if we ever decide that things like ethics and morals are holding back our ability to control the fundamental biology that makes each species unique—and makes us us.

The Ware Tetralogy, by Rudy Rucker
Robots in rebellion. Robots in rebellion living on the Moon. Who consume the brains of human beings in order to transform them into robots. Rucker’s classic series of cyberpunk novels doesn’t shy away from presenting an alternative to the sober, civilized robots in the Asimovian mode, constrained by Three Laws. Instead, his “Boppers” are woke, fiercely dedicated to natural selection, and ready to fight for what they see as theirs—which should scare the pants off of anyone who ever thought having a robot around the house would be cool.

Trucks, by Stephen King
This bonkers short story, which was turned into the bonkers film Maximum Overdrive, never really offers a sound explanation for how or why all the machines of the world suddenly become self-aware (and violently opposed to humanity). Instead, in classic King style, the story focuses on the horror of discovering just how surrounded you are by machinery you do not actually have any control over. All we have to do is glance out the window at all the cars parked outside to understand just how much trouble we’d be in if some alien force did animate the machines.

Cell, by Stephen King
King doesn’t go for subtlety in this 2006 novel either. When a mysterious signal broadcast to every cell phone turns the majority of the population into mindless, violent monsters, madness ensues. As society collapses, a few lucky (or unlucky) survivors try for safe havens, and King’s magic touch elevates the premise into a terrifying story predicated on our increasing interconnectedness. That connection we now share with almost everyone in the world should terrify us to some extent, because it’s a signal we can neither control or predict.

The Circle, by Dave Eggers
Eggers’ 2013 novel tackles the one piece of technology billions of us use on a daily basis—Facebook and its sibling social media platforms. Eggers zeros in on the real horror of these services: the transactional nature that our privacy takes on. Trading our information—our likes, dislikes, movements, and opinions—for a few scraps of convenient photo sharing and communication code is what horrifies him, and what will horrify you as you read this novel, and realize just how close we already are to the terrible world he describes.

Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro
The idea of extending your life always seems like a good one. If you could have some replacement organs grown so that your spoiled kidney, liver, or heart could be swapped out without any chance of rejection, why wouldn’t you? Except, of course, when you think about the sad, short lives of your clones, born and raised solely to keep your replacement parts warm until you need them. A lot of sci-fi presents technology as clean and sterile—encased in Apple-like white boxes. But the real horror of technology gone mad will be the visceral blood-and-guts cost.