8 Books to Read Once You’re Caught Up with HBO’s Westworld

Add in the fact that the robot actors are consistently proven to be the only beings with empathy in the park, and you’ve got a recipe for a lot of wild (and not so wild) speculation. How many of the park’s management staff are androids? Is everyone an android? Is Arnold still in the park? Do you think Ford ate Arnold’s liver, possibly with a nice chianti? Is Billie “the Man in Black”? Are they older and younger versions of the same man? Are there two timelines, or even three? Or more? What are the motivations of the corporation, or the Man in Black, or, come to think of it, literally everyone else?
We can all feel the big twist coming, and while certainly a reveal can be disappointing, at least half the fun is the fevered speculation, each episode adding grist to this theory or that one. But Westworld is old fashioned weekly television, meaning long spans between episodes or seasons, with no fix in-between. I can’t think of anything with the same mix of androids and theme parks, metafictional device and Western science fiction, but to fill the gap until the next episode, here’s seven books that echo themes in Westworld.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
To be fair, much of Dick’s catalog would fit on this list; he regularly explores themes of consciousness, the slippery nature of reality, and surveillance state paranoia. Bounty hunter Rick Deckard is tasked with “retiring” a number of androids who have returned to Earth, where all androids are banned. Deckard’s San Francisco is a dreary, emptying place, something like the opposite of the frontier; the frontier, instead, is where the androids have been sent to clear the way for humans. The religion of the hour is Mercerism, which is built on the idea that what makes us human is ourempathy. In both Westworld and Dick’s novel, the truth of that statement is shaky indeed, and who is human and who is android not immediately obvious. There’s plenty of lack of empathy to go ’round.

The Dark Tower series, by Stephen King
The Dark Tower is an absolute rabbit hole of a series, sending you out on very long journey with Roland Deschain, the last surviving member of an order called the Gunslingers. The landscape appears to be post-apocalyptic, with remnants of modern technology and culture existing alongside magic and mysticism. Ostensibly, Roland is on a quest to find the Dark Tower, but this is a shaggy dog of a motivation. King has called this series his “magnum opus;” the story crisscrosses time and space, linking up with other King stories, and generally getting more and more metafictional and self-referential. Both Westworld and The Dark Tower twist Western pulp conventions, peopling their frontiers with wonders and horrors. (Bonus: King, writing as Beryl Evans, just wrote his first children’s book, set in the Gunslinger universe, called Charlie the Choo-Choo. Let Uncle Steve tuck you in tonight!)

Sailing to Byzantium, by Robert Silverberg
The Nebula award-winning title novella in this collection concerns a future society of humans who have become functionally immortal. In order to amuse themselves, they perfectly recreate various cities and cultures throughout history, spending a decade or so sampling the sites in Rome under Marcus Aurelius, or one of the first cities built on the Fertile Crescent, or what have you. These cities are peopled not only with disposable “temporaries” who are period specific, but also anachronistic characters pulled out of time to travel with the immortals, reacting in their own period-specific ways. The disorienting, dreamlike plot, such as it is, chiefly follows Charles, who was pulled from 1980’s New York into this listless theme park of a society. His observations of the pointless lives of the immortal humans, spent living their lives in recreation and fantasy, are both sharp and weary. I read it ages ago, and it sticks with me.

The Lifecycle of Software Objects, by Ted Chiang
This Locus and Hugo award-winning novella has no Western ornament, but I’m including it because of its in-depth examination of the development of artificial intelligence and/or consciousness. The story concerns Digients, which (or possibly who) are digital pets originally created for an online game. Their interactions with both their programmers and gamers make them increasingly complex, while at the same time, the code base and platform grow increasingly out of date. Like the hosts of Westworld, the Digients are molded by their interactions, and the question of where exactly the line lies between the flawless approximation of consciousness and consciousness itself is a big one. Plus, the pressure of the market is not insignificant, something that seems to dog Westworld as well. Sure, the hosts creators’ design them a certain way, but how they are used affects them just as deeply.

Our Lady of The Ice, by Cassandra Rose Clarke
The feral androids of Our Lady of the Ice were themselves once theme park automata, left to rust and run down after the pleasure dome of Hope City in Antarctica was retooled to be a power station for the mainland. The andies have no legal standing— occasionally people make raids into the park to capture them for parts—but they also hold down jobs and interact with humans on more equitable footing. One of the subplots concerns the android Sofia, working towards reprogramming herself, cutting out the code that makes her snap into the dance routines that she was created to perform. Sophia is not interested in becoming human, as so many fictional androids are, but more with achieving self-determination. Given the behavior of the humans on Westworld, I would suspect that may ultimately be the hosts’ goal as well.

Karen Memory, by Elizabeth Bear
As per usual with Bear, Karen Memory is no easy novel to sum up. Set in a Western-inflected port city, the novel follows Karen Memery (“like memory but spelled with an e”), a “seamstress” in one of the portside brothels. The city is undergoing a gold rush, and the river of money and people arriving to mine out anything of value puts pressure on the local power structures. Oh, and there’s a vicious killer on the loose. There’s a lot of ornamental steampunkery—robots and the like—but the book’s strength is in its portraiture of the complex societal interactions that take place in frontier cities. Westerns are often trade in real rigidly defined tropes: the white hats and the black hats, the sweet rancher’s daughter, the prostitute with a heart of gold. Karen Memory busts that all open, as I’m hoping Westworld will, too.

The Alchemy Wars, by Ian Tregillis
Ian Tregillis’s Alchemy Wars trilogy is a suffusion of alternate history, technology, and magic that is, in some ways, far removed from the shiny tech of Westworld, but thematically, they’re cooking the same noodles. In The Mechanical, the year is 1926, but we are decidedly not in the Jazz Age. We know Christiaan Huygens as a 17th century Enlightenment mathematician, horologist, and astronomer who invented the pendulum clock, among many, many other things. In Tregillis’ timeline, he also builds clockwork mechanical men. Using alchemical magic, he imbues the “clakkers” with artificial intelligences bounded by geas, or hierarchical compulsions to serve humans. Though this wondrous new technology, the Dutch conquer the world, and the industrial revolution as we know it never occurs. The concept of the geas—the binding magic of either allegiance or servitude—is in some ways the pivot point of the series. Who do you live for? Who will you die for? What compels you? And what can compel you, force you to act against your will? We’re asking all the same questions about Westworld‘s hosts. It’s no accident that the most morally clean character in Tregillis’ novels is a robot; the human characters are bent on scheming and war-mongering, while Jax, the clakker, freed from the geas, revels in his newfound agency. He’s on quest for other free clakkers, a voyage of self-discovery and self-determination.

Flaming Zeppelins: The Adventures of Ned the Seal, by Joe R. Lansdale
Maybe this omnibus edition of two novels by Lansdale doesn’t exactly belong on this list, but I wanted to get a nod in to the strange subgenre of “Weird West.” Flaming Zeppelins begins in with the members of Buffalo Bill Cody’s traveling show heading to see the emperor of Japan in a zeppelin; things get weirder from there. Bill himself isn’t who he used to be: after getting shot in the back, his head was put in a jar of pig urine and whiskey and zapped with electricity to keep him talking. I think the exact literary term for this kind of writing is “bananas”. Lansdale has written extensively in this fertile valley of horror, pulp, science fiction, and the kitchen sink, but there are other great books in the mix, like Gemma Files’ A Book of Tongues (which is brutally stylish) or Richard Brautigan’s The Hawkline Monster (which gave me nightmares for no reason I could discern.)
What Westworld readlikes would you suggest?