7 Sci-Fi Horror Books About the Dark Side of Technology

Debbie Urbanski’s After World is an inventive and incredibly timely novel written from the perspective of an AI that has been instructed to write a novel.

The world of Urbanski’s novel is set in a future where humanity has become sterilized by viruses, faces extinction, and the world itself faces inevitable ecological collapse. The AI narrator writes as many a writer would: to ask questions and find answers.

After World is a masterful piece of worldbuilding, formal experimentation, and a narrative that looks right at artificial intelligence, a technology that might just completely change the world.

The result is a novel that looks ahead fearlessly and offers at times a deep read of what might become of us in the decades (or centuries) to come.

In Service Model, readers learn that even AI/robots are capable of murder. Tchaikovsky’s satirical tale centers on a robot named UnCharles who kills his master and goes on a pseudo-philosophical journey for purpose.

The world becomes a blank canvas for the robot, where humanity is struggling and the ecosystems of the past have already shifted towards something else.

It’s a world that you might recognize from sci-fi classics like Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles.

At once prescient and post-apocalyptic, Tchaikovsky explores the meaning of free will and self-purpose at the crossroads between consciousness.  

With a title like The Dark Net, you might expect Benjamin Percy’s novel to nosedive into the unmitigated corner of the internet where things like the Silk Road and other nefarious marketplaces exist.

Rather, The Dark Net opts for something a bit more expansive than the known dark corners of the internet. 

Lela is a reporter writing for The Oregonian, forever desperate for a scoop that might elevate her career. When Hannah, her niece, installs The Mirage, a piece of technology that offers the sense of sight, she sees more than the surface.

The technology reveals the nefarious underbelly of a spiritual realm where evil has always occupied, invisible to the naked eye.

 Suddenly Lela finds herself with more than just the scoop she was looking for; soon she is sought after by evil forces looking to destroy those in their path.

Another narrative set in the world of the dark web, Margot Harrison’s The Glare introduces readers to Hedda, a teenager who has spent a decade living without technology in a curated state of isolation on a ranch with her mom.

The glare implicated in the title is that of the glow of the screen, the light indicative of LEDs and social technology. The Glare is also an FPS game hosted on the dark web, a source of Hedda’s own sidestep to a technology-free life to recover from trauma.

Like the urban legend of Bloody Mary, The Glare has a death game woven into its levels—one that threatens all that play with the prospect of permadeath.

The result is a tense novel that effectively examines our modern social technologies while also demonstrating how we’re more likely to be hurt rather than helped by the technology initially designed to connect people across the globe.

Technology and politics are twin pistons of information-driven influence.

In Infomocracy, Malka Older’s debut novel, the world has descended upon a global micro-democracy by way of the control and disbursement of information by technologies like Information, a search engine that makes Google look like Geocities.

 nfomacracy keeps the thrills and the political intrigue high as readers are given windows into a world gone insanely complex, where various campaign agents fight to win favor.

Everyone wants that power, the win to elevate their careers, and of course, the corporations at the helm of the system want to maintain their stranglehold.

Older’s worldbuilding is at times as dense as its themes, but for the readers that choose to take part, they are rewarded with a novel that posits the future of socio-political hyper-technologies. 

If you’ve ever wondered what it is like to work in the content moderation departments of any of the major social media platforms (well, for the ones that still have content moderation and security), Hanna Bervoets’ novel brings you into the numbing, relentless role.

Kayleigh is like so many of us desperate to make ends meet; she finds a gig working as a content moderator for a social media platform, and soon ends up in a debilitating shift of seeing some of the most horrible posts/content one could imagine (and in many ways be unable to fathom).

So many hours seeing heinous things, We Had to Remove This Post explores what happens to the mind when stuck in such a toxic cycle.

And really, who would have ever thought such a role would exist?

Social media seen from the inside out, it reveals much about the shocking grind that keeps something so seemingly user-friendly from becoming a weapon.

Imagine a technology that can project, bend, and compartmentalize our own consciousness. It’s something akin to the best sci-fi has to offer, and yet when you take a good look at it, society often chases the act of separating the self through all sorts of technologies, be it for escapism or for expression.

The Many Selves of Katherine North conceives of neurological technologies that can take human consciousness and project them onto other living things.

Readers meet a “phenomenaut” named Kit working in the research department of Shen Corporation where she has spent her time jumping her consciousness into lab animals for testing. She sets herself apart for being a phenomenaut who has done it longer than most.

She’s addicted to the act, the technology, the ability to live different lives in various species. 

Of course, when one alters their mental state, the unexpected is often on the menu.

Kit soon makes a discovery that shifts her entire world, and the technology that was used to unearth such revelations.