Humans Raised for Meat: 10 Best Sci-Fi Reads Better Than Black Mirror

People as livestock

In Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is the Flesh, a virus makes animal meat poisonous to people. The government responds by raising humans as livestock. Marcos works at a processing plant handling what is called “special meat.” After he receives a live woman for consumption, he begins to treat her as a person.

An AI seeks more

Sierra Greer’s Annie Bot follows an artificial-intelligence woman designed as the ideal companion for Doug. She caters to his needs, maintains the house and tries to please him.

As Annie grows more human, she becomes less perfectly suited to her assigned role. The story also raises the possibility that Doug himself does not know what he wants, while Annie may seek a life beyond companionship.

Memories under threat

In Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, ordinary objects—including hats, roses and birds—disappear from the world and from people’s memories. A young woman is among the few who can still remember them.

The Memory Police enforce the forgetting, and the consequences grow more serious over time. Those around the protagonist remain unaware that anything is wrong, even as life changes around them.

Androids and erased threats

Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? takes place on a radioactive Earth after much of humanity has left for Mars. Rick Deckard stays behind with an electric sheep and works as an android killer for the police.

His assignment is to track six escaped androids that look and sound like ordinary people. The novel inspired the Blade Runner series. In There Is No Antimemetics Division, qntm explores entities that prevent people from remembering or sharing information about them. The SCP Foundation’s division tasked with handling these anti-memes struggles to contain them. Told through seemingly separate short stories, the book gradually reveals a connected story and a threat to humanity that no one can remember.