Five Must-Read Short Story Collections for Fans of <i>Black Mirror</i>

Stories of Your Life and Others is best-known for “Story of Your Life”—a mind-bending tale of first contact with aliens that was brilliantly adapted into the film Arrival (2016). But while definitely a standout of the collection, for me, that story ties for the top spot with “Hell Is the Absence of God.” Set in a reality where Heaven and Hell are known to exist and angels visit Earth (often to destructive effect!), the story explores the ramifications that all of this has on humanity. 

But if that doesn’t sound enough like Black Mirror to you (though it should be noted that the show has tackled various genres), then “Understand” perfectly fits that classic Black Mirror sci-fi mold. The story is about a man who is given an experimental drug to treat the brain damage he suffered after almost drowning—but the drug doesn’t just repair his brain, it also gives him super-intelligence.

Friday Black opens with “The Finkelstein 5,” which follows Emmanuel—who dials his Blackness up and down on a 10-point scale by modifying his voice and changing his clothes—as he deals with the fallout of a court case surrounding a white man’s brutal slaughter of five Black kids. The entire story is powerful, but the last few sentences packed such a punch that I was left staring at the wall for a few beats, and needed to take a moment before moving onto the next story.

The collection is most akin to the Black Mirror episodes that hit so hard precisely because they’re only a hair’s breadth away from our current reality (episodes like “Nosedive” and “The Waldo Moment”). The titular story sees Black Friday shoppers cast as zombie-like monsters, while “Zimmer Land” is set at a theme park that uses augmented reality to enable patrons to role-play as killers in the name of so-called self-defense. As with many of the best Black Mirror episodes, the satirical social commentary in Friday Black is so sharp that it cuts.

If you prefer the more heartfelt—and often heart-wrenching—episodes of Black Mirror (along the lines of “San Junipero” and “Be Right Back”), then How High We Go in the Dark is the collection for you. All of the short stories revolve around the same catastrophic event: the unleashing of a virus that causes organ cells to mutate into the cells of other organs (for instance, heart cells transform into lung cells).

Taking place over many years, the stories explore the different ways in which humanity attempts to cope—both practically and emotionally—with this horrible disease. “Pig Son” follows a scientist who is growing replacement organs in genetically-engineered pigs and strikes up a bond with one of the hogs, while “Speak, Fetch, Say I Love You” is about people desperately holding onto robot dogs that function as mementos of loved ones.

With death being such a persistent theme throughout many of the stories, the overall tone is one of melancholy. And yet, the collection manages to walk a delicate tightrope between bleakness and hopefulness.

The stories in Out There range from feeling completely grounded in reality to the utterly bizarre. My favorites tend to land somewhere in the middle. “The Bone Ward” follows a small group of people who are being treated for a rare disease that causes their bones to dissolve each night and then regrow each morning. The titular story explores the fresh hell that is dating due to the proliferation of handsome male androids that aim to capture women’s hearts and then steal their data.

If you want to read something a lot weirder, there’s “The Head in the Floor,” which is literally about a head slowly emerging from the floor of a woman’s apartment. And if you prefer reality then you can follow an art-obsessed woman who, during a revolution, shelters-in-place in a sky-high revolving restaurant in “A Scale Model of Gull Point.”

All of the stories—even the few without any speculative elements—have both a surreal and a humorous quality to them.

While Black Mirror’s episodes are often technology-based and feel like they could be set in a real version of our future, there are some that go in a more fantasy and/or horror direction (e.g., “Mazey Day” and “Demon 79”). Like those episodes, the stories in Flowers from the Void lean more into dark fantasy concepts in their exploration of different facets of humanity. 

“Take It From Me” is one of the short stories that feels most Black Mirror-esque: it’s set in a world where emotional trauma also manifests physically, meaning that if you lose your boyfriend, you might also lose your arm. At the other end of the spectrum—but no less fascinating—is “When I Cry, It’s Somebody Else’s Blood,” which is told from the point of view of an alien creature that crash-lands on Earth and becomes obsessed with human eyeballs.