What did you love about Ex Machina?
Machines Like Me
Machines Like Me gives you that same sick feeling when you can't tell if you're being seduced or played.
Speak
Speak asks whether connection through a screen or code is less real than touching someone's hand.
The Lifecycle of Software Objects
The Lifecycle of Software Objects stops asking if the AI is real and asks if your love for it counts.
5 books like Ex Machina
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley — The original 'creator and creation' story, and the one Ex Machina most directly descends from.
- Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan — McEwan's novel about a man who buys a synthetic human and forms a love triangle with it shares Ex Ma…
- The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang — Chiang's novella about people raising digital AI pets over decades asks Ex Machina's question from t…
- Speak by Louisa Hall — Hall's novel weaves five narratives across centuries — including a chatbot programmer and an AI in a…
- Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers — Powers' novel about a writer helping a scientist train a neural network to pass a Master's exam in E…
Picked for the feeling of Ex Machina, not its genre. Each one is explained below. One movie isn’t much to go on: rate four more and the books are picked for you.
Why these books
Garland's chamber piece asks the scariest question in AI: not 'can a machine think?' but 'can you tell when a machine is manipulating you into believing it can think?' Every conversation between Caleb and Ava is a Turing test that neither of them — and neither we — can be sure is being conducted honestly. These books live in that same paranoid space between intelligence and performance.
Frankenstein
The original 'creator and creation' story, and the one Ex Machina most directly descends from. Shelley asked in 1818 what Garland asks in 2014: if you build something that can suffer, are you responsible for that suffering? And if you abandon it, whose fault is it when it destroys you? Two hundred years later, we still don't have a good answer.
Read it with your book club →
Machines Like Me
McEwan's novel about a man who buys a synthetic human and forms a love triangle with it shares Ex Machina's refusal to let you decide whether the machine's emotions are real or performed. Like Ava, McEwan's Adam develops moral convictions that exceed his creator's — and the result is just as destabilizing.
Read it with your book club →
The Lifecycle of Software Objects
Chiang's novella about people raising digital AI pets over decades asks Ex Machina's question from the opposite direction: not 'is the AI manipulating me?' but 'does it matter if I love it anyway?' It's the most humane and heartbreaking thing written about artificial intelligence — less thriller, more adoption story.
Read it with your book club →
Speak
Hall's novel weaves five narratives across centuries — including a chatbot programmer and an AI in a prison cell — to ask what communication actually is and whether a machine that moves you has done something meaningfully different from a person who moves you. Like Ex Machina, it refuses to draw a clean line between artificial and authentic.
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Galatea 2.2
Powers' novel about a writer helping a scientist train a neural network to pass a Master's exam in English literature is Ex Machina as a love story between a man and a mind he's building. As the machine learns to read and respond to great literature, both creator and creation are changed — and the question of who's teaching whom becomes unanswerable.
Read it with your book club →Is Ex Machina based on a book?
Ex Machina isn’t based on a book — it’s an original screenplay by Alex Garland.
What should I read if I loved Ex Machina?
Start with Frankenstein, Machines Like Me and The Lifecycle of Software Objects. 5 books on this page were picked for the feeling of Ex Machina, not its genre, with a reason for each.
Which book is most like Ex Machina?
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. The original 'creator and creation' story, and the one Ex Machina most directly descends from.
These are for everyone who loved Ex Machina. Want books picked for you?
Someone who loved Ex Machina and Finding Nemo reads different books from someone who loved Ex Machina and Kiki's Delivery Service. One movie isn’t much to go on. Rate four more — Ex Machina already counts — and the books are picked for you.
Rate four more moviesOr read it with your book club and talk about it while you’re still reading.