If the failing infrastructure and poisoned ecosystems of “Pump Six,” “The Calorie Man,” and “The People of Sand and Slag” hooked you, you’ll love how The Windup Girl amplifies those same bioengineered pressures in a sweltering Bangkok. The corporate calorie empires you saw Lalji struggle against are now full-blown geopolitical forces, and the yellow-card refugee crisis you glimpsed becomes a harrowing day-to-day reality. It’s the same knife-edge ecology—only bigger, hotter, and even more precarious.

If “Pop Squad”’s chilling logic—eternal youth at the price of childhood—stayed with you, Oryx and Crake digs into a similarly ruthless biotech society where slick corporate labs normalize the unthinkable. Like the child-hunting enforcer in “Pop Squad,” Snowman wakes to the aftermath of choices that made sense to people in power, tracing how profit, vanity, and engineered perfection spiral into a world no one can truly live in.

If the yellow-card refugees in Bangkok and the wage-scraped workers in “The Calorie Man” cut deep, An Unkindness of Ghosts channels that same ferocity about who gets ground up to keep a system running. Aster navigates a generation ship where decks map directly onto class and race, echoing the brutal hierarchies and gatekept resources you saw in Bacigalupi’s worlds—only here, the ship itself is the company town, and rebellion is personal.

If the morbid laughs of “The People of Sand and Slag” and the bleak punchlines in “Pump Six” hit your sweet spot, Cat’s Cradle delivers that same deadpan bite. Vonnegut’s ice‑nine is the perfect sibling to Bacigalupi’s fiasco-tech: a clever solution with an extinction-level catch. You’ll recognize the tone—funny until it hurts—as society grins its way toward catastrophe.

If the punchy, self-contained shocks of “Pop Squad,” “The Calorie Man,” and “Pump Six” worked for you, Stories of Your Life and Others offers equally surgical shorts that fuse big ideas with emotional wallop. Like Bacigalupi, Chiang makes a single concept reframe an entire life in a few dozen pages—only here the turns are quieter and more philosophical, with the same afterglow of “I need to sit with this.”