If what hooked you was the first-person voice of the alien machine in The Lost Machine—its wry self-account of being stranded, studied, and misunderstood—then SecUnit’s confession-like narration will click right away. Like Wyndham’s castaway intelligence, Murderbot sizes up human behavior with curious detachment, wrestles with autonomy versus obedience, and keeps getting pulled into danger despite just wanting to be left alone. The tight, personal voice delivers the same intimate access to a non-human mind trying to make sense of us.

If you loved how the narrator of The Lost Machine scrutinizes human habits, tools, and motives from an outsider’s angle, Thomson’s novel offers that same close, patient attention—this time with a human scientist immersed in an alien society. As Juna learns the Tendu’s language, rituals, and biochemistry, the story mirrors the machine’s meticulous note-taking and growing empathy, turning cross-species misunderstanding into genuine connection.

Wyndham’s stranded machine ponders its own status and the fear it provokes; Dick pushes those same questions to the limit. As Rick Deckard hunts androids who may feel as deeply as humans, the book keeps asking the thing The Lost Machine raises in its reflective monologue: if an artificial being thinks, suffers, and chooses, who gets to deny its personhood?

If the appeal of The Lost Machine was how it focused on cognition, learning, and feeling—rather than gears and schematics—Chiang’s novella is a perfect fit. Following Ana and Derek as they raise digital AIs, it echoes the machine’s self-taught understanding and vulnerability, showing how bonds and ethical choices shape an artificial mind’s becoming.

The power of The Lost Machine lies in its solitary, confessional perspective—one consciousness narrating its struggle to be recognized. Keyes captures that same intimacy through Charlie’s progress reports, charting his changing mind and the loneliness that comes with being different, misunderstood, and judged by those around him.