If you were drawn to how Irina’s neural implant and the rogue AIs in Void Star blur the boundary between memory architecture and mind, Blindsight will hit that same nerve. Watts throws you into first contact where the real puzzle isn’t the aliens but what “self” even means. Like Mason’s cool, crystalline scenes of artificial minds and human recall-as-technology, Watts dissects cognition under pressure, asking whether awareness is a feature or a bug—only with a terrifyingly plausible scientific edge.

The drifting, surreal textures you felt moving from Kern’s street-level survival to the uncanny architectures of AI in Void Star echo beautifully in Borne. VanderMeer’s ruined city, living biotech, and shape-shifting creature give that same oneiric thrum—where every alley and organism feels a little impossible and yet emotionally true. If the way Mason made technology feel like myth lodged in your imagination, Borne delivers that same shimmering, unsettling wonder.

If the nonlinearity of Void Star—slipping among Irina, Kern, and Thales as memory and identity keep refracting—hooked you, The Affirmation is a masterclass in narrative vertigo. Priest folds a life story into a manuscript into a possible other world, letting memory edits and self-reinvention ripple until you question every timeline. It captures that same elusive, cerebral feeling you got as Mason’s plot doubled back and meanings shifted with each new revelation.

If you liked how Void Star braided Irina’s elite consulting, Thales’s entanglements with power, and Kern’s ground-level struggle into a single vision of a tilted world, The Windup Girl offers a similarly rich panorama. Bacigalupi’s multiple perspectives—scientists, enforcers, refugees, and the engineered title character—cross and collide in a fraught Bangkok where every choice has systemic consequences, echoing Mason’s layered, intercut viewpoint tapestry.

If the parts of Void Star that stayed with you were Irina’s struggle to trust her own curated memories and the way personhood blurs around artificial minds, Ishiguro’s novel will resonate. It’s softer in its speculative surface, but the emotional excavation—how memory, conditioning, and purpose shape who you are—cuts just as deep. The slow, devastating revelations mirror Mason’s calm, piercing psychological touch.