The House of the Scorpion
Nancy Farmer (2002)
“A boy discovers he is a clone — property, not a person — and must prove his humanity in a world that denies it.”
Similar Books
Thematic connections across eras and genres — books that talk to each other.
Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
Clones raised for organ harvest — but Ishiguro's characters accept their fate with English politeness while Matt fights with everything he has
The Giver
Lois Lowry
Dystopia accessible to young readers with a protagonist who discovers the truth about his society and must choose between safety and freedom
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
Engineered humans in a rigidly stratified society — Huxley's Epsilons are Farmer's eejits, conditioned rather than implanted but equally unfree
Animal Farm
George Orwell
The Keepers' rhetoric of equality masking exploitation directly echoes Orwell's pigs — 'all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others'
The Hunger Games
Suzanne Collins
YA dystopia that followed Farmer's path — young protagonist discovering the machinery of oppression and choosing to fight rather than submit
Kindred
Octavia Butler
A novel that uses speculative fiction to confront the reality of slavery — Farmer does for immigration and cloning what Butler did for American chattel slavery