Stephen King and Margaret Atwood are among the stars obviously suited to writing these dark satires. But lesser-known names might do just as well

After three seasons of satirical, speculative storytelling on the small screen, Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror is making the jump to the written word. Brooker will edit three volumes of novellas – in “high-tech ‘paper’ format”, as he quipped – that will be written by different authors, with the first due in February 2018, the second later that year and the third in 2019.

Charlie Brooker (@charltonbrooker) All-new stories from different authors, yeah?

Black Mirror’s often uncompromising nature, generally focused on the relationship between people and technology, would work with many obvious – perhaps too obvious – candidates. Stephen King springs to mind, as a writer who effortlessly melds everyday lives with the outre. He has stumbled into Black Mirror territory several times, notably with his novel Cell, about a mobile phone signal that turns people into crazed zombies (a theme touched on – with a twist – in the harrowing Black Mirror episode White Bear).

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Neil Gaiman’s short stories, adapted last year for Sky Arts in Neil Gaiman’s Likely Stories, also have a Black Mirror atmosphere. Those stories tended towards the visceral (Foreign Parts, about a man who is slowly taken over by his venereal disease) and the horrific (Feeders and Eaters, in which an old woman needs raw meat to survive). But they were loosely connected by the theme of consumption. It wouldn’t be too great a stretch to match that with Black Mirror’s recurring motifs of humanity’s hunger for technology and media – and where it often leads.

Enjoying fresh success with her 32-year-old novel The Handmaid’s Tale – currently also on TV – Margaret Atwood has delved deeply into the mingling of humanity and technology, most prominently in her MaddAddam series: Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood and MaddAdam. Atwood often tackles climate change, corporate scientific development and societal breakdown – all grist to the Black Mirror mill.

But perhaps Brooker will be mapping less-trammelled paths for his print writers. (For the moment, we don’t know how many stories there will be, nor who will be writing them.) Should the man himself be reading this, I’d like to point him in a couple of directions – beginning with South Africa and Lauren Beukes. Straddling near-future dystopian science fiction (Moxyland) and contemporary, twisty horror (The Shining Girls, Broken Monsters), Beukes certainly has the plotting chops, and doesn’t shy away from a shocking reveal.

Brooker could also do far worse than US writer Ted Chiang, who garnered rightful attention when one of his stories was adapted for last year’s Oscar-winning movie Arrival. Chiang is a rare breed of contemporary writer, one who only works in short stories and novellas – making him perfectly suited to the Black Mirror format. And British author Sarah Pinborough’s latest thriller, Behind Her Eyes, scrapes away the domestic veneer to reveal the ugliness beneath everyday life – complete with a kick-you-in-the-balls twist ending that should appeal to Brooker’s sense of the dramatic.

Brooker has cited numerous literary influences on Black Mirror, spanning Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Douglas Adams and hippy novelist Richard Brautigan, all of whom are no longer with us. But he’s also said that he was an inveterate reader of Gyles Brandreth’s joke books when he was a child – and Brandreth is well and truly alive. The former Tory MP also writes fiction. It’s unlikely, of course, that Brooker would employ Brandreth to write one of his novellas, but then again … unease building into outright horror is what Black Mirror is all about.