Here are 100 books that FlashForward fans have personally recommended if you like
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As a lover of both fiction and nonfiction, I find that the ultimate pleasure in reading is when the author combines the two without short-changing either. These are books that provide accurate and deep historical background, but also tell stories shaped by that context. These are also books that have intricate, unusual, and effective narrative structures.
This book is set in motion in the cultural revolution in China—a background that profoundly shapes the main characters’ choices and destinies.
A young scientist who has witnessed her father’s persecution ends up at a science center looking for radio-wave evidence of extra-terrestrial life. Not only does she find it, but she figures out how to communicate with it.
Couple the scientist’s views of humanity with those of a disillusioned heir to an oil fortune, and the stage is set for an epic novel with a unique take on first contact. This book—the first of a trilogy—provides frightening insights into how history can shape humanity’s future.
Read the award-winning, critically acclaimed, multi-million-copy-selling science-fiction phenomenon - soon to be a Netflix Original Series from the creators of Game of Thrones.
1967: Ye Wenjie witnesses Red Guards beat her father to death during China's Cultural Revolution. This singular event will shape not only the rest of her life but also the future of mankind.
Four decades later, Beijing police ask nanotech engineer Wang Miao to infiltrate a secretive cabal of scientists after a spate of inexplicable suicides. Wang's investigation will lead him to a mysterious online game and immerse him in a virtual world ruled by the intractable…
I grew up in a house of books. Bookcases in almost every room. At an early age, I discovered some great ones that were usually recommended by my dad. The Odyssey. Tarzan of the Apes. Princess of Mars. It is a long, long list, and I won’t give you all my faves—but one thing about it: I was drawn to books with heroes, particularly when those heroes were clearly good. There are no shades of gray for me. I like my heroes to have honor and humility and to always strive to do the right thing.
Okay, I’ve only read this book once, but I can tell you I’ll be reading it again. It’s that good.
It's a classic amnesia story. The hero wakes up from a coma and has no recollection of who he is. Over the course of the story, he discovers he’s a middle school science teacher. And he’s in a spaceship. Alone. And he may happen to be humanity’s only hope to survive.
Wow! Talk about a new spin on the amnesia trope. I’m rooting for Ryland Grace from the jump. No matter how crazy bad it gets, and it gets bad, our hero never loses his sense of humor. I laughed out loud many times. I loved the science, and I dug the author’s writing style.
Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish.
Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.
All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.
His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through…
Three events in my life have had a profound effect on the narratives created within my novels. After receiving a chemistry set for my 10th Christmas, I succeeded in causing an explosion, resulting in my extended hospitalization. While in the hospital, I had a near-death experience (NDE). During an amateur telescopic outing with a friend during our teenage years, we experienced a UFO sighting. While doing my doctoral thesis in experimental quantum physics, I began to sense a strong link between elements of quantum physics and consciousness. These events occasionally entered my thinking over the next decades. I developed a passion for writing novels to explore links between quantum physics and consciousness.
Tyson Klein, a quantum physicist at CERN, analyzes data from the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. He discovers a highly intelligent pattern in data broadcast over what he terms a “Quantum Radio.” The data has the potential to answer the deepest questions about human existence and the cosmos itself, a Theory of Everything. Because the data accurately describes history and alternate histories and projects their future outcome, he first questions whether it’s from another universe or from the future.
As he closes in on how to control the quantum radio, he finds that someone else is after it and will stop at nothing to get it. The first one to uncover its operation will control the world and probably more.
Riddle seamlessly weaves grandiose ideas in science, psychology, history, and time travel throughout the fabric of the personal relationships of several individuals who “coincidentally” enter Tyson’s life to help in…
FROM THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF LOST IN TIME
At CERN, a scientist has just made an incredible discovery - a breakthrough that may answer the deepest questions about human existence.
But what he's found is far more dangerous than he ever imagined.
Dr. Tyson Klein is a quantum physicist who has dedicated his entire life to his research. At CERN, he analyses data generated by the Large Hadron Collider, the world's biggest and most powerful particle accelerator. Now, Ty believes he's found a pattern in its output. It looks like an organised data stream, being broadcast over what…
I started in publishing at the Advocate magazine, twenty years ago in its heyday, then moved to Alyson Books, who first published Emma Donoghue among many others, offering a place for queer writers showcasing queer stories to find their audience. Afterwards, I became involved with Gertrude literary journal, a beloved, 25-year-old non-profit, LGBTQA journal that has now evolved to The Gertrude Conference. All the while, I read, wrote, and supported queer stories, like these gems!
James Hynes’ novel focuses on Jacob, nicknamed “Sparrow”, who’s a slave in a brothel in New Carthage at the end of the Roman Empire. Yum!
Although the book itself is too brutal for my taste, as it goes through development, perhaps they could add a thread of lightness, especially in the lives and friendships Sparrow develops with many of the “Wolves” (prostitutes). As a series, this could be a Gladiator-meets-Harlots, with a darkness and depth that would give us insight into the lowest rung of the Roman Empire, with the possibility of a dozen sub-stories to fill out as we trod through this dark time.
'A stunning work of historical imagination . . . masterful in its portrayal of love, sex and friendship' - The Observer 'Utterly engrossing, vivid and honest' - Emma Donoghue, author of Room
Meet Sparrow, a boy slave in the city of New Carthage in the twilight years of pagan Rome.
Raised in a brothel on the margins of a great empire, a boy of no known origin creates his own identity. He is Sparrow, who sings without reason and can fly from trouble. His world is a kitchen, a herb-scented garden, a loud and dangerous tavern, and the mysterious upstairs…
Since my first college course in quantum physics, I have been fascinated with this enigmatic, infinitely interesting theory. It's our most fundamental description of the universe, it's been found to be unerringly accurate, yet it's quite subtle to interpret. Even more intriguingly, "nobody really understands quantum physics" (as Richard Feynman put it). For example, the theory's central concept, the wave function, is interpreted radically differently by different physicists. I have always yearned to grasp, at least to my own satisfaction, a comprehensive understanding of this theory. Since retirement 23 years ago, I have pursued this passion nearly full-time and found some answers, leading to several technical papers and a popular book.
Unlike the other books on my list, Carroll's book focuses on quantum physics at the very high energies attained in experimental facilities such as the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. The book was published in 2012, the year LHC scientists announced the momentous discovery of the particle whose universe-filling quantum field causes other particles to acquire a non-zero mass. One reason for my enthusiasm about this book is Carroll's view that the universe is made of "fields" such as the electromagnetic field whose vibrations (or "excitations") are particles such as the proton, electron, and atom. Carroll is an experienced science writer and a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology.
Winner of the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books
A Best Science Book of the Year for the Guardian, Financial Times, and New Scientist
It was the universe's most elusive particle, the linchpin for everything scientists dreamed up to explain how physics works. It had to be found. But projects as big as CERN's Large Hadron Collider don't happen without incredible risks - or occasional skulduggery. In the definitive account of the greatest science story of our time, acclaimed physicist Sean Carroll reveals the insights, rivalry, and wonder that fuelled the Higgs discovery, and takes us on a riveting…
Don Lincoln is both a research scientist and a masterful science communicator. On the science side, he participated in the discovery of both the top quark and the Higgs boson. On the communicator side, he has written books, made hundreds of YouTube videos, and written for such visible venues as Scientific American and CNN. He has both the scientific chops and writer expertise to tell an exciting story about why the universe is the way it is.
It is perhaps unfair to pick this book, as it is one I wrote, but it really is an unparalled book on the subject of the Large Hadron Collider (or LHC), currently the most powerful particle accelerator on the planet. The book contains some physics and technical information on the LHC and the detectors arrayed around it. It tells the stories of the startup, including the catastrophic damage that took two years to repair, and the accelerator’s triumphant return to operations. It tells insider tales of the assembly of the detectors and also gives an insider’s view of the discovery of the Higgs boson. No other book gives the reader such an intimate window seat to see how this amazing technical leviathan came into being.
An insider's history of the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider: why it was built, how it works, and the importance of what it has revealed.
Since 2008 scientists have conducted experiments in a hyperenergized, 17-mile supercollider beneath the border of France and Switzerland. The Large Hadron Collider (or what scientists call "the LHC") is one of the wonders of the modern world-a highly sophisticated scientific instrument designed to re-create in miniature the conditions of the universe as they existed in the microseconds following the big bang. Among many notable LHC discoveries, one led to the 2013 Nobel…
My great interests have been ships and space travel, and if one takes time to consider the similarities the parallels stand out. Ships, especially submarines, travel in a medium and through an environment that is hostile to human life. In space travel, the ‘ship’ becomes the only habitat in which we can survive for any extended period, leaving it without a space suit is a fatal move. I cannot claim to be an expert in closed environments, but it's a subject that has fascinated me throughout my life. Every ‘biosphere’ is unique and incredibly complex and depends on the symbiosis of an enormous number of living creatures right down to bacteria and even viruses.
This book and the others, including The Globe, Darwin’s Watch, and Judgement Day, are wonderful in their mix of fantasy – Pratchett’s Discworld Wizards mixing it up in their quest to understand the “Round World” they accidentally created – and real science introduced and explained by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen. The fantasy and the science are seamlessly interwoven in a way that make some complex subjects not just understandable but very readable. Like the explanation of exploring particle physics in the Large Hadron Collider by comparing it to a race that has never seen a piano, cannot see the piano, and try to determine its function and properties by hitting it and eventually pushing it out of a window five stories up and then naming the sounds it makes on hitting the ground…
When a wizardly experiment goes adrift, the wizards of Unseen University find themselves with a pocket universe on their hands: Roundworld, where neither magic nor common sense seems to stand a chance against logic. The Universe, of course, is our own. And Roundworld is Earth. As the wizards watch their accidental creation grow, we follow the story of our universe from the primal singularity of the Big Bang to the Internet and beyond. Through this original Terry Pratchett story (with intervening chapters from Cohen and Stewart) we discover how puny and insignificant individual lives are against a cosmic backdrop of…
As a professor, I see students fascinated by science, but petrified to take a science class. This is in part because we have dehumanized science, removed the story, edited out the human, deleted the parts that allow people to connect with it. Science does not get delivered by gods, but is created by people: smart, quirky, sometimes immoral people. As a writer, my hope is to be able to reinsert life into readers’ understanding of our greatest advances. As a reader myself, I am deeply appreciative when other authors do it too.
The early period of the development of quantum mechanics were heady days, full of fascinating characters and factional infighting. As Europe was about to tear itself apart again, the physics community had also fractured. Jones explains the scientific fault lines and the personal relations (some of them quite racy!) that were in play as the modern theory of the atom unfolded.
Theoretical physics is in trouble. At least that's the impression you'd get from reading a spate of recent books on the continued failure to resolve the 80-year-old problem of unifying the classical and quantum worlds. The seeds of this problem were sewn eighty years ago when a dramatic revolution in physics reached a climax at the 1927 Solvay conference in Brussels. It's the story of a rush to formalize quantum physics, the work of just a handful of men fired by ambition, philosophical conflicts and personal agendas. Sheilla Jones paints an intimate portrait of the key figures who wrestled with…
Since my first college course in quantum physics, I have been fascinated with this enigmatic, infinitely interesting theory. It's our most fundamental description of the universe, it's been found to be unerringly accurate, yet it's quite subtle to interpret. Even more intriguingly, "nobody really understands quantum physics" (as Richard Feynman put it). For example, the theory's central concept, the wave function, is interpreted radically differently by different physicists. I have always yearned to grasp, at least to my own satisfaction, a comprehensive understanding of this theory. Since retirement 23 years ago, I have pursued this passion nearly full-time and found some answers, leading to several technical papers and a popular book.
Baggott's book is a rich, readable account of quantum physics as viewed at 40 key "moments" in its history. These moments range from the trouble with classical physics in 1900, leading to the notion of discrete "quanta" of energy, to the hunt for the Higgs particle at the CERN accelerator laboratory. Other moments include the invention of Schrodinger's equation, the Uncertainty Principle, and the Standard Model of particle physics. The author is an experienced science writer and former academic scientist.
The twentieth century was defined by physics. From the minds of the world's leading physicists there flowed a river of ideas that would transport mankind to the pinnacle of wonderment and to the very depths of human despair. This was a century that began with the certainties of absolute knowledge and ended with the knowledge of absolute uncertainty. It was a century in which physicists developed weapons with the capacity to destroy our reality, whilst at the same time denying us the possibility that we can ever properly comprehend it.
Almost everything we think we know about the nature of…
I am a physics professor with a passion for teaching. When I was a graduate student, I took required courses in classical mechanics, classical electrodynamics, quantum mechanics, and statistical mechanics. Some of the textbooks assigned by my professors were good; some were not so good. In every case, it was extremely helpful to read what other authors had to say about these foundational subjects. Four of the five books I recommend below are my personal favorites among these serious physics books. My fifth book choice is less serious and does not teach physics, but it will improve your graduate student experience nonetheless.
This book helped me pass my PhD qualifying exam. The writing style is crisp and qualitative arguments abound. Baym treats perturbation theory and scattering theory particularly nicely and your interest will never flag because he illustrates the formal theory with wonderfully chosen examples like K-meson interference effects, the Van der Waals interaction, Cooper pairing, spin resonance, multipole radiation, Klein’s paradox, and the Hanbury-Brown and Twiss experiment. A special treat not found in other textbooks is a discussion of Julian Schwinger’s unique take on the quantum theory of angular momentum.
These lecture notes comprise a three-semester graduate course in quantum mechanics at the University of Illinois. There are a number of texts which present the basic topics very well; but since a fair quantity of the material discussed in my course was not available to the students in elementary quantum mechanics books, I was asked to prepare written notes. In retrospect these lecture notes seemed sufficiently interesting to warrant their publication in this format. The notes, presented here in slightly revised form, consitutute a self-contained course in quantum mechanics from first principles to elementary and relativistic one-particle mechanics. Prerequisite to…
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