The most recommended books about planets

I have revisited Darkover Landfall often, but it never loses its hold on my imagination. It’s the Darkover novels’ origin story, telling what happens when an interstellar colonizing starship goes off course and crash-lands on an uncharted planet. In essence, this is Science Fiction, except that the earth-like planet has fantastic creatures, some of them with paranormal powers.

The castaways include a few hard-nosed scientific professionals who expect to lead many industrious generalists who plan to colonize a new world. All must recognize that the technology that brought them to Darkover will not sustain them unless they adapt, learn, and unlearn. It’s a story to make us wonder what we really need from our planet and each other.

I came across this, now out of print, booklet as a 19-year-old who could not believe the majority of the planet would believe something incorrect. This guy was a lone voice against the tide of overpopulation panic. 

The information he provided was easily confirmed with math or encyclopedia references. It is completely a Q&A format. Very strange, at first. It was as if he expected me, the reader, to reach my own conclusions based on the information alone. That was new for me. He did not coax me or summarize his conclusion. This influenced my writing style for life. It respects the reader as having a mind of his own.

The 2nd most impacting part about this was ultimately, that yes, the whole world could literally be wrong. Shocking!

A seemingly perfect society and its ugly underbelly always make for a compelling read. But this one goes a step beyond with compassion, culture-clash, inclusivity, sheer storytelling genius, and characters I was rooting hard for through every page. Luckily, since I couldn't get enough, there are quite a few sequels.

Poor Pluto! Earthlings are wretched, despicable creatures. How dare they ask Pluto if they can call him Plutoid!

In this hilarious, fact-filled book, Pluto gets the call from us dreadful, “Earth’s meanest jerks” – humans, giving him the ‘news.’ All of us on Earth heard the news, but Pluto was informed of his downgrade a wee bit later. Follow newly-demoted Pluto and the rest of the planets on a fun journey of acceptance. The author has done a fabulous job of interleaving (mostly) facts and fiction. The story is told with speech bubbles, many of which will leave you chuckling. There are also some great puns. Don’t miss this one!

This book marked my childhood in the '80s (there is a modern version but the original is the one), being one of the main reasons I do what I do. This is the story of an astronaut that lands on a planet far far away, after running out of fuel. Somehow everyone on earth can hear his loneliness and tries to help. It is a beautiful story about self-understanding and helping others, that mixes illustrations and photographs, allowing children's imaginations to flow: the little planet is represented by an orange photo and the rocket is just a regular bread piece, which as a kid blew my mind.  

I loved the humor of this novel: Prot – who claims to be an alien from the planet K-PAX – is charming and funny and absolutely wins over everyone he meets. You can’t not want him to be who he says he is. Is K-Pax a real planet? Is Prot a real alien or does he suffer from a mental illness? If you’ve seen the movie, that’s a start, but the book is better and there are sequels. It’s told from his psychiatrist’s point of view so we get a lot of background on him and how he relates to Prot. In many ways, the book tells us more about what it’s like for us to be humans than for Prot to be an alien.

This book carried a concept of shared thought that enchanted me. Colonists find themselves marooned on a planet of simple technologies. At a certain season, a flower sends pollen through the air that causes special connective telepathy and healing powers. They form a society based on royal families but there’s a group that melds minds which is beautifully depicted. This series raised in me a fascination with the idea of closeness of mind and connection. Amid the challenges of a primitive society blended with increasing amounts of outer, technologically advanced influence as their planet is eventually discovered, the mind is shown to still be the most powerful. 

This story imagines a human colony on an alien world that is both terrifying and surreal. 

One by one the colonists meet strange fates or murder each other, until they all wake up to discover the entire sequence of events was a virtual reality—a diversion designed to occupy them while awaiting an unlikely rescue from otherwise certain doom. However, elements from the virtual reality escape into the waking world, leading to salvation for at least one of the voyagers.

This book will keep you guessing right up to the end, and beyond, making the reader consider what is real, what is religion, and what do we want most out of life.

This long narrative poem has the most lyrical descriptions of sailing I’ve ever read, so back in my teens, I memorized it. It takes 30 minutes to recite. While voyaging under sail in the Pacific, reciting it twice would get me though the first lonely hour of my long night watch. Even today, reciting the poem sends my spirit back to the open sea.

The first turning point of the story is when the charismatic albatross is shot for no reason. The second turning point is when the mariner breaks the curse by overcoming his revulsion for the ocean’s non-charismatic “slimy things that crawl” and he blesses them. So we learn to value all life, charismatic or not.

Gibson was a dear friend and this is his fourth and final work. When I first read it, long before it was published, I was wondering how in the world he was going to connect a 1st Century Roman invasion of Ireland with a 33rd Century mining planet millions of light-years from Earth. And boy did he ever weave those two worlds together in an amazing way.