The influence of the books listed below, particularly I Am Legend and The Lathe of Heaven, led me to dedicate myself to writing shorter novels. In a world where many novels sprawl into the thousand-page mark, where world-building can overwhelm character and plot, I’m focused on writing tight, layered narratives where every sentence matters. No fluff, no padding, just character development, plot, and exploration of theme. I primarily write sci-fi mystery novels, and mystery readers want the who-what-when-where-how, characters they can root for, and a mystery they get obsessed with solving. I aim to give them exactly that—and very little else—to keep the story exciting.
I rarely reread a novel, but I’ve read this one five times so far. In just 25,000 words, Matheson does a masterful job of world-building. You experience the devastating effects of an apocalypse in a very personal, intimate way. It has the most meaningful, heartbreaking ending of any book I’ve ever read (and I’m bitter that all three film adaptations botched that ending).
Matheson created the modern vampire in this book, the first to invoke science for the monsters’ creation instead of supernatural elements. He also inadvertently created the zombie movie genre; George Romero cites the Vincent Price adaptation ofI Am Legend, The Last Man on Earth(co-written by Matheson), as his main inspiration for Night of the Living Dead.
An acclaimed SF novel about vampires. The last man on earth is not alone ...Robert Neville is the last living man on Earth ...but he is not alone. Every other man, woman and child on the planet has become a vampire, and they are hungry for Neville's blood. By day he is the hunter, stalking the undead through the ruins of civilisation. By night, he barricades himself in his home and prays for the dawn. How long can one man survive like this?
This is another novel I’ve read five times. In only 46,000 words, Le Guin doesn’t just build one world, she builds several. After three paragraphs of poetic introduction, Le Guin gives us three sentences that allude to an entire saga that happened just before the novel began, with the world decimated by some unspecified nuclear catastrophe. This pre-saga is never mentioned again, and every time I reread this book, I linger over those three sentences and try to imagine what went down.
Le Guin’s imagination knew no bounds. This book delivers aliens, sentient sea turtles, an ironic cure to racism, and ideas that stay with you for months after you finish the book. Not to mention Le Guin’s delectably poetic prose.
'Her worlds have a magic sheen . . . She moulds them into dimensions we can only just sense. She is unique. She is legend' THE TIMES
'Le Guin is a writer of phenomenal power' OBSERVER
George Orr is a mild and unremarkable man who finds the world a less than pleasant place to live: seven billion people jostle for living space and food. But George dreams dreams which do in fact change reality - and he has no means of controlling this extraordinary power.
Psychiatrist Dr William Haber offers to help. At first sceptical of George's powers, he comes…
When Annie Thornton, midwife and apprentice witch, falls through time to a 15th-century Yorkshire village with her telepathic cat, Rosamund, she befriends Will and Jack, two soldiers returning from the French Wars. Mistress Meg, Annie’s ancestral aunt living in the 15th century, is…
This novella makes my list primarily because it inspired my favorite horror movie of all time: John Carpenter’s The Thing. This is the only book on the list that I wish was much longer, mostly because it’s more plot-driven than character-driven, and the plot is ingenious. Campbell has so many brilliant twists throughout this terrifying tale of scientists in the Antarctic who unearth a frozen alien that consumes and then perfectly imitates its prey. Sequences that last a few pages warrant an entire book unto themselves.
Were Campbell writing in 2022, this novella would’ve been a series of short novels that would’ve had voracious readers devouring its many hundreds of serialized pages as quickly as they could.
Who Goes There?, the novella that formed the basis of the film The Thing, is the John W. Campbell classic about an antarctic research camp that discovers and thaws the ancient body of a crash-landed alien.
Like Le Guin, Bradbury writes beautiful prose. His writing style pushed me to make my own prose more lyrical. Though labeled a novel by his publisher, this is actually a short-story collection centered on the topic of Earth colonizing Mars in the future.
There are some recurring characters, and the stories are arranged in chronological order, telling an overarching tale of humanity’s trials and tribulations as they attempt to make a faraway planet their new home, but each chapter is a story that can be read and enjoyed as a one-off. That unconventional approach allows Bradbury to explore wild concepts on the periphery of the colonization adventure that he never would’ve been able to shed a light on if bound by the constraints of a typical plot.
The Martian Chronicles, a seminal work in Ray Bradbury's career, whose extraordinary power and imagination remain undimmed by time's passage, is available from Simon & Schuster for the first time.
In The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury, America’s preeminent storyteller, imagines a place of hope, dreams, and metaphor— of crystal pillars and fossil seas—where a fine dust settles on the great empty cities of a vanished, devastated civilization. Earthmen conquer Mars and then are conquered by it, lulled by dangerous lies of comfort and familiarity, and enchanted by the lingering glamour of an ancient, mysterious native race. In this classic work…
Connections In Time Bain's Story
by
S.G. Boudreaux,
Finding Family, Discovery, Destiny. This is what nineteen-year-old Bain Brinley is searching for.
In his homeland, far in the mountains, he stepped into what he could only describe as a time-portal and landed in a strange land known as Egypt. Then he falls through another portal during a storm, only…
Burgess blew me away with how he used the number of chapters to tell a story in and of itself.
There are 21 chapters in Clockwork, and Burgess revealed in interviews that that number is quite purposeful; the book is about a boy maturing into a man, and Burgess used 21 chapters since that is the age at which people are legally considered adults in his homeland of England.
This book taught me that restricting myself on purpose (the way Burgess limited himself to exactly 21 chapters) would enhance my creativity, not hinder it. I also liked how he created his own slang for his characters and used it without explanation in the book, allowing his readers to suss it out from context. I liked that confidence.
In Anthony Burgess's influential nightmare vision of the future, where the criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, a teen who talks in a fantastically inventive slang that evocatively renders his and his friends' intense reaction against their society. Dazzling and transgressive, A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil and the meaning of human freedom. This edition includes the controversial last chapter not published in the first edition, and Burgess's introduction, "A Clockwork Orange Resucked."
The first colony on Earth’s moon has just had its first murder. I’ve been tasked with catching the killer. My name is Coba. I’m a robot with artificial general intelligence, meaning I can learn any intellectual task a human being can.
A colonist is found with his neck snapped and his heart cut out. The heart is missing. A suspect is in custody, but something doesn’t add up. Strange events start to unfold, including a rash of bizarre sleepwalking incidents. The colonists’ conflicting accounts of the murder make me wonder if everyone is lying to me. I realize the killer wants to play a game with me when a gift box shows up in my room. Inside is the victim’s missing heart.
Whatever happened to the young Carr heiress who vanished years ago? A scheming uncle with an eye on her fortune persuades a vaudeville performer to impersonate his niece in exchange for a share of the inheritance. Desperate for work, Jessie accepts the role and moves from the tawdry world of…
Lolita Firestone, struggling Hollywood actress, visits Sedona, Arizona, catches so-called Red Rock Fever and establishes the Center for Cosmic Consciousness. Alas, when small groups of black men from African countries on the U.S. terrorism watchlist come to Sedona to attend the Cosmic Center's weekend workshops, the CIA takes notice and…