Fans pick 65 books like All the Weyrs of Pern

I like history and dragons, so I was immediately grabbed by a book offering an alternative history with dragons! The story is set during the Napoleonic Wars. Dragons are a major part of the war effort. A dragon chooses his or her captain, and the larger dragons are like warplanes or warships in the air, carrying the captain and a crew, including a medic.

The main human character, naval captain Will Laurence, is picked by a newly hatched dragon, which takes him into Britain’s Aerial Corps. I enjoyed reading how Laurence comes to love Temeraire, and that the dragon is a strong character in his own right. 

What would it be like to become a dragon? Jim Eckert finds out when his consciousness is projected into a medieval fantasy world, and his mind ends up in a dragon. I loved him working out how to convince people like his girlfriend, Angie, who he is and how others join him on his quest to free Angie after she’s been captured.

The dragon rescuing the lady inverts the normal trope and makes the novel great fun to read. 

The setting drew me in immediately. Fifteen-year-old Jakkin lives in a penal colony world where the economy has formed around the training and fighting of dragons.

As a young slave boy, he decides to steal a baby dragon, which he’ll raise and train to fight and so earn enough money to buy his freedom. The world-building is exceptional, and I came to love the dragon ‘Heart’s Blood’ as much as Jakkin. 

This is like a Dickens novel, but the characters are dragons rather than humans. All of the elements of a Victorian romance, such as obsession with manners and purity, are present, along with draconic elements like the heirs eating their dead father and parents killing off weak hatchlings. Social class and women’s rights are set in a culture of dragons!

This coming-of-age story centers on Jaxom, a young dragon rider and future lord of a hold, and his bonded dragon Ruth, a rare, small, and often silly white dragon. Jaxom thinks his greatest problem is the bullies who mock him for his status and his dragon’s unusual size, but as he strives to prove his naysayers wrong, he ends up thrown in the middle of political machinations far beyond what he could have dreamed. I love Ruth’s almost childlike nature and his fearless willingness to rise to whatever challenge they faced. Their friendship, and unique relationship with the tiny fire lizards of the land, was charming at every turn. 

I discovered Alastair Reynolds, who is now my favorite science fiction writer, by reading this book, which was a mind-opening experience. I especially enjoy his combining a kind of “film noir” sensibility with realistic science ideas (the latter is not surprising since he has a Ph.D. in astronomy.) 

This first novel in his series is an excellent way to delve into his marvelously imagined Universe, where humanity exists in a number of genetically modified variants, and intelligences have to contend with ancient and powerful machines that deem organic life too war-like to be permitted to live.

Realistic space settlement stories balance infinite optimism against terrifying risk. The celebrated authors of this science fiction masterpiece explore this cosmic equation without mercy. The veritable utopia of Camelot, mankind’s first interstellar settlement, is about to go very, very, very wrong. After reading this book, I stopped visiting the river behind my house and I lost sleep for weeks. It taught me that when we audaciously plan our real-world space settlements, the details really do matter. Living on another planet requires the consideration of thousands and thousands of important details… and unfortunately, the doomed settlers of Camelot have overlooked one.

Chasm City is part of Reynold's Revelation Space series, but this future-noir mystery is perfectly readable as a standalone. It follows a man on a mission of revenge, one that takes him into the crumbling, plague-ridden remains of a once-great civilization that has descended into chaos and squalor. The world-building is top-notch—this is a dying, decaying city that you can feel in your bones—and full mysteries that explore ideas of identity, memory, and redemption in a twisty mystery that ties together past, present, and future.

If it’s hard to make readers side with spiders, what about plants?

The planet on which an unlucky group of humans are stranded in Semiosis is indeed home to sentient plants that see humans as just another resource. But this isn’t some Day of The Triffids monster tale. The plants can’t move anything like humans can, which, in the hands of a lesser author, might make for quite a static, boring story.

Burke demonstrates her boundless imagination by taking the reader into the "mind" of the plant, seeing the world, its threats, and resources in a completely different and plant-like way and bringing a sense of urgency as the survival of plant and humans alike become bound together.

It’s a fascinating read, and the follow-up, Interference, is just as good. 

The fifth book on my list was a difficult choice; so many to exclude. I chose this because it is about the colonization of an alien world, in this case one tidally locked to a red dwarf. The description of the planet is good, although it begs the question of why the atmosphere did not freeze out on the dark side. I was struck by the highlighting of some of the sociological problems of colonizing such a strange world. It touches on the scientific aspects, the sociological aspects of being that far from home, and the economic issues. There is also a good story; I found it both entertaining and imaginative.