100 books like Axiomatic

By Greg Egan,

Here are 100 books that Axiomatic fans have personally recommended if you like Axiomatic. Shepherd is a community of 11,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of Stories of Your Life and Others

Ai Jiang Author Of I Am AI

From my list on reads for a glimpse at humanity.

Why am I passionate about this?

I grew up on a diet of dystopian fiction, and when I first began taking craft more seriously and diving into short stories, that was the genre I found myself writing most. I suppose what draws me to the genre is how dystopian fiction has the ability to illuminate society’s faults and injustices and humanity as a whole, the bleak futures that it could create if certain ideologies were allowed to persist, the way individual behaviours and actions can well shape the future and dictate whether it becomes one filled with hope or one that falls into disaster. 

Ai's book list on reads for a glimpse at humanity

Ai Jiang Why did Ai love this book?

What fascinates me most about this novella is its ability to capture such depth and fullness in such a short length.

This book explores the concept of time and language, and how the way humans perceive time vastly differs from the alien species, and the way language ultimately affects time perception and decision-making as well.

By Ted Chiang,

Why should I read it?

11 authors picked Stories of Your Life and Others as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'A science fiction genius . . . Ted Chiang is a superstar.' - Guardian

With Stories of Your Life and Others, his masterful first collection, multiple-award-winning author Ted Chiang deftly blends human emotion and scientific rationalism in eight remarkably diverse stories, all told in his trademark precise and evocative prose.

From a soaring Babylonian tower that connects a flat Earth with the firmament above, to a world where angelic visitations are a wondrous and terrifying part of everyday life; from a neural modification that eliminates the appeal of physical beauty, to an alien language that challenges our very perception of…


Book cover of Memory Speaks: On Losing and Reclaiming Language and Self

Michael J. Spivey Author Of Who You Are: The Science of Connectedness

From my list on the mind as more than a brain.

Why am I passionate about this?

Over the past 25 years, I have spent half of my time as a professor of psychology at Cornell University and the second half as a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Merced. The interdisciplinary field of cognitive science invites a much wider range of methods, theories, and perspectives in studying the mind. My work employs dynamical systems theory, neural network simulations, eye-tracking, and other dense-sampling measures of cognitive processes to reveal how the brain, body, and environment cooperate to generate mental activity. In 2010, I was awarded the William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement from the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Honor Society. I have authored two books, The Continuity of Mind, and Who You Are.

Michael's book list on the mind as more than a brain

Michael J. Spivey Why did Michael love this book?

One of the most important parts of the environment for human organisms is the linguistic information that we share back and forth with each other. The language(s) you share with the people around you cannot help but become a fundamental aspect of who you are. While the majority of the world is multilingual (i.e., able to talk about the same thing in different ways), many in North America struggle with developing fluency in a language other than English because English has become so overwhelmingly dominant. Julie Sedivy is in the curious (but not uncommon) situation of being “a linguistic orphan, a person without a mother tongue.” She learned only Czech for the first few years of her life but then was whisked away to Canada where she quickly learned English and rapidly forgot her native language. In Memory Speaks, Julie Sedivy draws the parallels between an individual losing a…

By Julie Sedivy,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Memory Speaks as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

From an award-winning writer and linguist, a scientific and personal meditation on the phenomenon of language loss and the possibility of renewal.

As a child Julie Sedivy left Czechoslovakia for Canada, and English soon took over her life. By early adulthood she spoke Czech rarely and badly, and when her father died unexpectedly, she lost not only a beloved parent but also her firmest point of connection to her native language. As Sedivy realized, more is at stake here than the loss of language: there is also the loss of identity.

Language is an important part of adaptation to a…


Book cover of The Trial

Andrew Najberg Author Of In Those Fading Stars

From my list on imagine how weird the universe can be.

Why am I passionate about this?

Throughout my life, I’ve moved around quite a bit, and in the process, members of my family and I have encountered many wildly strange people and things. The universe itself is a wild place when you delve into the more exotic aspects: black holes, quantum physics, and measurable differences in subjective realities. It’s hard to say what the real boundaries are, and so I look for stories that stretch my ability to conceive what could be–and that help me find wonder in all the darkness and strangeness around me.

Andrew's book list on imagine how weird the universe can be

Andrew Najberg Why did Andrew love this book?

This book by Franz Kafka may well be the OG book in the pursuit of weirdness in long-form fiction. Telling the harsh and anxious story of Joseph K’s unexplained arrest, Kafka brilliantly creates a universal allegory for the way we often feel like we must defend ourselves against a world that feels impossible to understand.

By Franz Kafka,

Why should I read it?

11 authors picked The Trial as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

"Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested." From its gripping first sentence onward, this novel exemplifies the term ""Kafkaesque." Its darkly humorous narrative recounts a bank clerk's entrapment — based on an undisclosed charge — in a maze of nonsensical rules and bureaucratic roadblocks.
Written in 1914 and published posthumously in 1925, Kafka's engrossing parable about the human condition plunges an isolated individual into an impersonal, illogical system. Josef K.'s ordeals raise provocative, ever-relevant issues related to the role of government and the nature of…


Book cover of Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension

Michael J. Spivey Author Of Who You Are: The Science of Connectedness

From my list on the mind as more than a brain.

Why am I passionate about this?

Over the past 25 years, I have spent half of my time as a professor of psychology at Cornell University and the second half as a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Merced. The interdisciplinary field of cognitive science invites a much wider range of methods, theories, and perspectives in studying the mind. My work employs dynamical systems theory, neural network simulations, eye-tracking, and other dense-sampling measures of cognitive processes to reveal how the brain, body, and environment cooperate to generate mental activity. In 2010, I was awarded the William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement from the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Honor Society. I have authored two books, The Continuity of Mind, and Who You Are.

Michael's book list on the mind as more than a brain

Michael J. Spivey Why did Michael love this book?

There are many relevant books that preceded Andy Clark’s Supersizing the Mind and that followed it. For example, Raymond Gibbs’s Embodiment and Cognitive Science, Louise Barrett’s Beyond the Brain, and Lawrence Shapiro’s Embodied Cognition have made important contributions to the field’s understanding of the role that the body plays in cognition. But Andy Clark’s treatment of this topic stands out because of the range of disciplines that he includes in marshaling of evidence for embodied and extended cognition.

Unlike many of the proponents of embodied and extended cognition, Andy Clark relies heavily on state-of-the-art robotics for his evidence. As a philosopher, Clark’s first instinct is to use thought experiments to help “pump” the reader’s intuitions out of the ground like subterranean insights. A good thought experiment can actually help you realize that you have a different opinion about something than you thought you had. But Clark also clearly…

By Andy Clark,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Supersizing the Mind as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

When historian Charles Weiner found pages of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman's notes, he saw it as a "record" of Feynman's work. Feynman himself, however, insisted that the notes were not a record but the work itself. In Supersizing the Mind , Andy Clark argues that our thinking doesn't happen only in our heads but that "certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed-forward and feed-around loops: loops that
promiscuously criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body and world." The pen and paper of Feynman's thought are just such feedback loops, physical machinery that shape the flow of…


Book cover of Extended Consciousness and Predictive Processing: A Third Wave View

Michael J. Spivey Author Of Who You Are: The Science of Connectedness

From my list on the mind as more than a brain.

Why am I passionate about this?

Over the past 25 years, I have spent half of my time as a professor of psychology at Cornell University and the second half as a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Merced. The interdisciplinary field of cognitive science invites a much wider range of methods, theories, and perspectives in studying the mind. My work employs dynamical systems theory, neural network simulations, eye-tracking, and other dense-sampling measures of cognitive processes to reveal how the brain, body, and environment cooperate to generate mental activity. In 2010, I was awarded the William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement from the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Honor Society. I have authored two books, The Continuity of Mind, and Who You Are.

Michael's book list on the mind as more than a brain

Michael J. Spivey Why did Michael love this book?

Where Andy Clark leaves off, claiming that cognition is extended into the environment via the tools that we use, Kirchhoff and Kiverstein take up claiming that consciousness itself may also be extended into the environment under certain circumstances. Consider that moment when you and someone close to you are both trying to remember the name of some actor from a movie. You both feel like the name is on the tip of your tongues but can’t quite come to a realization. You manage to blurt out the first name but nothing else and then your partner blurts out the last name. As per Andy Clark, this is clearly a case of extended cognition between two people. But is it perhaps also a case of a momentary shared consciousness? 

Kirchhoff and Kiverstein first provide a scholarly analytical philosophical treatment of recent iterations of the extended cognition hypothesis primarily to draw the…

By Michael D. Kirchhoff, Julian Kiverstein,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Extended Consciousness and Predictive Processing as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In this jointly authored book, Kirchhoff and Kiverstein defend the controversial thesis that phenomenal consciousness is realised by more than just the brain. They argue that the mechanisms and processes that realise phenomenal consciousness can at times extend across brain, body, and the social, material, and cultural world. Kirchhoff and Kiverstein offer a state-of-the-art tour of current arguments for and against extended consciousness. They aim to persuade you that it is possible to develop and defend the thesis of extended consciousness through the increasingly influential predictive processing theory developed in cognitive neuroscience. They show how predictive processing can be given…


Book cover of Radical Embodied Cognitive Science

Michael J. Spivey Author Of Who You Are: The Science of Connectedness

From my list on the mind as more than a brain.

Why am I passionate about this?

Over the past 25 years, I have spent half of my time as a professor of psychology at Cornell University and the second half as a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Merced. The interdisciplinary field of cognitive science invites a much wider range of methods, theories, and perspectives in studying the mind. My work employs dynamical systems theory, neural network simulations, eye-tracking, and other dense-sampling measures of cognitive processes to reveal how the brain, body, and environment cooperate to generate mental activity. In 2010, I was awarded the William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement from the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Honor Society. I have authored two books, The Continuity of Mind, and Who You Are.

Michael's book list on the mind as more than a brain

Michael J. Spivey Why did Michael love this book?

On the last page of The Continuity of Mind, I playfully hinted at a sequel (probably written by someone else) that would continue the paradigm’s push not just away from a “computer metaphor for the mind” but even beyond a brain-based approach to cognition. A couple of years later, Tony Chemero published Radical Embodied Cognitive Science, which (to me) felt like that sequel. 

In Radical Embodied Cognitive Science, Chemero draws on philosophy, then on cognitive psychology, then on dynamical systems theory, then on ecological psychology, and finally back to philosophy to tell the story of a progressive interdisciplinary approach to understanding sensorimotor processing and human experience as belonging to the natural order – rather than being some unique phenomenon that has no overlap with the rest of the natural world. After setting the stage with a treatment of the philosophical background and defining what the theoretical stakes…

By Anthony Chemero,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Radical Embodied Cognitive Science as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A proposal for a new way to do cognitive science argues that cognition should be described in terms of agent-environment dynamics rather than computation and representation.

 

While philosophers of mind have been arguing over the status of mental representations in cognitive science, cognitive scientists have been quietly engaged in studying perception, action, and cognition without explaining them in terms of mental representation. In this book, Anthony Chemero describes this nonrepresentational approach (which he terms radical embodied cognitive science), puts it in historical and conceptual context, and applies it to traditional problems in the philosophy of mind. Radical embodied cognitive science…


Book cover of One Hundred Years of Solitude

Mike Maggio Author Of The Appointment

From my list on speculative fiction.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have always been drawn to the weird, fantastic, supernatural, and unexplained. Whether it’s film or TV (The Twilight Zone, the X-files, Ingmar Bergman) or gothic and speculative literature, I become mesmerized by the mysteries involved. I have written 10 books (poetry and fiction). Of the fiction, most is either speculative, as in magical realism, or somewhat gothic in nature. My newest novel, due out in 2025, is pure gothic and takes place in a haunted abbey inhabited by ghosts and the devil himself. And yet, behind it all is an exploration of human faith and frailty and a search for answers about our beliefs.

Mike's book list on speculative fiction

Mike Maggio Why did Mike love this book?

I love being taken to places I’ve never been before and being exposed to leaps in imagination. Marquez, the most famous of the school of magical realism, takes the reader on a journey through time and history in an unforgettable tale. The style of writing captures me in this book and has also influenced me. If you read no other book, read this one.

By Gabriel García Márquez, Gregory Rabassa (translator),

Why should I read it?

19 authors picked One Hundred Years of Solitude as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, and alive with unforgettable men and women -- brimming with truth, compassion, and a lyrical magic that strikes the soul -- this novel is a masterpiece in the art of fiction.


Book cover of The Nine Billion Names of God

Mario Barbatti Author Of One Billion Faces: Short Stories

From my list on where reality dissolves into strangeness and wonder.

Why am I passionate about this?

I was ten. Every Sunday morning, I sat in front of the TV with a notepad to take notes while watching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. As a teen, I devoured every of Kafka’s books. The wonder of science and the strangeness of our existence have co-habited within me since then. Today, I’m a professional physicist and theoretical chemist. But I’m also a fiction writer. My fiction allows me to spill my science background into topics that wouldn’t be welcome in technical writing. For instance, wondering how life could re-emerge in the far future after all stars burned.

Mario's book list on where reality dissolves into strangeness and wonder

Mario Barbatti Why did Mario love this book?

Hard science fiction, firmly based on scientific concepts, is a constant source of wonder. This classic collection—one of my first contacts with the genre maybe thirty-five years ago—is still one of my favorites! 

Since Clarke wrote these stories in the 1950s and 60s, science, technology, and the world have changed dramatically. But his writing aged well. The moral despair of the protagonist of The Star when he uncovers the relationship between a supernova's remains and humanity's history is timeless. The warning, “There is always a last time for everything,” at the closing of the tale The Nine Billion Names of God, still rings prophetic.

By Arthur C. Clarke,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Nine Billion Names of God as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The invention of computers was a godsend to the obscure monks deep in the Himalayas. Their centuries-long project to write out all of God's names could be sped up by thousands of years. And only they had any clue what would come next!


Book cover of The Difference Engine

Iwan Rhys Morus Author Of How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon: The Story of the 19th-Century Innovators Who Forged Our Future

From my list on books that will blow your minds about the Victorians.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m fascinated by the Victorians – and I’ve spent most of my career trying to understand them – because they’re so like us and so unlike us in many ways. They’re familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. I’m a historian of science, and I’m passionate about trying to understand why we think about the world – and about science – the way we do. I think it started with the Victorians, so understanding them really matters and getting it right rather than repeating the same old stories. I hope these books will help you put the Victorians in their place the way they helped me.

Iwan's book list on books that will blow your minds about the Victorians

Iwan Rhys Morus Why did Iwan love this book?

OK, yes, I know. It’s fiction, and the first steampunk novel too. But I think that sometimes fiction can tell us (almost) as much as factual history about the past, if the authors have done their research – and Gibson and Sterling absolutely have. I can even tell just what academic papers they’d been reading!

It’s alternative history Victorian, But I think it tells us a lot about the real Victorians too, because it shows just how much technology mattered to their sense of who they were and what made them different from their parents. And, obviously, it’s a great story.

By William Gibson, Bruce Sterling,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Difference Engine as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In 1855, London swelters in a poisonous heatwave. The computer age has arrived a century ahead of time and the Industrial Revolution is in full swing. However, there is a conspiracy afoot, linking Britain with the France of Louis Napoleon and the Manhattan commune of Karl Marx.


Book cover of The Complete Strange Tales From the City of Dust: Omnibus

Tanweer Dar Author Of The Demon

From my list on indie cyberpunk to get your circuits going.

Why am I passionate about this?

Between Blade Runner and The Terminator, I was hooked on Cyberpunk. Throw in some Ghost in the Shell and Black Mirror, and the obsession was complete. With the rise of Synthwave as a musical genre and as a retro-futuristic aesthetic, I had both the soundtrack and the visual cues to which I could write Cyberpunk. I also feel strongly about our increasing reliance on technology and the blurring lines between biology and technology. This is something I explore in my writing.

Tanweer's book list on indie cyberpunk to get your circuits going

Tanweer Dar Why did Tanweer love this book?

Vaz Anzai collects all five episodes from his Strange Tales from The City Of Dust series in this absolutely breathtaking omnibus that also includes bonus short stories, author notes, and exclusive artwork. With great, and varied, characters, fascinating technology, and gritty Cyberpunk settings, Dust: Omnibus is essential reading for all fans of the genre.

By Vaz Anzai,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Complete Strange Tales From the City of Dust as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Strange Tales From The City Of Dust is the ultimate Omnibus for the complete Dust storyline.
5 episodic adventures along with 3 short stories and detailed author notes, commissioned artwork, and more!

CLOCKWORK DEUS: Episode 1
Alice, a "Tinkerer" for the Wonderlust brothel has discovered a Prostibot that has become self-aware. Together, they will uncover the secret behind a shadowy organization in Dust's abandoned zone, The Blooming Fields.

THE DARKEST PART: Episode 2
Laila, a mysterious Saudi Arabian woman, has escaped an event known as "The Opaque", a consuming void that destroyed her former city. Now in Dust, she must…


5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in cyberpunk, steampunk, and grimdark?

Cyberpunk 110 books
Steampunk 94 books
Grimdark 21 books