91 books like Coyote

Another work spanning more than a hundred years and featuring many rich characters, crises, and drama, the Mars Trilogy makes a great summer read. At a little more than 1600 pages, the trilogy is like three seasons of a really engrossing television series.

The trilogy contains ample portions of science, science fiction, politics, and explorations of the human condition. There’s even some boom-boom for those who like a few explosions in their stories. Like my other preferences, there’s little “magic” in the Trilogy’s universe; instead, things mostly make sense after accepting a couple of assumptions. The richness of the characters really stood out for me, helped by the fact that the characters, by and large, experience long lifetimes!

Dayworld is an elegant but dystopic solution to a possible future population crisis and one that keeps me thinking about how we should restrain ourselves. Humanity can only endure overpopulation by placing people into suspended animation six days a week. Jeff Carid is a rebel and a daybreaker, living a different life each day as he illegally moves through the week. But, when Jeff’s ability to segregate his seven lives deteriorates, the rebels realise they can’t trust him.

I love how Jeff slips from Tuesday-World to Wednesday-World, etc., easing into distinct personalities. This story made me realise different cultures exist in the same place, often never noticing each other, which we see when Jeff looks back with distaste at a previous day’s persona.

This book embodies many of my favorite features of post-apocalyptic fiction—everything from rogue AI and hazardous underground encounters to trekking across devastated hellscapes. The concept of “Sanctuary” and its mythical connotations made a significant impression on me. The idea that there was a safe place, regardless of how bad things got, appealed to my sense of fairness in the universe and reinforced the idea that there is always hope.

I have given copies of the Galactic Milieu Trilogy as gifts more than any other book. This is the bravest near-future sci-fi series I have ever read. Intervention, published in 1987, follows events from 1945 through to 2013 when the five races of the Galactic Milieu embrace humanity. I love the merger of historical events with future possibilities in a story centred around a dynasty of ‘operant’ human beings.

As a teenager, I was fascinated by stories of telepathy, etc., but I found most books that dealt with ‘higher mind powers’ were in the fantasy or horror market. But this series is perfect sci-fi, technically plausible while politically powerful—and again, with a large, diverse cast.

The United States was born out of a revolution, but the civil rights of its citizens were created by evolution over the country’s nearly 250-year history. In this book, author Kyle G. Volk traces how various minorities elbowed their way to the American rights table and changed our democratic political system. 

What made the book resonate with me was the well-researched examples of how minorities got their voices heard by the majority. He sticks to the meat and potatoes issues that matter to regular people, such as transportation, education, and booze–wet regulations, as it were.

It was a toss-up here between this book and The Scar, set in a different part of the same world. One of Miéville’s acknowledged influences is the wonderful Mervyn Peake, and like Peake, he’s never in a hurry to get a story underway.

I’d have probably tossed Perdido Street Station aside after 100-200 pages except for a friend’s fervent recommendation—and I’d have missed out big time if I had! Because the story as it develops is truly grand, truly epic. Like Peake, Miéville has a gift for raising action to a mythical status. I love, love, love a novel that builds up to a long, rolling, thunderous climax!

Because of the enormous odds stacked against each movement of this sort, the story of every nonviolent leader has an unlikely element to it. But Vaclav Havel’s biography may be the most unlikely of all. A playwright, an intellectual, and, in his own words, a “bundle of nerves,” Havel nevertheless found himself leader of Czechoslovakia’s astonishing nonviolent Velvet Revolution in 1989, and soon after became the country’s first president following the fall of communism. A very human embodiment of humanist conviction, Havel’s life is one to study.

There are two kinds of patriots: those who insist that allegiance to flag and country means keeping things the way they are, and those who want their country to live up to its ideals and do better by all its citizens. (Which side are you on?) In Dissent (2015), history professor Ralph Young shows how the foundational protest of the American Revolution lives on in the Occupy demonstrators and Women’s Marchers, Black Lives Matter groups, and climate change activists.

The emergence of a dissident movement and the KGB’s efforts to control it were one of the dramas of the Brezhnev era. What better way to read the history than through the agency’s reports on the period’s premier dissident? Andrei Sakharov, nuclear physicist and “Domestic Enemy Number One,” survived the mind games and isolation, emerging to lead the campaign for memory in the late 1980s as Gorbachev loosened up. The book is fascinating on the fumbling efforts of Politburo gerontocrats, who often seem confused and outplayed, as well as on the circumlocutions and ideological distortions of a security agency determined to blur the true character of its operations.  

For me, the most interesting aspect of this autobiography is its honesty. I already knew a lot about Sakharov when I read this book. I learned about Sakharov’s development that he was initially a devoted team member providing the most lethal weapons to a dictatorship, and how he evolved and eventually became a most fearless and forceful human rights advocate in a ruthless dictatorship—in the post-Stalin Soviet era.

I learned how he had opposed the Soviet leader Khrushchev and how he then became enemy No. 1 of the regime under Brezhnev. I found it also instructive how Gorbachev continued playing the role of his predecessors and how he found a formidable opponent in Sakharov. All this I find sadly relevant when I look at today’s Russia and its dictator.