Here are 100 books that Darwinia fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’ve been a science fiction writer since I was old enough to read, and I’ve spent probably way too much of my life reading and writing and researching and thinking about aliens. I’ve worked in the aerospace industry, launching rockets to the moon and Mars and Saturn, and five of the books I’ve published have touched on alien life in one way or another. I’ve worked as a contributing editor for WIRED magazine and the science and technology correspondent for the SyFy channel, and I hold patents in seven countries, including 31 issued U.S. patents.
Of all of Clarke’s works, this one had, for me, the grandest sense of adventure and mystery. We never do find out who the aliens are or what their goals might be, but we get to join them for part of their journey.
There are puzzles to solve, wonders to behold, and dangers bravely faced. I first read the book when I was nine years old, and it communicated to me just as clearly then as it does today.
In the year 2130, a mysterious and apparently untenanted alien spaceship, Rama, enters our solar system. The first product of an alien civilisation to be encountered by man, it reveals a world of technological marvels and an unparalleled artificial ecology.
Where many people would see an empty package of Oreos, I see the remains of a lost civilization, an artifact crafted galaxies away by beings who flit in and out of existence in order to build rainbows for lonely children and who have left the empty bag, filled with dog poop, flaming on someone’s front step and are laughing uncontrollably as the person stomps on it to put it out. I want to find authors who see more than the bag of Oreos. I want them to be wildly imaginative and to paint what they see with cleverness and humor. I try to do the same.
Kage Baker is an Isaac Asimov compared to Terry Pratchett’s Marx Brothers. In the Garden of Iden is more sci-fi than fantasy, including time travel, cybernetics, and nanotechnologies. And love and loss. This book is part of a series of novels that Baker crafted about time-travelling enhanced humans who carry out critical tasks throughout history.
What I loved most about this book is how very human her main characters are. Like Pratchett and Bill Shakespeare, Baker is a master at showing us human nature. Her comedy is high comedy. I laugh because I recognize myself in her characters. Baker has a fine eye for the subtle and the absurd. And yet unlike many humorous authors, the tragedies of the heart are always at the core of her stories.
This is the first novel in what has become one of the most popular series in contemporary Science Fiction, now back in print from Tor. In the twenty-fourth century, the Company preserves works of art and extinct forms of life (for profit of course). It recruits orphans from the past, renders them all but immortal, and trains them to serve the Company. One of these is Mendoza the botanist, who is sent to Elizabethan England to collect samples from the garden of Sir Walter Iden. Her quest is jeopardized by Nicholas Harpole, who stirs unfamiliar emotions within her about her…
I’m a Virginia-based science fiction and fantasy writer who’s lived variously-enriching lives as a coroner’s assistant, customer service manager, university lecturer, secretary, factory technician, and clerk. I’ve bounced all around the Midwest, from Minnesota to Ohio to Colorado to Missouri and now out on the East Coast.
It’s too easy, in time travel fantasies, to imagine that you would feel a step above the people around you... that you alone know what’s coming, and just, in general, have your advanced-future-person perspective on the world. That’s not how history should feel. The All Clear series’s time-traveling historians arrive to observe the London Blitz and have that comforting certainty ripped out from underneath them. They’re left lost, alone, and isolated in a well-painted portrait of a world on the edge of collapse.
Award-winning author Connie Willis returns with a stunning, enormously entertaining novel of time travel, war, and the deeds - great and small - of ordinary people who shape history.
I’m a Virginia-based science fiction and fantasy writer who’s lived variously-enriching lives as a coroner’s assistant, customer service manager, university lecturer, secretary, factory technician, and clerk. I’ve bounced all around the Midwest, from Minnesota to Ohio to Colorado to Missouri and now out on the East Coast.
Not all books about the past have to be set in the past. In the far-flung future, deep in interstellar space and surrounded by impossible living technologies, an amnesiac takes part in a sociological experiment to reconstruct twentieth-century middle-class living. Glasshouse is, among other things, a playful, bitter, and funny takedown of both the era and the impossibility of actually reconstructing history. The paranoia engendered by twentieth-century living is only far too justified by the interstellar conspiracy that’s ensnared the study’s participants.
“ONE NIGHTMARISH PANOPTICON.” – The New York Times
When Robin wakes up in a clinic with most of his memories missing, it doesn’t take him long to discover that someone is trying to kill him. It’s the twenty-seventh century, when interstellar travel is by teleport gate and conflicts are fought by network worms that censor refugees’ personalities—including Robin’s earlier self.
On the run from a ruthless pursuer and searching for a place to hide, he volunteers to participate in a unique experimental polity: the Glasshouse, a simulated pre-accelerated culture where participants are assigned anonymized identities. But what looks like the…
I’m a Virginia-based science fiction and fantasy writer who’s lived variously-enriching lives as a coroner’s assistant, customer service manager, university lecturer, secretary, factory technician, and clerk. I’ve bounced all around the Midwest, from Minnesota to Ohio to Colorado to Missouri and now out on the East Coast.
Ammonite starts in space and lands on an alien world but brings plenty of Earth’s history along with it. Human settlers that lost an age ago, transformed by a virus that only women survive but allows them to reproduce, have spread across this world. Anthropologist Marghe Taishan faces down nomadic horse archers and gets lost in pastoral folkways both new and familiar. She deconstructs her future and rebuilds herself out of the past. Ammonite’s new world shows us how our world might have looked if different paths were taken.
Winner of the Lambda and Tiptree Awards • “A knockout . . . Strong, likable characters, a compelling story, and a very interesting take on gender.”—Ursula K. Le Guin
Change or die. These are the only options available on planet Jeep. Centuries earlier, a deadly virus shattered the original colony, killing the men and forever altering the few surviving women. Now, generations after the colony lost touch with the rest of humanity, a company arrives to exploit Jeep—and its forces find themselves fighting for their lives. Terrified of spreading the virus, the company abandons its employees, leaving them afraid and…
I became an author because I loved books and wanted to craft my own. Here are five books I consumed first as a reader and then as a writer, methodically noting what made these books brilliant in style, depth, and plot. If you enjoy thrillers or science fiction and are looking for books to hone your craft as a writer, here are my choices.
I like to write “big” books not just in length, but in high concept and complexity.
While struggling with my first book, my editor recommended this one by Michael Crichton. In this book, a derelict spaceship is discovered at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, and a group of scientists are sent down to investigate Earth’s first solid proof of extraterrestrial life. Their encounter quickly becomes a struggle for survival, and when a typhoon drives off the support vessels on the surface, they are on their own.
Sphere taught me a skilled author can make even the most outlandish plot compelling, and those tools helped me finish my first book.
“Crichton keeps us guessing at every turn in his best work since The Andromeda Strain.” —Los Angeles Times
“Sphere may be Crichton’s best novel, but even if it ranked only second or third, it would be a must for suspense fans.” —Miami Herald
A classic thriller from #1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Crichton, Sphere is a bravura demonstration of what he does better than anyone: riveting storytelling that combines frighteningly plausible, cutting edge science and technology with pulse-pounding action and serious chills. The gripping story of a group of American scientists sent to the…
Why hopepunk, and why me? Look, it’s no surprise that you can look around today and find all sorts of indicators that we are entering Heinlein’s “Crazy Years.” Imagining a dystopian or grimdark future isn’t difficult; all you have to do is read the news. But I think that we are writing the history of the future right now, by the choices we make every day. Writing stories that present that optimistic view of the future is not just the right thing to do but necessary, at least to me. As Heinlein said, “A pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun…”
I’m going old-school, back to one of the grandfathers of science fiction, Robert Heinlein.
Not only is his book a masterful example of character-driven storytelling, but it takes a critical eye to many of the things our current society takes for granted as being “true” and “right,” finding them wanting. It’s also been a huge influence on me in my writing, as have many of Heinlein’s other works, and I couldn’t not put it in here.
In 2075, the Moon is no longer a penal colony. But it is still a prison...
Life isn't easy for the political dissidents and convicts who live in the scattered colonies that make up lunar civilisation. Everything is regulated strictly, efficiently and cheaply by a central supercomputer, HOLMES IV.
When humble technician Mannie O'Kelly-Davis discovers that HOLMES IV has quietly achieved consciousness (and developed a sense of humour), the choice is clear: either report the problem to the authorities... or become friends.
And perhaps overthrow the government while they're at it.
I’ve been fascinated by science and space since I was a child and naturally gravitated toward science fiction. In many respects, it was a form of escapism, as I didn’t enjoy school. I always preferred escaping into another world or being taken on a journey to another world. It wasn’t until I got older that I realized that most great science fiction is a commentary on our own world and the issues we face daily. Science fiction, more than any other genre, does a better job of exploring and dissecting aspects of our world, which in turn helps us better understand our world and our relationship with it.
The Accidental Time Machine is one of the few novels that I’ve read beginning to end in one sitting because I found it so interesting. This isn’t the type of novel that will change your life or change how you feel about something. It’s just good. A good, fun book that can be read in a couple of hours. Haldeman doesn’t waste any time getting the story going and from there he takes you on a ride more enjoyable than novels twice the length.
Grad- school dropout Matt Fuller is toiling as a lowly research assistant at MIT when he inadvertently creates a time machine. With a dead-end job and a girlfriend who left him for another man, Matt has nothing to lose in taking a time-machine trip himself-or so he thinks.
As an artist, photographer, author, and workshop leader, my goal is to help others become more skilled with photographic techniques and more creative with their photographic and artistic practice. I like to tell workshop participants that to take better photographs, one should stand in front of more interesting things. But to become a really better photographer one needs to become a more interesting person. The books in the list have helped me grow as a person and photographer, and I hope they also enhance your technique and your passion as a photographer.
I started writing my photography blog almost twenty years ago. Looking back at the vast number of stories I have written in my blog, I see that many of them are my contemporaneous thoughts about images I am in the process of creating.
This book serves a similar role in the pre-Internet, pre-blogging world: the reader gets a birds-eye view of Weston’s life and creative challenges as he makes some of his most famous images. Why not go to the source? If you want to learn more about creativity and image-making, I completely recommend this glorious day-by-day diary.
For more than 15 years, Edward Weston kept a diary in which he recorded his struggle to understand himself, his society and his art. His journal has become a classic of photographic literature. Weston was a towering figure in twentieth-century photography, whose restless quest for beauty and the mystical presence behind it resulted in a body of work unrivaled in the medium. John Szarkowski observes that “It was as though the things of everyday experience had been transformed... into organic sculptures, the forms of which were both the expression and the justification of the life within... He had freed his…
I’m a historian of Latin America and a professor at California State University, Los Angeles. I write about Chile’s labor and social history in the twentieth century. As a historian, I am especially interested in understanding how working people relate with public institutions and authorities, what they expect from the state, and how they have organized and expanded social and economic rights. While my research centers in Chile and Latin America, I also look to place regional debates in a transnational framework and see how ideas and people have moved across borders. I like books that bring working people’s diverse voices and experiences.
In the 1930s, Dorothea Lang photographed poor and migrant families across the United States. She documented the devastating impact of the Great Depression, contributing to raising national awareness about the consequences of poverty. In this outstanding and engaging biography, Linda Gordon tells the story of her life and work and how her photographs were part of a larger political movement to transform and expand social protection to US citizens.
We all know Dorothea Lange's iconic photos-the Migrant Mother holding her child, the shoeless children of the Dust Bowl-but now renowned American historian Linda Gordon brings them to three-dimensional life in this groundbreaking exploration of Lange's transformation into a documentarist. Using Lange's life to anchor a moving social history of twentieth-century America, Gordon masterfully re-creates bohemian San Francisco, the Depression, and the Japanese-American internment camps. Accompanied by more than one hundred images-many of them previously unseen and some formerly suppressed-Gordon has written a sparkling, fast-moving story that testifies to her status as one of the most gifted historians of our…
