87 books like Defiance of the Fall

This book is probably my favorite cultivation novel out there, and for good reason. If you’re not aware what cultivation is, it’s a system of fantasy and magic inspired by eastern Taoist philosophies and chinese stories about reaching immortality and feature a lot of those themes.

It’s an entire genre and one I enjoy quite a bit, and Cradle, to me, is the very pinnacle of this genre. The book manages to bring a very fresh and exciting tale of cultivation that’s also still quite friendly to new readers just getting into the genre. It’s well beloved by the fans of the genre and held in extremely high regard, and I personally marvel at just how well it executed the story and just how rich and exciting the setting was for the story.

Iron Prince is unique in this list (and among most progression fantasy books) in that it takes place in the distant future, on one of many planets in a galaxy at war.

Instead of mystical cores or game or system-imposed leveling constructs, individuals are given CADs (combat assistance devices) that largely do the same thing. 

What I love about the book is that the main character, Rei, is the ultimate underdog. He’s done everything he could to achieve success despite his shortcomings, only to get crushed by peers and a governing system that abhors weakness.

His determination to push on is one of my favorite traits in characters, and ensures that we, the audience, remain engaged, even as he learns to leverage his unique gifts. Smart and never boring, I can’t wait for the sequel!

Progression fantasy is a young genre, and currently divides into a handful of different categories, the largest of which are LitRPGs and Cultivation fiction.

Dungeon Crawler Carl is almost universally praised as the best of the former.

I love it because it takes an impossible situation—Earth being transformed into a dungeon-delving murder reality show for the rest of the universe—and somehow injects equal mixes of humor and pathos.

I love that the main characters, the titular Carl and his cat, Donut, are the perfect emotional counterparts to the subgenre’s traditionally crunchy numbers… levels, skills, spells, and increasingly overpowered items all exist but don’t overshadow the essential humanity at the story’s center.

The prose is great, and the plot is even better.

I am not being hyperbolic when I say that discovering this fiction changed the course of my life. I found it during a dark time, and the impact it had might be the reason I’m so addicted to reading and writing cozy fantasy. Upon finishing it, I wasn’t ready to leave the world behind, so I fired up the audio and started again. 

This novel is a place of reprieve. A warm hearth I can return to when life gets difficult. And I can’t recommend it enough.

Shadeslinger is another LitRPG but belongs to the subgenre known as VRMMO.

The characters are playing a full-immersion, virtual reality MMO, and it’s the game world that provides the framework of levels, skills, and advancement. It’s not a subgenre that I always love, but Shadeslinger and its sequels are an exception to that rule!

I love how the author leans into the game nature of the world to create constant challenges and global threats, and I love the main character’s me-against-the-world attitude, which changes as he finds an in-game family beyond anything he had in the real world.

But my favorite aspect is one unique to this subgenre… as someone who played MMOs for decades, these books do an incredible job of capturing that atmosphere while injecting humanity and pathos into the mix.

If Cradle is a refreshing take on cultivation done faithfully and to its pinnacle while bringing a new aesthetic to it, then this book does the opposite and dives right into the heart of the xianxia aesthetic, but it does so in a phenomenal way.

It’s nothing new, per se, but that’s okay because what is there is done really well. Honestly, I don’t have too much to say about this book besides just that you should go read it—it’s great. 

This last book expanded my view on just what kind of settings a xianxia story could truly inhabit. To Flail Against Infinity takes place in a sci-fi xianxia with space cultivators, planetary settings, and so many new, interesting, and fresh ideas. It expands the genre, mixes it with something new, and brings a fresh take on stories that can sometimes feel a little samey. It was a highly worthwhile read that left me craving more. 

The grumpy, shrewd, and open-minded Ling Taishi, the mentor of the spoiled hero Jian, certainly steals the spotlight in this novel. The initial uncomfortable master-apprentice relationship gradually turns into a warm and lasting bond as the two face a world of danger, assassins, and revolution together.

The badass image of this older war artist is quite striking, while the other two female leads (one is an idealistic revolutionary and the other a brutal assassin) are also nicely fleshed out in their respective separate plotlines. The martial arts action scenes are cinematic and well-written.

I’m most impressed by the fact that the author, a white American, did meticulous research into Chinese mythology and Daoist practices. The kungfu fight scenes are also arresting.   

Xian Li-Lin, a plucky Daoist priestess with superior martial arts skills who is bent on forging her own way in a male-dominated world of 19th century San Francisco Chinatown, charmed me from the start of the novel (which is a sequel but can be read as a standalone). Beset with personal challenges as a lonely Chinese widow with a harsh father, she still takes it upon herself to fend helpless immigrants from the perils of ghosts, evil spirits, and gangsters.

Probably the most astonishing book I’ve read in the last five years. Imagine every dramatic extreme you ever thought you wanted in a novel—love, intrigue, brutality, violence, scenes as sweet as candy, spectacular magic, cataclysmic struggles, good and evil writ large across the sky... Then imagine that they were all packed into the same novel and that novel was so hilarious that you laughed out loud, so profound that you quoted it unintentionally, so heartbreaking you had to actually read through tears. Compulsively readable with characters that readers love, hate, hate to love and love to hate. It gave me a book hangover that still hasn’t gone away six months later. I routinely force my friends to read the first few pages of this story—one time I even paid someone five bucks just to try it. It’s that good. An official English translation will be available Fall 2022

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