Here are 92 books that Dim Stars fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’ve been reading and enjoying science fiction since, as a kid, I rode my bicycle to the local library to read everything they had. That’s given me a broad exposure to the field from the Golden Age classics to new stuff hot off the presses. I’ve had four science fiction novels published, and in all of them I’ve used personal experiences to create as realistic a world as possible. I’ve also focused on ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances – that combination makes for better stories. I’ll leave the superheroes to the Marvel Cinematic Universe – they’ve got the budget to Blow Stuff Up Real Good!
I’m also a personal friend of Jim C. Hines, but we became friends because I was a fan of his work.
This book is the first of a trilogy (which is different than a never-ending series) and takes a new, different, and funny spin on the zombie apocalypse.
Earth was hit by a plague that zombie-fied those humans it didn’t kill. Then the aliens came and cured some humans, who had to join their space fleet. Mostly as janitors and other menial laborers. Marion “Mops” Adamopoulos goes from head janitor to captain of the Earth Mercenary Corps Ship Pufferfish. She can barely fly the ship, but now must fight it.
Definitely a case where an ordinary person gets put in an extraordinary situation.
The Krakau came to invite Earth into an alliance of sentient species, only to find that plague had turned humanity into shambling, near-unstoppable animals. A century later a bioweapon wipes out the Krakau command crew and reverts the rest of the humans to their feral state - only Marion 'Mops' Adamopoulos and her Shipboard Hygiene and Sanitation team on board the Earth Mercenary Corps Ship Pufferfish are left with their minds intact. They stumble onto a conspiracy born from the truth of what happened on Earth all those years ago.
I’m a woman in a technology field dominated by men, a person with both mental and physical problems, and I’ve studied a dozen different martial arts. I’m a mean shot with a bow and love to hurl axes and spears. None of these things are contradictory. They’re just different aspects of me. Real people don’t fit in boxes and neither should good characters. My world is filled with my Hispanic grandkids, my bi daughter, my gay foster brother, my friends and family and people I love that don’t fit the Captain Awesome stereotype. Remember that we, too, can be heroes.
My mother has a service dog, and I’ve inherited a disability or two. The heroine in The Spare Man didn’t let her dog or her physical limitations stop her. She even used them to her advantage when she could.
I also loved how the book was an old-school Nick and Nora style murder mystery told in the far future on a space cruise ship. The author mixed those genres like she was mixing a tasty cocktail.
It was glorious fun from first page to last. And like all the stories on my list, it showed how much a hero can shine, no matter what gender or lack of gender she is, no matter how big or how small, what sort of personality or capability she has. It might be more of a mark of courage for a hero to find a friend than storm a castle, but that’s okay because…
Hugo, Locus, and Nebula-Award winner Mary Robinette Kowal blends her no-nonsense approach to life in space with her talent for creating glittering high-society in this stylish SF mystery, The Spare Man.
Tesla Crane, a brilliant inventor and an heiress, is on her honeymoon on an interplanetary space liner, cruising between the Moon and Mars. She’s traveling incognito and is reveling in her anonymity. Then someone is murdered and the festering chowderheads who run security have the audacity to arrest her spouse. Armed with banter, martinis and her small service dog, Tesla is determined to solve the crime so that the…
I’ve been reading and enjoying science fiction since, as a kid, I rode my bicycle to the local library to read everything they had. That’s given me a broad exposure to the field from the Golden Age classics to new stuff hot off the presses. I’ve had four science fiction novels published, and in all of them I’ve used personal experiences to create as realistic a world as possible. I’ve also focused on ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances – that combination makes for better stories. I’ll leave the superheroes to the Marvel Cinematic Universe – they’ve got the budget to Blow Stuff Up Real Good!
Star Trek is a great series, but you expect the flagship of the Federation to be able to handle pretty much anything. I’m much more interested in how ordinary people deal with extraordinary situations.
Michael Mammay, who like me, is former military, has a very ordinary hero in this story - Sergeant Gastovsky (“Gas” to everybody he knows). Gas’s one superpower is he knows everybody and can make a deal with anybody.
The Misfit Soldier is very enjoyable. The first half of the book is basically the plot of the movie Kelly's Heroes which is a WWII heist movie. It’s well-told and moves quickly. The second part, also based on Mammay’s personal experiences, is how his future military deals with the aftermath.
Ocean's Eleven meets John Scalzi in this funny, action-filled, stand-alone sci-fi adventure from the author of Planetside, in which a small team of misfit soldiers takes on a mission that could change the entire galaxy.
Sergeant Gastovsky-Gas to everyone but his superior officers-never wanted to be a soldier. Far from it. But when a con goes wrong and he needs a place to lay low for a while, he finds himself wearing the power armor of the augmented infantry.
After three years on a six-year contract, Gas has found his groove running low-level cons and various illegal activities that make…
Hunted by those who want to study his gravity powers, Jes makes his way to the best place for a mixed-species fugitive to blend in: the pleasure moon where everyone just wants to be lost in the party. It doesn’t take long for him to catch the attention of the…
I’ve been reading and enjoying science fiction since, as a kid, I rode my bicycle to the local library to read everything they had. That’s given me a broad exposure to the field from the Golden Age classics to new stuff hot off the presses. I’ve had four science fiction novels published, and in all of them I’ve used personal experiences to create as realistic a world as possible. I’ve also focused on ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances – that combination makes for better stories. I’ll leave the superheroes to the Marvel Cinematic Universe – they’ve got the budget to Blow Stuff Up Real Good!
Fergus Ferguson is an ordinary man who just happens to be good at one thing – finding stuff. So he becomes an intergalactic repo man, and when the book starts he’s been tasked with finding a stolen starship, as one does.
He’s also found himself wrapped up in a civil war and a possible alien invasion.
This book is a little darker than the others on the list, in that Fergus has a lot of personal baggage to deal with, the people behind the civil war aren’t nice, and it’s really hard to figure out what the aliens want. But the darkness is leavened by Fergus’s humor and strong moral code.
It’s also book one of a (very nicely tied-up) trilogy.
From Hugo Award-winning debut author Suzanne Palmer comes an action-packed sci-fi caper starring Fergus Ferguson, interstellar repo man and professional finder
Fergus Ferguson has been called a lot of names: thief, con artist, repo man. He prefers the term finder.
His latest job should be simple. Find the spacecraft Venetia's Sword and steal it back from Arum Gilger, ex-nobleman turned power-hungry trade boss. He'll slip in, decode the ship's compromised AI security, and get out of town, Sword in hand.
Fergus locates both Gilger and the ship in the farthest corner of human-inhabited space, a backwater deep space colony called…
From my earliest days I was surrounded by music, from Friday night family band to our musical Christmas card on a bright red record to trumpet trios played with my dad and brother. I went to the University of Southern California on a trumpet scholarship, then took a detour from music and tried writing. I liked it. To this day, one of my favorite things is combining these two interests to create novels, stories, and plays about music. Since moving to Nashville, I’ve immersed myself in American popular music and have loved returning to my roots.
When my wife and I moved to Nashville, I was stunned to realize that most forms of American popular music had been born within 500 miles of our new home, in an arc from New Orleans (jazz) to the Mississippi Delta (blues) to Memphis (rock ’n’ roll) to Nashville (bluegrass) to Bristol (country).
I began reading eagerly about American popular music, and my reading led to writing—most recently my novel about the birth of country music, Lord of the Mountain. This list gives you some of my favorite books.
The best of these is also one of my favorite biographies of any kind, Peter Guralnick’s magnificent Last Train to Memphis, the first volume of his essential two-volume story of Elvis Presley and the birth of rock ’n’ roll.
Written with grace, humor, and affection, Last Train to Memphis has been hailed as the definitive biography of Elvis Presley. It is the first to set aside the myths and focus on Elvis' humanity in a way that has yet to be duplicated.
A New York Times Notable Book
Winner of the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award
"Elvis steps from the pages. You can feel him breathe. This book cancels out all others." --Bob Dylan
From the moment that he first shook up the world in the mid 1950s, Elvis Presley has been one of the most vivid and…
I’ve always been fascinated by the intensity of friendships, whether they last a few months or a lifetime. For me, unlikely friendships have always been the most interesting, whether it be differences in class, age, hobbies, etc. I think all people can find common ground if they just listen to one another and talk for a minute. I love books featuring unlikely duos and almost always include them in my own novels. I hope you enjoy these books as much as I do, and they remind you of the best friends you’ve ever had.
Me and a Guy Named Elvis is a book I couldn’t put down. My sister and I took a road trip to Graceland years ago and ever since we’ve been a bit fascinated by Elvis. Jerry is a regular guy who happens to meet Elvis right before he becomes a star. Jerry is several years younger, but that doesn’t matter. What ensues is a decades-long friendship that takes Jerry on many adventures -- some out of this world and some heartbreaking. It’s an inside look at Elvis the superstar as well as Elvis the “regular guy.”
On a lazy Sunday in 1954, twelve-year-old Jerry Schilling wandered into a Memphis touch football game, only to discover that his team was quarterbacked by a nineteen-year-old Elvis Presley, the local teenager whose first record, "That's All Right," had just debuted on Memphis radio. The two became fast friends, even as Elvis turned into the world's biggest star. In 1964, Elvis invited Jerry to work for him as part of his "Memphis Mafia," and Jerry soon found himself living with Elvis full-time in a Bel Air mansion and, later, in his own room at Graceland. Over the next thirteen years…
Constance is a wild, stubborn young girl growing up poor in a small industrial town in the late 1800's. Beneath her thread-worn exterior beats the heart of a dreamer and a wordsmith. But at age twelve, she’s orphaned. Running away to join the circus—like kids do in adventure books—seems like…
Maureen Callahan is a New York Times bestselling author, award-winning investigative journalist, columnist, and commentator. She has covered everything from pop culture to politics. Her writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, New York, Spin, and the New York Post, where she is Critic-at-Large. She lives in New York. For Shepherd, Callahan has selected her favorite books about American pop culture, which is currently dominated by her favorite subgenre, true crime.
Speaking of Elvis, this biography, the second of two parts, is among the greatest of the late 20th century. We begin with Elvis entering the U.S. Army in 1958 and follow this increasingly lost soul through the years, his fame metastasizing into something unrivaled, incredible, enviable and wholly malignant. Guralnick captures the singular loneliness Elvis came to suffer, the slow suicide that was his Las Vegas residency, the exploitations of his manager, Col. Tom Parker, and a death so humiliating it finally made Elvis what he had longed to be for decades: Profoundly, squalidly human. None other than Bob Dylan called this Presley biography the one that “cancels out all others.”
Last Train to Memphis, the first part of Guralnick's two-volume life of Elvis Presley, received unprecedented accolades. This concluding volume recounts the second half of Elvis's life in rich and previously unimagined detail, and confirms Guralnick's status as one of the great biographers of our time. Beginning with Presley's army service in Germany in 1958 and ending with his death in Memphis in 1977, Careless Love chronicles the unraveling of the dream that once shone so brightly, homing in on the complex playing-out of Elvis's relationship with his Machiavellian manager, Colonel Tom Parker. It's a breathtaking drama that places the…
Writing about history came to me rather late in life and I suppose it’s because the past now looks more inviting than the future. But there’s more to it than that. Everything has a history; it’s a bottomless topic. I became fascinated with the history of my own geographic environment and began exploring areas that were basically in my own backyard, which led to the inception of my first book. And, after years working as a graphic artist, I decided to help the narrative along by adding illustrations. A second book soon followed, then a third, a fourth, and now I’ve just finished my fifth book.
I was fortunate enough to be able to share a pint with Malachy McCourt some time ago at The Plough & the Stars in Philadelphia where he was promoting this book.
A delightfully true Irishman, he was full of fatalist humor and irony, bringing to mind the famous quote by G.K. Chesterton from his epic poem The Ballad of the White Horse:
“The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.”
And “Danny Boy” is truly a sad song, but there is one enormous flaw regarding its Irishness: it was written by an Englishman who never set foot in Ireland. Frederick Wetherly, a barrister by day, and a lyricist by night, was asked by his sister-in-law to put words to a beautiful tune she had heard. He did, and the song became an enormous hit.…
Everyone can hum this haunting Irish ballad that inevitably brings a tear to the eye. The most requested Irish song, it has been recorded by a variety of performers ranging from Elvis Presley, Bing Crosby, and Kate Smith to the Pogues. The complete story of this moving tune has been shrouded in mystery until now. Where did "Danny Boy" originate, who actually wrote the lyrics, and is it even Irish? Acclaimed novelist, actor, memoirist, screenwriter, playwright, and raconteur, Malachy McCourt, turns his Irish eye to the song's complex history and myths in an eloquent ode to this classic. He traces…
As a stand-up comedian myself, I find a lot of so-called funny books to be hugely disappointing. In these days of authors wanting their amazing works listed in every possible category on Amazon, you often find books in the humor sections which have severely mistaken ‘a somewhat light tone’ or ‘occasional moments of levity’ for being actual comedies. And don’t even get me started on the reams of literotica with covers featuring musclebound torsos that fill up any search for something supposedly funny. Kindly f*ck off, writers of the latest Billionaire Bad Boy Romance—you do not belong here. Instead, here are some books that will actually make you laugh.
This fantastical story stars Elvis Presley and a time travelling Brussels sprout—need I say more?—from one of the most celebrated humorist authors going. The good news is, if you like it, there’s more in the series, then heaps of other crazy books by Rankin to devour.
Theological warfare. Elvis on an epic time-travel journey - the Presliad. Buddhavision - a network bigger than God (and more powerful, too). Nasty nuclear leftovers. Naughty sex habits. Dalai Dan (the 153rd reincarnation of the Lama of that ilk) and Barry, the talkative Time Sprout. Even with all this excitement, you wouldn't think a backwater planet like Earth makes much of a splash in the galatic pond.
But the soap opera called The Earthers is making big video bucks in the intergalactic ratings race. And alien TV execs know exactly what…
Liam was orphaned at the age of two by a group of giant carnivorous insects called the chitin. Taken in by High Councilor Marcus and his wife, Lidia, Liam was raised with their older son, Randolf in New Olympia, the last remaining city on the planet Etrusci.
I grew up watching every cop show on the air with my father. I always wanted to be a detective, but one that didn’t have to do a lot of chasing, like Starsky and Hutch, or get beat up a lot, like Mannix—one who could take a laid-back approach and work his own hours, like Ellery Queen. I wound up becoming a forensic specialist who also writes thrillers. The protagonists have my same job, only with smarter criminals and better-looking colleagues. I also grew up playing the clarinet—not, I admit, particularly well—in a band and/or orchestra from the fourth grade until well after I married.
A greatly entertaining book about the myriad scandals of Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis, crimes and murder among Norway’s black metal bands, how Sam Cooke wound up shot to death in a low-budget motel, and Gram Parsons’ death at 26, among others, written by the guy with a podcast of the same name. I’ve played and listened to music my entire life but have never really studied the topic or its practitioners, so much of this came as a fascinating surprise. Brennan does veer into fiction—at one point he relates a conversation between two dead people after they’re dead—but still a very interesting compilation.
From the creator of the popular rock 'n' roll true crime podcast, Disgraceland comes an off-kilter, hysterical, at times macabre book inspired by true stories from the highly entertaining underbelly of music history. You may know Jerry Lee Lewis married his thirteen-year-old cousin but did you know he shot his bass player in the chest with a shotgun or that a couple of his wives died under extremely mysterious circumstances? Or that Sam Cooke was shot dead in a seedy motel after barging into the manager's office naked to attack her? Maybe not. Would it change your view of him…
