86 books like Divers Down!

I remember being twelve, lying in bed and reading this into the wee hours of the night, dimly aware of the train whistle from the other side of town.

The magic of the story – the wonder of the aliens and their world – transported me and wrapped me up and made me want to go rescue alien princesses and liberate oppressed alien peoples. Nothing about this book makes sense scientifically (what else do you expect from the author of Tarzan?), but somehow it still made me want to go to be an astronaut and explore new worlds. 

Don’t write it off because of the terrible movie adaptation or the schlocky book covers. Embrace the camp and feel the magic!

This pick reflects changes to speculative fiction that had taken place by the 2010s, including common publication by smaller publishers and frequent mashups of multiple genres. With robots (okay, so they’re called automatons), werewolves, ghosts, and a steampunk 1800s feel, the story is quite different from others in my list, but it shares the mystery, the fun adventure, and the proper romance.

Lucy Pickett comes to a dark manor house, ala Jane Eyre, and must use all her deductive skills and biological knowledge to solve a mystery and perhaps exonerate the dark and dangerous Lord Miles. In this story, I not only found those elements of mystery, discovery, and relationship that draw me in, but I also found the motivation to begin writing again myself.

I’ve picked this story from the 1950s because, as a teenager, it stirred my sense of wonder at time and space.

Dard Nordis must get safely to the ship that will carry him, his family, and his friends from the tyranny that has overtaken Earth to freedom among the stars. Halfway into the book, hundreds of years pass with the turn of a page, the tyranny of old Earth is just a distant memory, and Dard is in a new world far from the troubled world that he knew.

The story opened up for me the potential for a profoundly new life.  It stirred my desire to discover the universe through scientific exploration. There is no romance here, but there is family, friends, and an adventure like no other!

This fun story from the 1990s revived my youthful joy in reading at a time when the busy-ness of adulthood had stolen it away. Siri has forgotten who she is and is swept into multiple space adventures as she tries to reconstruct her lost memories and regain the power and place she once held with her people. In the process, she finds friendships (the Drapsk!) and romance (Morgan!), and comes to understand herself better.

In reading this book, I realized that the science fiction stories I like best are ones that deal with relationships, mystery, and discovery and not just complicated technologies and their implications for society. I realized that I could have fun reading again if I had some fun science fiction with adventure, romance, and exploration!

Where can I even begin with the magic and immersion of Naomi Novik’s Uprooted?

Saying an unlikely heroine with an affinity for the forest meets an aloof, powerful wizard thus starting her quest to uncover the potential of her own magic barely scratches the surface of the enchanting world Novik creates. The allure and power of the dark forest that runs tangled roots beneath the story’s unspooling narrative is an unmissable experience.

And Novik’s uniquely beautiful language is perfectly matched by the magic of the fairy tale world itself and the weaving of the spells therein! 

This was a book that really surprised me. A very no-nonsense macho family member recommended it to me on a holiday, and I remember raising my eyebrows reading the back cover and finding out it heavily featured an interspecies romance.

The minute I started reading, I got so wrapped up in the adrenaline and action that I actually went on to recommend it to my sci-fi-loving dad, who read it in a day and went on to borrow the rest of the series. The heroine, a power armor-wearing mercenary, is incredibly competent and badass but avoids falling into either Mary Sue or Damsel in Distress territory as the plot proceeds.

Additionally, while I kept going for the action-romance, the worldbuilding was surprisingly interesting and in-depth. Whenever I’m reluctantly charmed by something, I find it hard not to gush about it; it’s just such a fun experience as a reader to… show more.

While this book is more literary than plot- or character-driven, it deals with the loss of memory and self, and the struggles to reclaim those parts of oneself. It reads like a dream, or a series of dreams – as the reader you’re not entirely sure what is important and what isn’t, but the beautiful prose and interesting situations keep things going.

I’ve heard people say “This isn’t fantasy”, which confuses me. A story about miniature people living in your walls and stuff, who “borrow” items to furnish their homes and lives? Sounds pretty fantastical to me!  

This book really made me think about what could be hiding right under my nose. Before I read this, I’d never really considered the possibility that there could be things in our world that we have no idea about. That helped form the core tenet of my trilogy: extraordinary things can be hiding amongst the ordinary ones.

Imagine, if you will, a classic pulp sci-fi hero, standing bold on the cover of a dimestore paperback, raygun in one hand, a beautiful woman in the other, and dangerous aliens all around him. Now imagine it's many years later, and that hero is now a deadbeat relic of a bygone era, and the heroism of his glory days has become little more than inspiration for cheap entertainment. The hero of Will Save the Galaxy for Food is confronted with the reality of the world leaving him behind, and has to figure out what he can do about it. Or even if he should do anything.

Here we enter the topic of time travel, a concept very dear to me from both a fictional, moral, and scientific point of view. Many novels have attempted to show how one change in the past could change our future. Elton’s novel struck me for its originality in picking a notorious historical event largely ignored by fiction when it comes to time travel and alternate history. The assassination of the Franz Ferdinand of Austria is used not just as the spark of World War I but as the start of the ideological and warmongering terror that would spread through Europe. The novel is an example of man’s fixation with trying to find one cause for all problems when maybe there are multiple causes going back years and years. The search is as vain as the main character’s attempts to change history.