100 books like Hellspark

My partner and I read the first few books in the Iron Druid series aloud together while I was pregnant and couldn’t get out much, and they brought a laugh to my lips every time… partly because of our atrocious pronunciation of the Irish words in the story.

Hearne brings a wonderful balance of action and humor to his writing, which makes this story a joy to read. From a telepathic dog with attitude to the druid grabbing a drink with Jesus and pissing off the old gods, the characters really carry this book. Every time I see it on my shelf, it makes me smile.

I loved this book because it combines three of my favorite things—humor, fantasy, and baking. What’s not to like about a wizard whose familiar is a sourdough starter?

There’s a small army of hilarious gingerbread men, to boot. T. Kingfisher manages a weird balance between humor, horror, and heart. Her world, like ours, has some really dark stuff in it, but she has such a deft touch that I felt cozy even during murder, political scapegoating, and siege.

Cog, short for “cognitive development,” is the name of a robot built like a 12-year-old boy and programmed to learn about everything from lying to platypuses.

When he learns he’s considered property, he and some fellow robots set out to find freedom. There’s a robot dog named Proto, a trash disposal bot named Trashbot, a robot girl named ADA, and a robot car named, well, Car.

This band of bots is a delight. Trashbot is constantly asking about waste it can dispose of. Proto is a wonderful blend of dog and robot. You can’t help but care about and cheer for them all.

Starbridge is another old favorite. The book is written with heart and warmth. It’s the kind of story that always makes me feel better when I finish reading.

Mahree Burroughs is almost seventeen, and on her way to Earth from her colony world when their ship gets caught up in a first contact situation. As is often the case, secrets and misunderstandings abound, and things get messy.

While the alien Simiu is interesting, one of my favorite characters is the sentient fungus Mahree meets and names Doctor Blanket. Doctor Blanket doesn’t come along until later in the book, but he’s great: wise and curious and simultaneously old and youthful.

What a phenomenal novel by Ann Leckie! I came across Ann Leckie’s series as I was working through books about cloning while I was writing my books. What do I love about it? The concepts, for sure: AI ships being negotiated, the entire idea of shipping minds around, a leader who sabotages herself to the detriment of her realm. All of these have been done to some extent before, but not at the scale that Ann Leckie takes on. She also manages to avoid some dead clone tropes and dead or dying AI tropes while she entertains. This novel (and series) were done well and the characters pop with personality. Loved it!

When I’m not developing AI methods (or writing about them) I read. Most of what I read is science fiction. There’s nothing more imaginative than a good science fiction book, and many science fiction stories have inspired us to develop whole new technologies. This one probably won’t do that, but it has such a bizarre mind-bending world that I couldn’t resist recommending it. Niven is great at this kind of thing – the Ringworld books were a favourite of mine as a kid, and frankly, I could recommend another 30 of his books. But Integral Trees is entertaining, a little bizarre, and it even has diagrams to illustrate the underlying concepts at the start – what more could you ask for in a science fiction book?

At the beginning, readers are drawn into an exciting world where humans battle to save their desolate planet from an alien race. But in typical Brandon Sanderson fashion, good and evil are not clear-cut, and the conflict soon grows far more complex. 

As the series progresses, the main character, Spensa, discovers that the battle for her planet is not as straightforward as she had once thought, and that the aliens she had fought were neither uniform nor uniformly evil. When she infiltrates an alien homeland in Book 2, Spensa is forced to question her original assumptions about who deserves to be saved—not just humans, but maybe also some alien races and even artificially intelligent beings. 

I had been reading Heroic and Epic Fantasy for years, and I’d purposely avoided reading Sci-Fi, convinced that it would influence my burgeoning plot development. I wanted to maintain my plot integrity and not be subconsciously led by other authors in the genre (but of course I couldn’t avoid the influence of the SF I watched on TV). Of course, I was missing out on some great writing. I was enthralled by this story—it combined an undead trope with space opera, as the ‘risen empire’ maintains its territory while facing an external threat from the technologically hybrid Rix. There’s a fascination with the potential of biological augmentation and the place of AI in our distant future (consider ‘immortal’ humans against potentially ‘eternal’ hybrid humans), but this story is extremely character-driven and concerned with the place of the individual. The fictional science was breathtaking and not without research, but what stuck… show more.

Asimov is known as the grandfather of A.I. Science Fiction, and yet, you don’t have to have much of an interest in robotics in order to appreciate many of his stories. One of the best examples of this would be Liar! A story that tackles how a robot, one which isn’t allowed to hurt humans, would try to circumvent peoples’ emotions in a situation in which their desire for career success and romance are on the line. As someone who has dealt with all sides of these affairs, Lair! Is one of those stories that reminded me that no matter what, I’m only human.

So you want to find aliens. But where to begin? Digging up microbial neighbors on Mars? Encountering big-brained, tentacled beings in flying saucers? Searching for far-flung habitable exoplanets?

This compilation of essays from astrobiologists, AI experts, psychologists, planetary geologists, and NASA scientists (plus more!) gives the alien-hunter a well-rounded, thoughtful start for their search.

Some of the essays will leave you laughing out loud; others will remind you how much we still have to learn about the universe. I came away feeling both smarter and smaller, and I enjoyed every minute of it.