Here are 100 books that How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe fans have personally recommended if you like
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.
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I've been writing for 20 years, and the more I learn about the craft, the less interested I am in big, bombastic thrillers about the end of the world. Now I'm more impressed by books that do a lot with a little. Some talented writers can spin a gripping story out of nothing more than two people in a room (Stephen King's Misery is one of my all-time faves). The domestic noir genre lends itself to this kind of minimalism. Sure, serial killers are scary, but not as scary as the thought that your spouse might not be who they seem.
Christine has a brain injury, which causes her memories to degrade every time she sleeps. She wakes up every morning as a blank slate, and her devoted husband explains who she is and then helps her get through the day. Unbeknownst to him, she starts keeping a journalâand soon realizes that his story about how she was injured is a little different each time.
I'm never in the mood for a thriller with a big twist in the penultimate chapter. I always want one with a big twist at the end of every chapter, and this book absolutely delivers. Is the husband a good guy or a bad guy? I changed my mind a dozen times over the course of this book, expertly manipulated by the author. I read the whole thing aloud to my wife on a long drive, and the time went by in a blink.
I am a professional artist and musician, and I owe a huge debt to Philip K. Dick. I started to read his works at a very young age (I believe Iâve read most everything heâs written at least twice), and my love of his work has continued throughout my life and he has been the greatest inspiration to my music, writing, and art. I felt so influenced and indebted that a created a comic book to honor him and to tell my stories and ideas that have populated my imagination as a result of his books.
I am a huge fan of dreampunk books and this book helped create the genre. Reading it took me into a dreamworld that lead into another dreamworld and then yet another.
As with all Philip K. Dick books I was left wondering if I ever did return to the reality I believe I live in. I also found the character of Palmer Eldritch himself to be one of my all-time favorites.
In the overcrowded world and cramped space colonies of the late twenty-first century, tedium can be endured through the use of the drug Can-D, which enables the user to inhabit a shared illusory world.
But when industrialist Palmer Eldritch returns from an interstellar trip, he brings with him a new drug, Chew-Z, which is far more potent than Can-D. But could the permanent state of drugged illusion it induces be part of something much more sinister?
When I was in elementary school, I was poor at writing essays. My mother believed that reading could help to improve my school performance, and started collecting short stories suitable for me. Incidentally, my interest in reading and writing was fostered. I grew older and became passionate about books that led me to see new worlds, to experience lives unknown to me before, and to empathize with other people regardless of race. With hindsight, I realized that all the books Iâd read had something in commonâthat is, love, with its profound meaning and influence on our forever imperfect world, is the eternal theme and always inspiring me.
During my schooling years, mathematics was my forte, though I hardly found it interesting. When I read the book, I felt that my pride was dwarfed by the beautiful writing on mathematics, about which I realized I had known almost nothing.
The writing endowed mathematics with a life full of various feelings, and enabled it to become ties of love, friendship, care, etc. which, in turn, changed peopleâs life for better. In a way, the book reshaped my view of the world.
This is one of those books written in such lucid, unpretentious language that reading it is like looking into a deep pool of clear water...Dive into Yoko Ogawa's world and you find yourself tugged by forces more felt than seen' New York Times
Each morning, the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to one another. The Professor may not remember what he had for breakfast, but his mind is still alive with elegant mathematical equations from the past. He devises clever maths riddles - based on her shoe size or her birthday - and the numbers reveal a sheltering andâŚ
Truth told, folks still ask if Saul Crabtree sold his soul for the perfect voice. If he sold it to angels or devils. A Bristol newspaper once asked: âAre his love songs closer to heaven than dying?â Others wonder how he wrote a song so sad, everyone who heard itâŚ
I have always been fascinated by the idea of memory. What sticks in your mind, what is lost, what can be manipulated, how you see things in different ways to others, and how sometimes you canât trust even your own memories. I studied psychology at A-level and that sparked an interest in me, especially in terms of repression and learned behaviours. I studied creative writing to MA level at university, where I wrote my first thriller, which also focuses on memory. Iâm always searching for reads that make me look at human nature differently, or break me out of routine and can offer a surprise. Surprises keep things interesting!
This one is a bit of a cheat as It doesnât fall into the category of memory and forgetting as easily but I think it is definitely about past trauma, trying to reinvent yourself, ignoring parts of your true nature, which for me, is a form of forgetting. In this tense novel, three women must uncover the truth about a tragic incident, one of whom is a probation officer trying to decide if a prisoner should be released on parole. Itâs told from dual perspectives and it keeps twisting throughout. The last twist really threw me and I wanted to go back and read it again.
Emma has everything Rose lacks: a faithful husband, beauty, and a healthy baby boy. Rose meets her in the hospital after her own baby dies from premature birth, and when Emmaâs child dies in a suspicious house fire shortly after, the obsessive and unstable Rose is the primary suspect.
Now, after almost five years in prison, Rose is up for parole, but probation officer Cate Austin must first decide whether this accused murderer can be released or if she really is a threat to society. The answer seems obvious at first, but as Cate delves deeper into Roseâs disturbing pastâaâŚ
I have always been fascinated by the idea of memory. What sticks in your mind, what is lost, what can be manipulated, how you see things in different ways to others, and how sometimes you canât trust even your own memories. I studied psychology at A-level and that sparked an interest in me, especially in terms of repression and learned behaviours. I studied creative writing to MA level at university, where I wrote my first thriller, which also focuses on memory. Iâm always searching for reads that make me look at human nature differently, or break me out of routine and can offer a surprise. Surprises keep things interesting!
This is a sci-fi thriller with amazing concepts and a page-turning story! Meet Hap Thompson â his job is to take on other peopleâs memories. He carries bad memories for a few hours and gets paid for the privilege. When he gets landed with a bad memory by someone who wonât take it back, he finds himself on the run. Then, people start disappearing⌠This is a fab read â refreshing different with some sci-fi elements, but still a thriller by nature. Michael Marshall Smithâs writing is both dark, humorous, and inventive. I wouldnât say itâs a perfect novel but for the ideas about memory and forgetting, it delivers a lot.
A mesmerising SF thriller from a master of the genre. Hap Thompson is a REMtemp, working the night hours, having people's anxiety dreams for them. For the first time in his life, Hap's making big money - and that should have been enough...
Hap Thompson has finally found something he can do better than anyone else. And it's legal. Almost. Hap's a REMtemp, working the night hours, having people's anxiety dreams for them. For the first time in his life, Hap's making big money - and that should have been enough.
I was a teacher and a professor who showed generations of students how to find x, how to prove figure 1 was similar to figure 2, how to make a machine search through millions of bits of data for an answer. An inspiration for a story struck me one day early in retirement as I was daydreaming. I began to write and have never stopped. It turns out that âif-thenâ is not so different from âwhat if.â The first is more like destiny, the second like free will. One is science, the other is fiction. âWhat ifâ has led me into strange lands.
What is it? A first contact story. Sort of. They were aliens? Yeah, Russians. What are they like? Donât know. Theyâre gone now. Did you find anything good? Lots and lots. Whatâs that? The God hypothesis. It allows you to have an unparalleled understanding of absolutely everything while knowing absolutely nothing. Can you show me something else? No. You gotta go yourself. Can I really go into the Zone? If youâre old enough. And brave enough. Is it dangerous? People donât come back. Is it legal? No, but you can sneak in.
Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of those young rebels who are compelled, in spite of extreme danger, to venture illegally into the Zone to collect the mysterious artifacts that the alien visitors left scattered around. His life is dominated by the place and the thriving black market in the alien products. But when he and his friend Kirill go into the Zone together to pick up a âfull empty,â something goes wrong. And the news he gets from his girlfriend upon his return makes it inevitable that heâll keep going back to the Zone, again and again, until heâŚ
After World imagines a not-so-distant future where, due to worsening global environmental collapse, an artificial intelligence determines that the planet would be better off without the presence of humans. After a virus that sterilizes the entire human population is released, humanity must reckon with how they leave this world beforeâŚ
As a former librarian I have long been fascinated with Borgesâs view of books: their metaphysical shape and their tendency to open into the uncanny and the infinite. Illness early in life drove me to books, to their particular isolation. Since then, Iâve found that worlds can open almost anywhere in literature by way of a mood, a patina of language, a vision, a set of images completely beyond the control of the writer. Now, I read these books to remind me of what fiction can do, the places it can go, the worlds it will open.
Samuel R. Delaneyâs masterpiece, Dhalgren, is set in a city in the Midwest that has been emptied by an unnamed catastrophe.
A sense of freedom, violence and disaster hang everywhere as the hero â Kidd, Kid, or the kid, a man with no memory and of ambiguous race (he remembers his mother was Native American) â gains entry into the subcultures that remain behind: parties, high-rise poetry readings with older white people, gun fights, gangs, graphic sex.
Time and perspective seem fluxive, inconstant, and looping.
This is beautiful, destabilized world building. Dhalgrenanswers no questions yet evokes a time, place, and milieu that shifts as you read.
I first found it when I was working as a librarian in a prison out on the plains. I didnât last in prison.
Nebula Award Finalist: Reality unravels in a Midwestern town in this sci-fi epic by the acclaimed author of Babel-17. Includes a foreword by William Gibson.
A young halfâNative American known as the Kid has hitchhiked from Mexico to the midwestern city Bellonaâonly something is wrong there . . . In Bellona, the shattered city, a nameless cataclysm has left reality unhinged. Into this desperate metropolis steps the Kid, his fist wrapped in razor-sharp knives, to write, to love, to wound.
So begins Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delanyâs masterwork, which in 1975 opened a new door for what science fiction could mean.âŚ
Before I even started writing my outline, I spent four months researching everything I could on quantum entanglement. I read textbooks, watched seminars and lectures, and even went to Tokyo, Japan to visit the quantum physics exhibition at a museum! I have immersed myself in time travel novel, films, and even music (i.e., Electric Light Orchestraâs Timealbum, where my novel gets its title fromâtrack #2 on the album is âYours Truly, 2095â) since I was very young. I even gave a presentation to the Library of Congress on the differences between time travel with engineering and time travel with physics.
While itâs hard to dismiss 12 Monkeys on a list of fiction where there are not machines creating the passage for time travel (even though it was never a novel), I have to say Jack LondonâsThe Jacket does a better job at being subtle. The novel was adapted into a film in 2005 and follows a main character who experiences a time slip at the point of a near-death experience when he is in confined situations (i.e., when they think heâs dead and put him in a casket or when they need to subdue him in a straitjacket.) These tight confines of space initiate his ability to time travel through teetering on the brink of death. The story is slightly more âspiritualâ than âscience based,â but I felt it stood out as a good example of using the power inside of us to be able to defy the fabricâŚ
The Jacket (1915) is a novel by American writer Jack London. A groundbreaking work of science fiction that blends elements of mysticism, The Jacket critiques the harsh reality of the American criminal justice system. The novel was inspired by the experiences of Ed Morrell, a man who spent time at San Quentin State Prison for robbing trains. Horrified by his description of "the jacket," a constricting device used to punish inmates, London wrote the novel to explore the psychological effects of torture. Darrell Standing was a Professor of Agronomics at the University of California, Berkeley when, in a fit ofâŚ
Iâve always been fascinated by time travel as a framing device in stories. Having spent my childhood hoovering up anything I could get my hands on in both the science fiction and straight-up fiction genres, an unexpected byproduct was that I found myself becoming increasingly fascinated with merging the two, eventually wrapping my head around what it would mean if time itself became more than just a construct of our own creation. Asking myself regularly the question; what if it was terrain? It took me thirty-four years to translate all of those ideas into a solid hook for a book. And a further four years to turn that hook into a fully-fledged series.
I adored this entire series from beginning to end, but Iâm recommending Book 1 in the series becauseâŚwell, itâs the start and also my favourite. This series launched all the way back in 2010 and even though itâs written for a young adult teen audience, itâs so well written and a joy to just kick back with on a Sunday afternoon with a cuppa.
The characterisation is brilliant, has some brilliant set pieces, and it has that Harry Potter kind of vibe with young protagonists forced into growing up a little too fast and getting to wield an altogether different kind of magic. Thereâs so much to love, as you learn all the rules and quirks of this universe.
Maddy should have died in a plane crash. Liam should have died at sea when the Titanic sank. Sal should have died in a tragic fire. But a mysterious man whisked them away to safety.
Maddy, Liam, and Sal quickly learn that time travel is no longer just a hope for the future; it is a dangerous reality. And they weren't just rescued from their terrible fatesâŚthey were recruited for the agency of TimeRiders created to protect the world from those seeking to alter the course of history for personal gain. By reliving the highly documented events in New YorkâŚ
What happens when youâre face-to-face with a truth that shakes you? Do you accept it, or pretend it was never there?
Award-winning author Mark A. Rayner smudges the lines between realist and fabulist, literary and speculative in this collection of stories that examines this questionâwhat Homer called passing through TheâŚ
I am a former journalist, currently a freelance writer and editor, book blogger, and author. Iâve spent my entire life voraciously reading. I majored in history in college and spent many years covering Congress and politics in Washington, D.C., before turning to writing books.
Edward Eagerâs books were my inspiration when I started writing the President and Me series. I picked The Time Garden here because it specifically deals with the concept of time, but most of Eagerâs books would fit the bill, including Half Magic. Eagerâs books, published in the 1950s and â60s, feature kids who have magic adventures, often through time travel but are also grounded in their own present-day reality, with issues they have to cope with in between their escapades.
Book four in the series called "truly magic in a reader's hands" by Jack Gantos, Newbery Medal winner for Dead End in Norvelt.
Time and again, the children from Knightâs Castle have longed for another magic adventure.
But you canât find magic just anywhere. It doesnât grow like grass. It requires the right place and the right time . . . Or thyme, as the case may be. At Mrs. Whitonâs house, magic grows as wild as the banks of thyme in the garden. Growing there is olden time, future time, and common time. Or so says the Natterjack, theâŚ