100 books like I, Robot

Of all of Clarke’s works, this one had, for me, the grandest sense of adventure and mystery. We never do find out who the aliens are or what their goals might be, but we get to join them for part of their journey.

There are puzzles to solve, wonders to behold, and dangers bravely faced. I first read the book when I was nine years old, and it communicated to me just as clearly then as it does today.

Egan is an Australian science fiction writer.

To my mind, he’s written better about AI than any other science fiction writer, because he takes it seriously. He recognizes it represents enormous change.

Permutation City is about a time in history when uploading becomes possible and very rich people can upload themselves into machines that operate quickly and in real time.

Poorer people have to upload themselves into machines that process very slowly and so they live very slow versions of life. 

The immersive nature of this book's narrative gripped me from the very start. This is a truly foundational text in the genre, but it nevertheless holds up to this day.

I particularly enjoyed the two-part story’s focus on humanity’s initial resistance to the invading force as well as an exploration of life under Martian control.

It goes without saying that the book is considerably older than the others I read while becoming interested in this topic. I enjoyed reflecting on the similarities and differences in Wells’ contemporary ideas about aliens, which naturally reflect some key Earth-based societal concerns of the time.

I read this book relatively recently, not at school or when I was in my twenties, but when I was in my late thirties. I had heard of the novel, and the concept of burning books was all-too familiar as I studied a module on Holocaust literature at university. However, the premise of Ray Bradbury’s novel, written in 1953, was so simple yet so powerful.

It echoes with our own reality today, as although books are not being burned, we are seeing the art of writing itself being "burned" or minimized by tools such as AI or social media. The virtual burning of honest reportage or poetry for opinionated views and algorithms is one symptom of today’s fast-paced society. 

There were some great quotes in Fahrenheit 451, too; the one that really stuck out was, “Everyone must leave something behind when he dies… A child or a book or a… show more.

For me speculative fiction is about twisting one aspect of the real world, and then playing with the consequences. I love the way that Philip K Dick does this.

Some of his ideas seem absurd, but as a reader you quickly buy into them. This is not a traditional crime novel in any sense, but is about a bounty hunter tracking down escaped androids. As he confronts questions about his own humanity, it raises ethical issues for the reader as to what it is to be human.

Like all Dick’s works it is clever, entertaining, and thought-provoking.

I have been a fan of Gothic and melodrama since I first watched the 1931 film Frankenstein with Boris Karloff–and I was delighted to discover that the book is even better and so much more than what we’ve ever seen on screen.

Frankenstein’s monster is articulate and soulful in Mary Shelley’s atmospheric, dread-filled original novel, and his plight is all the more moving because of it. She wrote it when she was just 18 years old, still grieving over the death of her first child two years earlier. I feel her aching sorrow on every page. 

Stanislaw Lem, the Polish philosopher and science fiction novelist, had the talent of writing novels that raise profound questions about the human condition. One of the issues he tackled was whether our human form of intelligence is just one of many types of intelligence that might be found in the universe.

In one of his most gripping and mind-stretching novels, The Invincible, an Earth spaceship lands on an apparently uninhabited planet only to find that many years previously, another race had crash-landed on the planet, and their small, robotic assistants were the main survivors of the crash. Those automata evolved into a collection of tiny “flies,” which, although not individually conscious or possessed of reasoning, use evolved herd behaviors to destroy their surviving alien masters and all other living creatures on the planet’s surface. When the humans from Earth explore the planet, they encounter clouds of these tiny metallic… show more.

This book seems a bit strange at first, when the story begins with Moon-Watcher, the leader of a tribe of early ape-man, who struggles for survival during the brutal Pleistocene ice age. After an alien monolith appears, it seems to advance the way he thinks, leading him to develop crude weapons. When the same monolith is discovered in the future, we seem fated to find the answers behind the eerie structure. Skipping to a team of astronauts who travel aboard a ship to further investigate, things take an unexpected turn when the ship’s A.I. called HAL-9000, gets very confused about keeping secrets. Something about the way it remains so polite while it deceives the crew, is enough to give anyone a nightmare.

I know I’m not supposed to double-dip, but Arthur C. Clarke is a man of many masterpieces, and this is another one. The idea of the space elevator is brilliant and believable. But it is Clarke’s handling of "first contact" that has me recommending the novel. Without spoiling anything, he crafts a scenario wholly different from his other books, yet equally believable and fascinating. 

After spending a few weeks on the Navajo lands in Northern Arizona in 1988, I wanted to write my book from the holistic and naturalistic perspective of a young Navajo who had worked for NASA and lived off the reservation for several years (loosely based on a friend of mine). As it turned out, Ben Bova got there ahead of me in 1992, sending a Navajo geologist on the first crewed mission to Mars. While he’s there, he makes a discovery that also ties into Navajo culture. I have always appreciated the worldview of the Navajo people, and characters with this perspective offer a different lens for interpreting Martian landscapes and the possibilities of a new frontier that can be settled without being destroyed by human activity.