56 books like K-Pax

I must have re-read this wonderful book half a dozen times in my youth. I first read it when I was in middle school. Though I had discovered science fiction and fantasy books a few years earlier, most of them had been heavy on action and light on ideas.

This was one of the first books I read that really made me think about how strange and wonderful the universe might really be and see how that might provide a context for telling profoundly moving human stories. It filled my young mind with awe and wonder, as well as a desire to tell my own stories.

I love a good dystopian novel, and this hit all the right notes for me. At first, everything seems perfect in Jonas’s tightly-ordered world—only everyone is hiding something. Jonas is different, but he doesn’t know how.

I loved how thought-provoking The Giver was. It got me asking questions about what it means to be a part of a community, a friend, and a member of a family. What risks are we willing to take for the ultimate good, and what crosses the line?

I found Jonas’s story fascinating and felt genuinely concerned for him throughout the book.

This is a big sprawling story. Do you love books like that or hate them? I love them because they feel like giant puzzles: you kind of lose yourself in them and enjoy the constant twists and turns. DeLillo is a postmodern master so you can trust that he has it all under control. In this book, Billy, a teen mathematician prodigy, wins the Nobel Prize in Mathematics and is spirited away to help decipher a mysterious message from aliens. It’s been compared to Alice in Wonderland for its down-the-rabbit-hole and through-the-looking-glass aspects of plot twists and characters. What makes this satire accessible, however, is the comedy. Billy is us, the readers, and he takes us on a philosophical journey while being surrounded by the strangest of characters.

In my golden years I’ve come, perhaps wrongly, to trust myself and the decisions I make. Still I sometimes agonize over decisions which like a great clapper sound the bell at the core of my ethical self.

Nearly as handwringing are choices I’m forced into through something new I’ve learned about myself, my friends, or the world around me. Something new that shakes the ground of my understanding so violently I have to stop what I’m doing and hold on.

This is what happens in The Sparrow, as at last we – as someday we surely will – communicate with other life from outside the earth. Salzman cleverly puts much of the action into the hands of the Jesuits. Imagine how they must feel when the Bible, their tradition, and almost everything they believe go out the door…

His to Claim pushes the reader through a wide spectrum of emotions. One interesting point is that you see a possessive hero in a romance novel work to embrace emotions. A dark romance novel it features a bride hunt trope that lands our main characters into a variety of cultural understandings which give insights into how we handle our own misunderstandings. 

This story imagines a human colony on an alien world that is both terrifying and surreal. 

One by one the colonists meet strange fates or murder each other, until they all wake up to discover the entire sequence of events was a virtual reality—a diversion designed to occupy them while awaiting an unlikely rescue from otherwise certain doom. However, elements from the virtual reality escape into the waking world, leading to salvation for at least one of the voyagers.

This book will keep you guessing right up to the end, and beyond, making the reader consider what is real, what is religion, and what do we want most out of life.

Sterling burst onto the SF scene with a crash and clatter when I was in high school, and this book, while perhaps not his very best work, is certainly his most creative.

I loved the fact that the aliens were investors rather than conquerors and also the fact that human beings were diverging along so many different vectors that we were rapidly becoming alien to one another.

This is hefty, recent, authoritative, and well written (the author’s CV includes a Pulitzer Prize nomination).

Over a lengthy historic account, he spins the twin stories of the search by scientists for extraterrestrial life and the – usually – amateur search by ufologists for evidence to support their claims that aliens are already visiting us. Garrett Graff explores the contradictions.

He is clear and concise on the strength and weakness each side’s efforts, and insightful in those moments when both sides have briefly collaborated. For a beginner to the subject who wants the shortest route to becoming truly knowledgeable, this is the perfect primer.

This is UFO investigation the way a professor of religious studies tackles it.

Diane Pasulka starts off considering why the levels of belief in intelligent extraterrestrial life amongst Americans roughly match the levels of belief in God. She then completes a study to find out why this is, and what – exactly – drives people, including some of the most successful and intelligent Americans she can find, to this belief.

To her credit she finds answers and covers the whole complex topic in a clear and readable book. Some of the most important contributions to understanding the UFO subject have been made by people who started their investigation from outside the UFO community. This is one of the best examples.

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.