Fans pick 79 books like Out of the Everywhere and Other Extraordinary Visions

My sister and I were only close because we’re only two years apart. But recently we’ve had some tragedy in our family, and that brought us closer.

While I was making this list of books, I was reminded of this story and how much I enjoyed it, not just for the prose, which I take notice of and will drop a book if it’s bad, but for that reminder of the brother and sister story here. Not to mention the rescue crew of odd characters which reflects a belief of mine: truth is universal.

Any human or alien can understand compassion and suffering and choose the better of the two.

A planet in its equivalent of the stone age is passing through a galactic debris field. An alien stargazer realizes that sooner or later some object will strike the planet and destroy it. The only hope of survival his species has is to leave the planet before that happens. But the concept is a mere abstraction to his people, the equivalent of a Neanderthal saying “we need to travel to the moon,” and the task is further complicated by the fact that their technology is biological in nature, focused on the manipulation of living tissue. It is hard to imagine how such technology could ever produce a spaceship. 

The novel--structured as a series of novellas-- follows the development of a fascinating alien species from its primitive roots to an age of high technology, each chapter focusing on a different time period. Always the stargazer’s warning is proclaimed by a few… show more.

I couldn’t finish this list without including one of the most famous examples of pregnancy in science fiction.

Humanity comes face-to-face with an alien species, the Oankali, who use gene editing, cloning, and mating to refresh their gene pools. The focus is on Lilith, a black woman taken hostage by the aliens who must learn about their plans for her and strategize her responses.

I really appreciate the way Butler’s work manages to speak to the legacy of slavery, particularly through a scene where the aliens create the circumstances for Lilith to breed with a human man in aid of their experiments. Lilith’s refusal to succumb to this animalistic treatment confronts the legacy of breeding humans during slavery.

I find Lilith (like many of Butler’s other characters) a driven character who deals with outlandish situations and the potential invasion of her own body with a pragmatic determination that invites me,… show more.

Years before Game of Thrones became a household name, Martin was best known for this hauntingly beautiful and deeply disturbing novella. Two telepaths, Robb and Lya, are sent to an alien planet to investigate a disturbing religious movement. The planet is home to a race called the Shkeen, and to a gelatinous parasite called the Greeshka. In middle age the Shkeen allow the Greeshka to infect them, and ten years later they visit a cave where they allow a massive specimen to consume them. Some humans living on the planet have even joined the native religion, and have allowed themselves to be infected and devoured. The administrators are desperate to know why.

Robb and Lya have an unusually close relationship, but she suffers from a sense of isolation that telepathy cannot banish. While they watch some Shkeen being devoured by the Greeshka, she can sense how isolated the Shkeen feel… show more.

This book should perhaps be classified as sci-fi, but hear me out: the bulk of this novella follows two characters, one who is technically supernatural (we just happen to call him an alien), as they break out of captivity and quest through a forest. That’s fantasy enough for me, and the syrupy sweetness of these two can overcome any hesitation over on-page, spacey jargon.

I’ve never read a book that so wholly gets into the head of a non-human species as this, and it also had me cracking up the entire time. Simmi, the alien in question, is a germaphobe, to put it lightly, but his partner in escaping, Aurora, is patient and kind with him, and the love that blossoms between them is kick-your-feet delightful.

Fast-paced action, adventure, humour, combat, and brilliant world building: The Last City has it all. The female characters fight alongside — and against — the male characters in this action-packed sci-fi novel, set in the multi-layered city of Scorpia. I loved immersing myself in this fictional world inhabited by a legion of post-human species. The struggles of the main female characters, including Sihlo, whose history means she’s a target for the bad guys, and object-morphing Diega, are drawn with clarity and depth that meant I really cared for these oddball creatures and cheered for them to defeat the enemy. This book is such a lot of fun, and I loved it from start to finish.

In the summer, this book takes over from British Wildlife as my favourite reference book that doesn’t bamboozle me with science. I nearly always find the insect I’m looking for and then inevitably spend half an hour lost in details of the plants it eats or places it lives.

I wouldn’t want to be without this book, and I regularly buy it as a present for friends and family. 

Esen is a shapechanger, a young one. While exploring a world considered ‘safe’ by her matriarch, she is captured by the natives. Her only hope of rescue is to betray her species' strict rules and reveal her true nature to her fellow prisoner, a human.

I adore Esen as a character. She is very relatable. I also love the breadth and scope of species and habitats and worlds in this series. Julie Czerneda is one of my favorite authors. Her storytelling skills shine. Esen is definitely not human, but Czerneda creates such a warm character you can’t help but love her. Beholder’s Eye is part coming-of-age but mostly a darn good science fiction adventure.

This collection contains, hands down, my favorite exploration of non-human consciousness: the story “The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics.” The title is a mouthful but I love how this story acknowledges we may never fully understand other species’ communications, that there will always be some matter of uncertainty or mistranslation.

At the same time, this story captures for me the intelligence and creativity of the non-human while making a persuasive argument that we need to at least try to understand forms of life that see and experience the world so differently from us.  

Is it worth buying an entire collection for this one story? Totally. But there are a lot of other great gems in Real and the Unreal as well.

In addition to providing a fascinating biological history of North America, this book is also extremely well-written.

Its chapters offer history lessons of North American landscape and ecosystems, disguised as lyrical essays that focus on a series of unlikely non-human protagonists (or antagonists, depending on how you look at them)—including hessian flies, gypsy moths, pigeons, starlings, and honeybees.

These stories matter because they remind us of how great our illusion of control is, especially when it comes to the natural world, and how far the consequences of even the most well-intentioned actions can reach. It also showed me how engaging a story can be when the human characters are resigned to the margins.