100 books like Quantum Night

What if Jews settled in Alaska instead of Israel? There is a question I’d never asked, but I loved chewing on it. Alternative histories are great at exploring questions of cause and effect, the rippling power of people and places, and the very existence of fate.

They are not to everyone’s taste, so how about a murder mystery instead? Let’s call it that, and you won’t be put off by worries about excessive background and explanation. When exposition comes in the form of detective work, it is so much more palatable. And personal. Chabon feeds the reader ideas the way one might sneak a dog medicine–wrapped in something that goes down easy.

This book is written by two dear friends who are the reason I am a published author myself. However, I don’t recommend it just because they are close to me, but because it is a wonderful book that kicked off the entire Outward Odyssey series, of which my book is a part. This magnificent book set a new standard for historical work on space exploration by focusing on the people instead of the hardware. The stories you’ll read here will show you why we are who we are and why humans will always strive for the unknown.

Crossfield wrote one of the first books about what it means to be a test pilot of a powerful rocket plane, and I consider it the best. This book is an autobiography that delves into the nature of the personality of someone who can climb into the cockpit of an experimental aircraft, light off the engines, and climb high into the desert sky at multiples of the speed of sound. It also is the book that began my deeply personal 30-year journey to write my own book on the North American X-15. Scotty was one of the first pilots I spoke to in order to get insights into how these people think and react. I know you’ll enjoy meeting him through his book as much as I did sitting with him in person.

This book feels different from the other four. It predates the others by several decades and wears its unique era in Clarke’s voice from a previous generation.

The most astounding thing about Clarke’s depiction of the future is how prescient he was, writing in the 1950s: a city-wide supercomputer that runs all of society, a population whose minds are stored in the computer’s data banks with a subpopulation rendered physical at any time in the form of uploaded people who live different lives over and over again.

How did Clarke envision these concepts becoming commonplace four decades later in the 1990s? This book is worth reading just to stand agape at Clarke’s premonitions of a technological society that embraces notions of mind-uploading that are far more commonplace nowadays.

If you only ever read two books penned by astronauts, this should be the second. Gene Cernan flew on Gemini 9, Apollo 10, and Apollo 17; on this final mission in 1972 he was the last man to walk on the Moon as part of the Apollo Program. Like Collins, Cernan sheds the astronaut tough-guy image to show us the human cost of the Apollo Program, as well as the bravery and glory of the enterprise. He’s unflinchingly honest, but also thoughtful and sometimes lyrical about his space experiences, and always entertaining. Of all the astronauts, Cernan might have been my first choice as a dinner companion; I’d have loved to talk with him about his three EVAs covering 22 hours of lunar exploration. That would have been terrific.

What if extinctions could be traded like carbon? There’s an idea that doesn’t come up too often over dinner. It’s odd, awful, and yet somewhat plausible, as our hyper-capitalistic world keeps thinking it can buy its way out of physics.

Beauman chooses not to hash out the details in the Journal of Political Economy. He chooses to have it read instead. As you should, because I found the novel that fully examines this terrible concept to be terribly interesting, terribly inventive, and terribly funny. Not in a LOL kind of funny (though there are moments) but in the smirking, wry, ‘of course’ realm of humor ruled by the line of succession that runs from Jonathan Swift to George Carlin.

I love jokes that last long enough for you to realize they were so much more than whimsy. 

What if our willpower was a commodity? Ok, it kind of already is, right? I spent thousands of hours in a cubicle, having my soul sipped on. But making will semi-tangible and directly transferable got me thinking about the ‘power of self’ in a whole different way, which is only one of the many delights of this novel. There is also a mystery, political struggle, wonderful world-building, and a tense examination of goal orientation.

This is technically a fantasy novel, but labels are like nutritional guidelines. Who’s to say what a serving size is? Who’s to say fantasy can’t be speculative, probing, and–when it comes to human interaction–as real as hardcore sci-fi? Not me. I want a second or third helping of Islington.

What I adore about this book—which Carol Shields wrote a few years after winning the Pulitzer Prize for The Stone Diaries—is how it mingles the quotidian and the fanciful and the fantastic.

The quotidian takes the form of the very ordinary details in the life of the titular protagonist’s middle-aged life: The small things that Larry frets about, his ordinary conversations in Winnipeg coffee shops, his very relatable miscommunications, and even his fairly typical penis (there’s an entire chapter called “Larry’s Penis”).

Then there are the fanciful touches—for example, Larry makes garden labyrinths for a living (not a run-of-the-mill profession), and streets that don’t intersect in the real Winnipeg do intersect in the novel.

As for the fantastic, the novel ends with Larry having a vision of how his life might have gone in a happier alternative reality. 

I love books that make me feel like I’m living in another time period—and this book, set in Winnipeg in 1913—does that in spades. In fact, speaking of “spades,” Sam Spade, the protagonist of Dashiell Hammet’s The Maltese Falcon, is surely one of the inspirations for this mystery novel’s protagonist, Sam Klein, a hard-nosed detective.

The novel’s author, Allan Levine, is a historian, and the vivid details he pulls into the plot target all of our senses (including smell—Winnipeg’s streets weren’t paved in 1913, and horses were still more common than cars!). Levine also draws upon the prejudices of the era—Sam Klein isn’t accepted by the city’s elite because he’s Jewish—and he paints a compelling portrait of the city’s gritty neighborhoods and corrupt city politics. 

I love history—not just historical fiction but actual history books—and this book skillfully weaves together an abundance of intriguing facts and true stories from that city’s history.

Why 1912? Because in that year, Winnipeg was one of the most important cities in North America, largely because it was (and is) located in the very center of the continent, which led to it developing the biggest rail yard in the world.

As we learn from this book, luminaries such as Charlie Chaplin, W.C. Fields, Charles Dickens, Harry Houdini, and many more passed through this thriving city. But that changed in 1914 when the Panama Canal opened, and suddenly, goods were shipped from one ocean to another through that waterway instead of through Winnipeg. In terms of commerce, Winnipeg never fully recovered.