10 books like Quicksilver

Dune is a sci-fi story that really makes you think in the abstract and it poses a lot of deep questions about leadership. While Dune is a tough read with strange protagonists, its worldbuilding is what sucks you because it’s so richly detailed. It’s an immersive book, and I consider it the sci-fi equivalent of Lord of the Rings for setting the standard for sweeping space operas. I read Dune before self-publishing my most recent book, and it made me want to retool the way resource control worked in my book’s universe.

Foundation was inspired by Gibbons’ History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and it shows. The series spans millennia, with dark ages and rediscoveries, civilization versus barbarism and naked imperial aggression. Asimov was not the first writer to create a “future history” (Olaf Stapledon’s Starmaker predates it by more than a decade) but he certainly brought the concept to popular consciousness. Thought-provoking and dizzying in scope, Foundation remains a bedrock of modern science fiction. 

This is the first of the 21 Aubrey/Maturin novels about the British side in the Napoleonic Wars. Read one and you’re hooked for the duration! O’Brian recreates an accurate and nuanced immersion into the age of sail and the British Navy. His characters are rich and complex with foibles and flaws, yet rise to the circumstances of their lives. His research is impeccable and exhaustive. One feels they are on the oak deck next to the crew.
The movie of the same title is far more truncated than the novel, but still a wonder in its beautifully rendered scenes.

The casual brutality, foreign intrigues, and vivid battle scenes leave the reader with racing heart and the hint of salt air in their nose. This series is a true treasure.

Being a romantic I loved Time and Again (as well as the movie) for the story’s construction. I appreciate verisimilitude in historical novels and Finney has done his homework. Having briefly visited New York City twice, I do not know it personally. 

Finney makes it breathe in 1882 with fascinating detail that never bores, and by using photographs. I thought the novel was perfect, and it stuck in my head as much for production/construction values as well as the story. When I first researched Treadwell at the Alaska Historical Library in Juneau I came across dozens of photographs, and the form for the novel coalesced in my head.

In retrospect I realize the novels I loved taught me about the architecture of story as well as entertaining me.

Dead Wake is fact that reads like fiction. Not often do I choose a book already knowing how it ends. His artistic rendering of the world in 1915 is alone worth the read. He introduces us to the passengers of the SS Lusitania, who they are, why they are on the ship, and he makes us care.

Larson limns Captains Turner of the Lusitania, and Schweiger of the U-20, the Imperial German submarine. The author carefully choreographs the final voyage of the doomed ship. The sinking is not the end of the story. 

The last third of the book is devoted to what happened after the torpedo hit. Captain Turner survives the attack as well as many of the passengers. This is a beautifully researched, but heartrending read. 

I first read 1919 by Dos Passos when I was a teenager in the Navy. Having a yen for history since the age of eight, I was transported to an era where hopes and dreams have shattered or vanished. The author created the gritty and tawdry ambiance of characters as far out of their depth as was the reader.

We meet many limned characters with engaging flaws and hopes. The point-of-view shifts constantly and the narrative is spaced with advertising jingles from period radio programs and magazines to promote visualization.

The USA trilogy never left me. After pursuing art and making my living as a commercial artist for 15 years I turned to writing. I realized I wanted to create an immersive portrait of Juneau using similar tactics. I believe I succeeded.

This omnibus collects eleven short stories about space merchant Nicholas Van Rijn. Van Rijn (no coincidence that he’s Dutch) is literate, clever, eccentric in speech, archaic in dress, and occasionally valiant in battle – but he’d much rather trade than fight, and although he describes trade as “swindling each other,” he characteristically strikes deals that benefit all parties.

Van Rijn’s trade-in spices (he is CEO of the Solar Spice and Liquors Company) is a callout to the history of the Dutch East India Company. The great early modern companies (and specifically, the British East India Company) are one of the inspirations in my book: they founded some fortunes and give to startling adventure stories, but the contradictions inherent in their nature also led to corruption and oppression.

In The Pride of Chanur, a human prisoner escapes from the alien kif, who are interrogating him and who have killed his shipmates. The human stows away aboard a hani merchant vessel (the hani are non-human sentients; think large humanoid cats); when discovered, he talked the ship’s captain into making him part of the (otherwise female and hani) crew. The kif attempt to bully the hani into giving up their human crewmate, but they refuse and retreat, until the kif are overextended and have to return home. This is a psychologically rich and entertaining novel that is about spaceships, but whose action is all subterfuge, negotiation, and diplomacy, rather than shooting.

Alex Rider is the series that first introduced me to YA spy novels. They are a defining part of my childhood and adolescence… I don’t have a favorite

After thinking the series was over, Never Say Die was the unexpected sequel I needed. I didn’t need to reread the books to be re-immersed in Alex Rider’s world—it was almost as if I’d never left.

But why choose this one? For a character that could be defined as a reluctant spy, I enjoyed seeing him use the skills that had been forced upon him for something he wanted to do for once. It taught me that we might not always have control over what skills and talents we acquire, but we do have a choice in how we use them.

This book is a great stand-alone but thankfully is a series. It is a story about moving away and learning to integrate but also a young girl discovering strange things in the woods and finding herself immersed in a mystery you will not believe. I read this to my boys but I found myself more intrigued every chapter