100 books like Ready Player Two

By Ernest Cline,

Here are 100 books that Ready Player Two fans have personally recommended if you like Ready Player Two. Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of Childhood's End

Craig A. Falconer Author Of Not Alone

From my list on how things will change when the aliens show up.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve always had a longstanding interest in space, and particularly in aliens. In researching my breakthrough novel Not Alone, I extensively read as much nonfiction content on the topic as I could find, including governmental-backed scenario analyses of how things might actually play out in a contact or invasion scenario. Naturally, I have also read widely in the sci-fi genre for my own pleasure, with most of my interest in this specific topic.

Craig's book list on how things will change when the aliens show up

Craig A. Falconer Why did Craig love this book?

This was the first major alien arrival novel I read. I recall being awestruck by Arthur C. Clarke’s masterful mixing of incisive storytelling and a deep sense of grandeur.

The Overlords are hugely memorable, but it was the exploration of human identity that had the biggest effect on me. The story endures as a classic for a very good reason.

By Arthur C. Clarke,

Why should I read it?

8 authors picked Childhood's End as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Arthur C. Clarke's classic in which he ponders humanity's future and possible evolution

When the silent spacecraft arrived and took the light from the world, no one knew what to expect. But, although the Overlords kept themselves hidden from man, they had come to unite a warring world and to offer an end to poverty and crime. When they finally showed themselves it was a shock, but one that humankind could now cope with, and an era of peace, prosperity and endless leisure began.

But the children of this utopia dream strange dreams of distant suns and alien planets, and…


Book cover of The Reality Dysfunction

Jason Jowett Author Of Alchemy Series Compendium

From my list on inspiring sci-fi that reforges your worldview.

Why am I passionate about this?

As an avid explorer having thrice traveled around the world, living and working in over 40 countries, my inspirations as so originally science fiction have found grounding. I looked to level my imagination in the real world and filtered out the impossible from the unnecessary on a path to utopia. Sharing our ideas, exposing misgivings too, all contribute to a shared realization of human potential. This is much of the reason for who I am as a founder of business platforms I designed to achieve things that I envisage as helpful, necessary, and constructive contributions to our world. Those software endeavours underway in 2022, and a longtime coming still, are Horoscorpio and De Democracy.

Jason's book list on inspiring sci-fi that reforges your worldview

Jason Jowett Why did Jason love this book?

A galactic society with living ships! This pan-ultimate technological empire is so immense, I seized upon the concept for a sequel to my book regarding the symbiosis of human and machine. Joshua Calver's astro-archeological adventure was the most enjoyable for me. The idea of immersing in progenitor hyper-technological society's exciting, and forms the basis of RPGs such as Mass Effect. It's not entirely alien a concept either but based on the real history of Earth and its megalithic stone cut marvels, featuring precision cutting on either impossibly large building stones or delicate bowls.

By Peter F. Hamilton,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Reality Dysfunction as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it. This book is for kids age 16, and 17.

What is this book about?

The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F. Hamilton is the first in a sweeping galactic series, The Night's Dawn trilogy, from the master of space opera.

In AD 2600, the human race is finally realizing its potential. The galaxy's colonized planets host a multitude of diverse cultures. Genetic engineering has defeated disease and produced extraordinary space-born creatures. Huge fleets of sentient trader starships thrive, living on the wealth created by industrializing entire star systems. And throughout inhabited space, the Confederation Navy keeps the peace.

Then something goes catastrophically wrong. On a primitive colony planet, a renegade criminal encounters an utterly alien…


Book cover of The Algebraist

Jason Jowett Author Of Alchemy Series Compendium

From my list on inspiring sci-fi that reforges your worldview.

Why am I passionate about this?

As an avid explorer having thrice traveled around the world, living and working in over 40 countries, my inspirations as so originally science fiction have found grounding. I looked to level my imagination in the real world and filtered out the impossible from the unnecessary on a path to utopia. Sharing our ideas, exposing misgivings too, all contribute to a shared realization of human potential. This is much of the reason for who I am as a founder of business platforms I designed to achieve things that I envisage as helpful, necessary, and constructive contributions to our world. Those software endeavours underway in 2022, and a longtime coming still, are Horoscorpio and De Democracy.

Jason's book list on inspiring sci-fi that reforges your worldview

Jason Jowett Why did Jason love this book?

The biggest challenge to setting out a worldview within a universe is describing the detail about entities that imbues the feelings associated with living as those entities within it. Banks manages the sensation of living beings masterfully, where they are so alien and so abstract your pure imagination is put to the test. What would life be like for you as a jelly blob that flies around a gas giant? Pretty damn good thanks to Iain, and it's something I tackled in my book too with not nearly as much success it seems, at least yet.

By Iain M. Banks,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Algebraist as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

It is 4034 AD. Humanity has made it to the stars. Fassin Taak, a Slow Seer at the Court of the Nasqueron Dwellers, will be fortunate if he makes it to the end of the year.

The Nasqueron Dwellers inhabit a gas giant on the outskirts of the galaxy, in a system awaiting its wormhole connection to the rest of civilisation. In the meantime, they are dismissed as decadents living in a state of highly developed barbarism, hoarding data without order, hunting their own young and fighting pointless formal wars.

Seconded to a military-religious order he's barely heard of -…


Book cover of Freeway Fighter

Jason Jowett Author Of Alchemy Series Compendium

From my list on inspiring sci-fi that reforges your worldview.

Why am I passionate about this?

As an avid explorer having thrice traveled around the world, living and working in over 40 countries, my inspirations as so originally science fiction have found grounding. I looked to level my imagination in the real world and filtered out the impossible from the unnecessary on a path to utopia. Sharing our ideas, exposing misgivings too, all contribute to a shared realization of human potential. This is much of the reason for who I am as a founder of business platforms I designed to achieve things that I envisage as helpful, necessary, and constructive contributions to our world. Those software endeavours underway in 2022, and a longtime coming still, are Horoscorpio and De Democracy.

Jason's book list on inspiring sci-fi that reforges your worldview

Jason Jowett Why did Jason love this book?

Ever wondered if you'd survive in the Mad Max universe? Here's the assurance you can, well maybe if you've loaded die. Choose your own adventure has been a staple literary source of my youth and Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson are both united champions of the genre. Freeway Fighter is one of their few which lends more to science than fantasy, and is thoroughly invigorating. For mind-bending characterization, here you've got the original immersion you need in self-discovery.

By Andi Ewington, Simon Coleby (illustrator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Freeway Fighter as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The smash-hit Fighting Fantasy gamebook comes to comics for the very first time, in a brand-new story of post-apocalyptic racing and survival against all odds! Bella De La Rosa was heir to a great I-400 racing tradition before the virus hit, before most of humanity was wiped out, and civilization fell. Eighteen months after the collapse of society, she and her blue and red Interceptor prowl the remnants of what once was America, eking out a life among the ruins, trying to evade vicious car gangs like the Doom Dogs, and find enough gas, food, and water to survive. But…


Book cover of A People's Future of the United States: Speculative Fiction from 25 Extraordinary Writers

O. E. Tearmann Author Of The Hands We're Given

From my list on a future worth living in.

Why am I passionate about this?

I come from a reservation town in Wisconsin, and make my livelihood as a horticulturist in the water-strapped state of Colorado. I’m mix-race and LGBT. These influences have shaped what I look for in stories. I write and seek to read about communities in which the person creating medicine and the person growing food is just as important as the fighter, because let me tell you: if you don’t have the means to make food and heal wounds, all the guns in the world won’t save you. I particularly appreciate stories that explore ecology, agriculture, and plant science in innovative ways. These make my little horticulture-geek heart sing.

O. E.'s book list on a future worth living in

O. E. Tearmann Why did O. E. love this book?

By turns uplifting, bloody strange, heartbreaking, and joyful, this story collection touches on so many things: gender relations, race, hope, the need to feel safe, and the need to feel dignity among them. There are versions of America in this series that I dread, and versions of America that I long for. This is a book we need right now: a collection of dire warnings and beautiful dreams, hopes, and fears. We’re at a crossroads in history. This book reminds us that we can take a turn into the dark or the light. And wherever we go, we’ll be taking our whole selves and all our facets along for the ride: good and bad, kind and cruel, genetic and historical.

Strap in.

By Charlie Jane Anders, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Charles Yu

Why should I read it?

1 author picked A People's Future of the United States as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A glittering landscape of twenty-five speculative stories that challenge oppression and envision new futures for America—from N. K. Jemisin, Charles Yu, Jamie Ford, G. Willow Wilson, Charlie Jane Anders, Hugh Howey, and more.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

In these tumultuous times, in our deeply divided country, many people are angry, frightened, and hurting. Knowing that imagining a brighter tomorrow has always been an act of resistance, editors Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams invited an extraordinarily talented group of writers to share stories that explore new forms of freedom, love, and justice.…


Book cover of Utopian Thought in the Western World

Peter Zarrow Author Of Abolishing Boundaries: Global Utopias in the Formation of Modern Chinese Political Thought, 1880-1940

From my list on utopianism east and west.

Why am I passionate about this?

When I was a teenager, I thought we could create a perfect world—or if not quite perfect, at least much, much better than the one we are currently destroying. Actually, I still think it’s possible, just a lot harder and a lot more dangerous than I originally thought. I’ve been interested in all the efforts to imagine and create utopias, which sometimes produce hells instead of heavens, ever since. I have evolved (I think it’s progress) from being a high school Maoist to something more mature while watching China’s attempts to improve the lives of its citizens with respect and sympathy.

Peter's book list on utopianism east and west

Peter Zarrow Why did Peter love this book?

The Manuels give an exhaustive but very readable history of utopian thought from the Renaissance (Thomas More) to Marxism, with backward glances to ancient Judaic and Hellenic cultures. This book explains how and why utopias have been central to Western thought, showing how the utopias of one age seem dystopian in another age (or even their own), presented in wry prose that draws readers into the story.

By Frank E. Manuel, Fritzie P. Manuel,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Utopian Thought in the Western World as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This masterly study has a grand sweep. It ranges over centuries, with a long look backward over several millennia. Yet the history it unfolds is primarily the story of individuals: thinkers and dreamers who envisaged an ideal social order and described it persuasively, leaving a mark on their own and later times.

The roster of utopians includes men of all stripes in different countries and eras--figures as disparate as More and Fourier, the Marquis de Sade and Edward Bellamy, Rousseau and Marx. Fascinating character studies of the major figures are among the delights of the book.

Utopian writings run the…


Book cover of Men Like Gods

Ira Nayman Author Of The Dance: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction

From my list on wildly entertaining journeys around the multiverse.

Why am I passionate about this?

I, Ira Nayman, have been writing stories set in the multiverse for almost twenty years, first with the Alternate Reality News Service set of books, then with my Transdimensional Authority/Multiverse novels and, most recently, with multiverse triptychs (the spark for The Dance). One of the things that I recently realized about my writing is that a lot of it focuses on the factors that shape our lives and make us the people we are. My ongoing fascination with the multiverse is because it is a great vehicle for exploring this idea by showing us how our lives could have turned out if circumstances or our choices had been different.

Ira's book list on wildly entertaining journeys around the multiverse

Ira Nayman Why did Ira love this book?

Do you think this multiverse business is something new from MCU Labs? H.G. Wells wrote about parallel universes in this book back in 1923. 

Humble Mr. Barnstaple and some 1920 one-percenters pass through a dimensional rift into an alternate world called “Utopia.” Appropriately, there’s no disease or poverty, no war, and everybody’s into exploration and scientific progress. But there are also some worrying things (e.g. “eugenics-light”). Aldous Huxley’s anti-utopia Brave New World (1932) is partly a rebuttal of this book.

This book is more of a slow burn than the high impacts of wonder/terror in The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. However, the resolution of the story is ingenious, and Well’s vision of humanity’s destiny is still relevant after 101 years.

By H. G. Wells,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Men Like Gods as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.

Welcome to Utopia.

When Mr. Barnstaple, an Earthling, is accidentally transported to Utopia with a group of others, he begins an adventure that will change how he views the world forever.

Utopia has no government. Utopia has no religion. People are governed only by their own conscience and desires, and Barnstaple is drawn into what he sees as a perfect society. But when a disease brought by the Earthlings threatens the existence of the Utopians, Barnstaple must make a choice: take over Utopia, or betray his own people…


Book cover of The Giver

Jesse Maas Author Of Not for the Faint of Heart

From my list on fiction books that capture the meaning of simply being human.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am passionate about writing books that put good into the world and highlight meaningful and inspiring themes, which, in turn, means I am also passionate about reading books that do the same. I love to write and read books that leave the reader feeling like there is still good in the world, even when it seems to be very dark around us. If people read my books or any on this list, I sincerely hope they feel encouraged and inspired and enjoy them as much as I do.

Jesse's book list on fiction books that capture the meaning of simply being human

Jesse Maas Why did Jesse love this book?

While I don’t always love mainstream classics, The Giver is a classic for a reason, and, in my opinion, it rightfully deserves its place on the shelf.

I love the emotional draw of this book and the invitation to think deeper about the meaning of life and the burden it can take on us. I love books that challenge us to think about the bigger concepts of life and all they entail: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

By Lois Lowry,

Why should I read it?

21 authors picked The Giver as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it. This book is for kids age 10, 11, 12, and 13.

What is this book about?

THE GIVER is soon to be a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges, Katie Holmes and Taylor Swift.

Now available for the first time in the UK, THE GIVER QUARTET is the complete four-novel collection.

THE GIVER: It is the future. There is no war, no hunger, no pain. No one in the community wants for anything. Everything needed is provided. And at twelve years old, each member of the community has their profession carefully chosen for them by the Committee of Elders.

Jonas has never thought there was anything wrong with his world. But from the moment he is…


Book cover of Lord of the Flies

Pedro Domingos Author Of 2040: A Silicon Valley Satire

From my list on satires that changed our view of the world.

Why am I passionate about this?

Like a caricature, satire lets you see reality better by exaggerating it. When satire is done right, every element, from the overall plot to the characters to paragraph-level details, is there to cast an exposing light on some part of our real world. They are books that exist on many levels, expose hubris and essential misunderstandings, and generally speak truth to power. They should leave the reader reassessing core assumptions about how the world works. I’ve written a best-selling nonfiction book about machine learning in the past, and I probably could have taken that approach again, but AI and American politics are both ripe for satire.

Pedro's book list on satires that changed our view of the world

Pedro Domingos Why did Pedro love this book?

I couldn’t look at society the same way after reading this tale of how a group of schoolboys stranded on an island descends, step by step, into savagery. The savagery is inside all of us, and the veneer of civilization that our education puts on it is very thin and easily cracks. Haunting. 

By William Golding,

Why should I read it?

15 authors picked Lord of the Flies as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A plane crashes on a desert island and the only survivors, a group of schoolboys, assemble on the beach and wait to be rescued. By day they inhabit a land of bright fantastic birds and dark blue seas, but at night their dreams are haunted by the image of a terrifying beast. As the boys' delicate sense of order fades, so their childish dreams are transformed into something more primitive, and their behaviour starts to take on a murderous, savage significance.

First published in 1954, Lord of the Flies is one of the most celebrated and widely read of modern…


Book cover of The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead

Trebor Healey Author Of A Horse Named Sorrow

From my list on erotic themes that are imaginative and insightful.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been writing stories and poems with erotic themes since I first entered the spoken word scene in 1980s San Francisco. As a young queer boy, raised in the highly eroticized Catholic Church, I was actually comfortable talking about and writing about sex and eros as I’d been stigmatized by it, and it got me fascinated with what the big deal was and why writers were afraid to approach it or why they did so in a corny/predictable/idealized and/or often dishonest and clumsy way. Soon I was teaching erotic writing and have been integrating it into my writing in honest, fresh, and enlivening ways—and helping others do soever since.

Trebor's book list on erotic themes that are imaginative and insightful

Trebor Healey Why did Trebor love this book?

The Wild Boys is at once dystopian and utopian, featuring a band of boys who’ve gone rogue and have perfected strange and poetically beautiful sex rites which allow them to ritually and meditatively conjure or reproduce more wild boy offspring. At once science fiction and fantastical in its imaginative scope, it is also, like all Burroughs’s work, a profound exploration of social control, the excesses and assumptions inherent in state and religious terror, and the sexual and erotic oppression and misunderstanding that is the real enemy of freedom. Fearless and experimental, Burroughs inspires me to be bold, blunt, and not afraid to disturb or offend in exploring the poetic and erotic relationships between all manner of ideas.

By William S. Burroughs,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Wild Boys as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In this funny, nightmarish masterpiece of imaginative excess, grotesque characters engage in acts of violent one-upmanship, boundless riches mangle a corner of Africa into a Bacchanalian utopia, and technology, flesh and violence fuse with and undo each other. A fragmentary, freewheeling novel, it sees wild boys engage in vigorous, ritualistic sex and drug taking, as well as pranksterish guerrilla warfare and open combat with a confused and outmatched army. The Wild Boys shows why Burroughs is a writer unlike any other, able to make captivating the explicit and horrific.


Book cover of Childhood's End
Book cover of The Reality Dysfunction
Book cover of The Algebraist

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5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in utopian, virtual reality, and dystopian?

Utopian 72 books
Virtual Reality 54 books
Dystopian 618 books