Here are 100 books that Recursion fans have personally recommended if you like
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Sci-fi and fantasy give us permission to go places we might not go in this world. I am a big daydreamer and always have been. One of the most magical things about being a writer is that you get to design a world that lives only in your mind, and then share it with the reader. Like George R. R. Martin wrote, “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”
The story of people living in an underground Silo who don’t know why they're there, and only that the outside world is toxic and they must survive.
The characters in this story are heroic and relatable. I just wanted this book to keep going, and luckily there are two more in the series – Shift and Dust. The TV series is also a great addition and keeps a similar tone to the book.
SOON TO BE A MAJOR APPLE TV SERIES __________________________ 'Thrilling, thought-provoking and memorable ... one of dystopian fiction's masterpieces alongside the likes of 1984 and Brave New World.' DAILY EXPRESS
In a ruined and hostile landscape, in a future few have been unlucky enough to survive, a community exists in a giant underground silo.
Inside, men and women live an enclosed life full of rules and regulations, of secrets and lies.
To live, you must follow the rules. But some don't. These are the dangerous ones; these are the people who dare to hope and dream, and who infect others…
In my day job, I’m immersed either with technical equipment or managing people and I enjoy the duality of both challenges. It’s difficult to say which I like best, but because part of my job is people focused, I’ve enjoyed learning to understand the social and interpersonal dynamics between coworkers and clients alike. So books with strong character relationships and stories that are driven by their wants and desires, however right or wrong they may be, are a favorite of mine. The science fiction aspect comes with my love for technology, mainly in music and film and I find many parallels between those arts and writing books.
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.
Fleeing a menace of galactic proportions, a spaceship crashes on an unfamiliar world, leaving the survivors - a pair of children - to the not-so-tender mercies of a medieval, lupine race. Responding to the ship's distress signal, a rescue mission races against time to retrieve the children.
I’ve always loved novels that reinvent and refresh history and legends. They take these building blocks of culture and make them personal and emotional. These novels breathe new life into ancient tales and historical events, so they resonate with relevance. They reveal hidden depths and connections within familiar stories, transforming them into vibrant tales. This genre makes legend and history feel personal by taking me on one character’s unique journey, transforming the exploration of the past into a deeply engaging experience.
I’ve read countless stories about the JFK assassination, but this novel completely refreshed and reframed this part of history for me. By blending the omniscient knowledge of time travel with the perspective of an ordinary person thrown into one of the greatest moments in American history, this novel created a deeply personal journey.
This intimate journey made the time period, the politics, and the culture resonate with life. The vivid portrayal of the late 1950s and early 1960s immersed me in this era, and the novel’s intricate plot, combined with the emotional depth of the main character’s journey, kept me hooked from start to finish. This novel brilliantly refreshes history, offering a thought-provoking exploration of how the past shapes the future.
Now a major TV series from JJ Abrams and Stephen King, starring James Franco (Hulu US, Fox UK and Europe, Stan Australia, SKY New Zealand).
WHAT IF you could go back in time and change the course of history? WHAT IF the watershed moment you could change was the JFK assassination? 11.22.63, the date that Kennedy was shot - unless . . .
King takes his protagonist Jake Epping, a high school English teacher from Lisbon Falls, Maine, 2011, on a fascinating journey back to 1958 - from a world of mobile phones and iPods to a new world of…
A fractured mind or a global conspiracy? Uncovering the truth can be hell when nobody believes you… and you can’t even trust yourself.
"A fantastic science fiction thriller with a sincere and important message.”—Kirkus Reviews.
“A breathtaking, deeply dark alternate-history Earth with complex characters, layered worldbuilding, and twist after twist after twist.”—Julianna Caro, Reedsy Discovery.
Broken Mirror is the first volume in a queer psychological science fiction saga that looks at the stigma of mental illness and the hellish distrust and alienation that goes with it.
Broken Mirror: the start of a smart, complex, and imaginative cyberpunk alternate history saga. Literary science fiction from a fresh, young voice.
In a skewed mirror universe, a mentally ill young man searches for his grandfather’s killer.
Someone killed Jefferson Eastmore. His grandson Victor is sure of it, but no one believes him.
Diagnosed with mirror resonance syndrome and shunned by Semiautonomous California society, Victor suffers from hyperempathy, blank outs, and sensory overload. Jefferson devoted his life to researching mental illness and curing Broken Mirrors like Victor through genetic engineering, but now that he’s gone, Victor must walk a narrow…
I am an academic in rebellion. I have interviewed hundreds of urban leaders and professionals in nine divided urban areas throughout the world. I have written much on this subject, replete with footnotes and sophisticated writing. I am weary of writing more about this important topic—how people do or do not get along in urban settings—from an academic distance. I find the scholarly posture sterilized and insufficiently provocative. I entered into the fictional genre in order to reach a broader audience. I think that fictional futurist writing has the unique ability to portray extraordinary new worlds while at the same time addressing fundamental issues that we face now.
What could be more fun than Gods getting involved in city planning? Spy story wrapped inside a grand and mysterious history of once-supreme Gods now dormant (or not). Memorable characters. Don’t mess with the giant grunt Sigrud. Divine power with 6 Gods (light bearer, judge, warrior, seed-sower, trickster, and builder). Imagine holding a committee meeting with this group. Magical portals that enable back-and-forth between current gritty and past majestic city. A thought-provoking conclusion that speaks to worldwide conflict in real life today.
'Robert Jackson Bennett deserves a huge audience' - Brent Weeks, New York Times bestselling author of The Black Prism
In the city of stairs, nothing is as it seems.
You've got to be careful when you're chasing a murderer through Bulikov, for the world is not as it should be in that city. When the gods were destroyed and all worship of them banned by the Polis, reality folded; now stairs lead to nowhere, alleyways have become portals to the past, and criminals disappear into thin air.
The murder of Dr Efrem Pangyui, the Polis diplomat researching the Continent's past,…
Throughout my life, I’ve moved around quite a bit, and in the process, members of my family and I have encountered many wildly strange people and things. The universe itself is a wild place when you delve into the more exotic aspects: black holes, quantum physics, and measurable differences in subjective realities. It’s hard to say what the real boundaries are, and so I look for stories that stretch my ability to conceive what could be–and that help me find wonder in all the darkness and strangeness around me.
This is the first book in the Southern Reach Trilogy, but it also stands alone as a mysterious and haunting exploration of the way we attempt to navigate a world that is both familiar and alien at the same time.
Mysteries abound, and answers are elusive, but you can revisit Area X again and again and feel like answers lie just beyond the reach of your fingertips.
THE FIRST VOLUME OF THE EXTRAORDINARY SOUTHERN REACH TRILOGY - NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY ALEX GARLAND (EX MACHINA) AND STARRING NATALIE PORTMAN AND OSCAR ISAAC
For thirty years, Area X has remained mysterious and remote behind its intangible border - an environmental disaster zone, though to all appearances an abundant wilderness.
The Southern Reach, a secretive government agency, has sent eleven expeditions to investigate Area X. One has ended in mass suicide, another in a hail of gunfire, the eleventh in a fatal cancer epidemic.
My name is Alister Dray Penborn. I am a lifelong mystery lover, all the way back to my favorite childhood cartoon, Scooby-Doo, and my favorite anime, Detective Conan, or Case Closed as it was called in the US at the time of airing. It's a passion that grew over the years as I was exposed to even more great mysteries. One of the most appealing aspects is the investigation process, where a character sees the inconsistencies of crime scenes, analyzes and makes sense of events, and collects and relies on the slightest clues to act as puzzle pieces to the full picture.
Admittedly, I had to re-read this novel a few times to comprehend the mystery, but it was well worth it. While the supernatural element was hard to grasp, the plot clicked right into place once I figured it out.
The main character’s confusion added to their story more than subtracted, which alone is a success to me as characters running around confused for half the book can be frustrating. But the scenario was essentially an isolated murder mystery done in a rather clever and unique way.
With a mystery that was so complex, I was worried the ending would be too convoluted for my liking. Yet, it concluded with the clues explained and were relevant to the final reveal, much to my satisfaction.
"Pop your favorite Agatha Christie whodunnit into a blender with a scoop of Downton Abbey, a dash of Quantum Leap, and a liberal sprinkling of Groundhog Day and you'll get this unique murder mystery." ―Harper's Bazaar
The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle is a breathlessly addictive mystery that follows one man's race to find a killer, with an astonishing time-turning twist that means nothing and no one are quite what they seem.
Aiden Bishop knows the rules. Evelyn Hardcastle will die every day until he can identify her killer and break the cycle. But every time the day begins again,…
Who am I to be an expert? I'm not. I know what I like and why, and I also know what I dislike. I have no idea what you like or dislike, and I don't presume to know more than anyone else. I do not have a passion for sci-fi; I have a predilection for it. I've been writing creatively all my life. Sci fi is not all I read or write either. At the end of the day, I only need to know that I've given life my best shot.
This book doesn't really need a reason to be recommended. I mean, c'mon, we've all seen The Edge of Tomorrow, and admittedly, I did not read the novel until after I saw the movie. Most Americans don't know much about, less yet come across, Japanese graphic novels unless they're already into that kind of stuff.
Regardless, reading the book after seeing the movie was a pleasant surprise. It's like reading Dreamcatcher by Stephen King after seeing the movie. The movies never do the books justice.
When the alien Gitai invade, Keiji Kiriya is just one of many raw recruits shoved into a suit of battle armour and sent out to kill. Keiji dies on the battlefield, only to find himself reborn each morning to fight and die again and again. On the 158th iteration though, he sees something different, something out of place: the female soldier known as the Bitch of War. Is the Bitch the key to Keiji's escape, or to his final death?
My science fiction and fantasy writing is concerned with the values I was exposed to growing up. As a lifelong Quaker, I have struggled—often unsuccessfully—to live out Quakerism’s non-conformist, almost utopian commitment to equality, simplicity, peace, and community. Not only have I tried to bear witness to those values in my writing, but those ideals led me to my career as an instructor at a community college, one of America’s great socioeconomic leveling institutions. My background as a speculative fiction writer has also made me into a teacher of science fiction and fantasy literature at my college, where I read and came to love the books I recommend here.
This tightly-plotted murder mystery takes place in one of the most compelling imagined settings I’ve ever encountered: a double city somewhere in the Balkans where the inhabitants of each half are required by law not to see the inhabitants of the other half.
Equal parts Kafka and Philip K Dick, Miéville’s The City and the City offers a thought-provoking meditation on the haves and have-nots, as well as life in the Balkanized cities of the world, those “double places” where one-half of the population conspires not to notice the other half.
With shades of Kafka and Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler and 1984, the multi-award winning The City & The City by China Mieville is a murder mystery taken to dazzling metaphysical and artistic heights.
'You can't talk about Mieville without using the word "brilliant".' - Ursula Le Guin, author of the Earthsea series.
When the body of a murdered woman is found in the extraordinary, decaying city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks like a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlu of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he probes, the evidence begins to point to…
I’ve always loved stories that rearrange reality in some simple, allusive way, including movies like Groundhog Day or The Truman Show. They remind me of a quote about Italo Calvino that I first read when I was a teenager and have loved ever since: ‘He holds a mirror up to life, then writes about the mirror.’ I tend not to be attracted to stories that simply depict reality and even less so to stories that completely abandon reality for an invented fantasy world. All my favorite fictions take place somewhere in between, in the blending of the real and the impossible.
Part of what I love about this novel is that its basic premise–an English pastor is sent to a distant planet to preach the Christian gospel to aliens–sounds so absurd that it’s hard to imagine it feeling real. But Faber does a wonderful job of taking the glamor out of space travel and foreign worlds.
The atmosphere of this novel is all empty cafeterias and unpleasant humidity–I love the banality of it all! In its portrait of a loving but strained marriage (with the husband getting excited over aliens and the wife struggling to hold it together on a dying Earth), the novel is dryly funny while also being genuinely moving.
'I am with you always, even unto the end of the world . . .'
Peter Leigh is a missionary called to go on the journey of a lifetime. Leaving behind his beloved wife, Bea, he boards a flight for a remote and unfamiliar land, a place where the locals are hungry for the teachings of the Bible - his 'book of strange new things'. It is a quest that will challenge Peter's beliefs, his understanding of the limits of the human body and, most of all, his love for Bea.
I am an academic in rebellion. I have interviewed hundreds of urban leaders and professionals in nine divided urban areas throughout the world. I have written much on this subject, replete with footnotes and sophisticated writing. I am weary of writing more about this important topic—how people do or do not get along in urban settings—from an academic distance. I find the scholarly posture sterilized and insufficiently provocative. I entered into the fictional genre in order to reach a broader audience. I think that fictional futurist writing has the unique ability to portray extraordinary new worlds while at the same time addressing fundamental issues that we face now.
I am a big fan of the author’s nuanced and powerful writing style. The best-written book on my list. Collection of short stories that interweave personal details and idiosyncrasies with broader themes and omens. In “Scenic Route” (‘they have me up hard against the hood of the Cadillac Escalade, which is covered in the dust and dead insects of a thousand back roads’) and “Fairground” (‘school buses lined up like ducks at the crosswalk, waiting for the light to turn green, the faces of the secured population looking through the windows with indifference and resignation’), individuals dealing with internal tumult confront in matter-of-fact ways the stark presence of territories and people divided by check-point partitions. Sectoral partitions, segregated populations. Stark divisions in urban life normalized and routinized.
Said Sayrafiezadeh has been hailed by Philip Gourevitch as "a masterful storyteller working from deep in the American grain." His new collection of stories-some of which have appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, and the Best American Short Stories-is set in a contemporary America full of the kind of emotionally bruised characters familiar to readers of Denis Johnson and George Saunders. These are people contending with internal struggles-a son's fractured relationship with his father, the death of a mother, the loss of a job, drug addiction-even as they are battered by larger, often invisible, economic, political, and racial…
