89 books like Red Dwarf

An angel and a demon work together to stop the antichrist from destroying the world. Simple enough. But things get off to a rocky start when they spend the first eleven years monitoring the wrong child.

I initially read this book on vacation, and while I don’t remember much about the trip itself, I remember the book! An otherwise-normal pre-teen with the power to shape reality takes this story to appropriate (and absurd) extremes, but at its core, it’s a narrative about good and evil, human nature, and free will—and it approaches these themes with sincerity, nuance, and care.

Come for the laughs, stay for the laughs…and for the profound reflection on humanity.

Any list like this needs to include a Hitchhiker’s book, and this is my personal favourite. These books skirt even further into the surreal and silly than the Discworld books, but somehow Douglas Adams saves them from falling into pointlessness. I can’t quite see how he does it. The settings are so diverse and mind-boggling, and the plot is thin enough that it would probably collapse if I tried to describe it, like a beautiful bubble popping in your palm. The characters are vividly memorable, but in these books, it is the language that really shines, the spectacular, witty, wonderful use of words and phrases, which somehow elevate the book, making us care about the journey despite its utter silliness.

As something I would never have chosen to read, this book club pick had me gripped from the start alongside our hapless protagonist Ryland Grace, a middle school scientist who wakes in a spaceship and discovers he has to single-handedly save the world. He joins forces with Rocky, a giant blind spider-like alien.

The moment they pull off their mission and Rocky puts on his ‘best’ clothes to celebrate is a golden scene that made my cheeks ache from smiling. I found it to be one of the most original, clever, and funny books I’ve ever read. 

The whimsy and humor of this book make it an easy choice to round out an otherwise serious list! An engrossing story lurks behind the comedy, which is no doubt why this book has transcended generations and cultures to persist as a worldwide fan favorite.

The truth is that we have no idea what humanity’s first encounter with aliens will look like, even if Arthur Dent’s experience with the bureaucratic Vogons is a little more tongue-in-cheek than those in our more “serious” picks.

Progression fantasy is a young genre, and currently divides into a handful of different categories, the largest of which are LitRPGs and Cultivation fiction.

Dungeon Crawler Carl is almost universally praised as the best of the former.

I love it because it takes an impossible situation—Earth being transformed into a dungeon-delving murder reality show for the rest of the universe—and somehow injects equal mixes of humor and pathos.

I love that the main characters, the titular Carl and his cat, Donut, are the perfect emotional counterparts to the subgenre’s traditionally crunchy numbers… levels, skills, spells, and increasingly overpowered items all exist but don’t overshadow the essential humanity at the story’s center.

The prose is great, and the plot is even better.

This book takes the fish out of water trope I just spoke about in a whole different direction. In Vainqueur, it’s not so much a fish, as a hungry shark that finds itself out of its usual element. 

A dragon wakes up from a lengthy nap and finds that the whole world is now an RPG-style game. It can level up, gain abilities, and accept quests. Thankfully, it’s a bloody big dragon, which makes some of the quests a tad easier to complete.

The dragon really steals the show and behaves exactly as you’d expect a grumpy old murder machine might. The book has wonderful dialogue and a fresh perspective on some of the genre tropes. It’s a nice easy read, with the perfect amount of groveling minions.      

A very funny book based on the John Carpenter movie of the same name. It’s about the crew of the malfunctioning Dark Star, engaged in the suitably pointless mission of “destroying unstable planets.” Highlights include the alien shaped like a beach ball, and the philosophical bomb agonizing over its purpose in life – to blow or not to blow. Sadly, the book is out of print, although you might bag a second-hand copy. One of us (Corben) obtained a manky copy on the No. 47 bus as he made his way with his greyhound Professor Wagglesworth to the Catford Dog track in 1974. The Professor performed poorly that night – distracted by a frisky poodle in the crowd – so Corben read the book instead. It made him realise that life, unlike greyhound racing, is not to be taken seriously.

If you’ve gone through life thinking that a sprout can’t be funny, this book will convince you otherwise. Barry the Sprout is the star of the show, lodged in the head of lead character Will Starling. But the whole book is a joy. Highly inventive and very funny. It involves time travel, weird conspiracy theories, Queen Victoria, the Elephant Man, Jack the Ripper, the Brentford Snail Boy, and many more. 

Here's a little-known gem that is clever and witty, packed with funny incidents and terrible puns. It’s about downsizing consultant Graham Paint who owns the eponymous insect. Much to his inconvenience, the caterpillar (which, like its namesake cat, exists in a state of quantum uncertainty) starts spawning alternative realities, each with their own copy of Graham – causing havoc for him, and the police. The storyline has echoes of the Gwyneth Paltrow movie Sliding Doors, but is much funnier and smarter. Oh, and check out the book’s trailer on YouTube.

This is the second book in the Guards sequence, but it’s easy enough to start here. This detective story set in the sprawling, smelly metropolis of Ankh-Morpork, featuring dwarves, werewolves, and (occasionally) humans, is a laugh-out-loud and anarchic book, managing to be hugely joyous and page-turningly compelling at the same time. Insanely silly and utterly real, with characters so solid you can see (or in some cases, smell) them long after you turn the last page.