59 books like Sundiver

Okay, I’ve only read this book once, but I can tell you I’ll be reading it again. It’s that good.

It's a classic amnesia story. The hero wakes up from a coma and has no recollection of who he is. Over the course of the story, he discovers he’s a middle school science teacher. And he’s in a spaceship. Alone. And he may happen to be humanity’s only hope to survive.

Wow! Talk about a new spin on the amnesia trope. I’m rooting for Ryland Grace from the jump. No matter how crazy bad it gets, and it gets bad, our hero never loses his sense of humor. I laughed out loud many times. I loved the science, and I dug the author’s writing style.

What responsibility does mankind have towards the universe and itself? What sort of responsibility do we have towards them, especially when actual humans are on the brink of extinction?

A book like this makes me think about a lot of abstract (and perhaps pretentious) philosophy. Do humans have a responsibility towards their own species or even the universe? By extension, what is the qualitative nature of a human? If we regress as a society, does that diminish our value? And what if there are space spiders who become intelligent beings? What sort of responsibility do we have towards them, especially when actual humans are on the brink of collapse?

I think what stuck with me most was the lesson at the end. (Which I won’t spoil)

In Seveneves the crises start coming and never stop coming.

The sudden, inexplicable destruction of the Moon and the resultant catastrophic rain of debris destroys habitability on Earth. A small population of refugees escapes into space to keep the flame of humanity alight.

Naturally, the inhospitality of interplanetary space and conflicting factions of survivors plunges the journey into resource depletion, rampant cancer, attempted coups, and a population bottleneck, but I found that the ending concludes a surprising story of human connection, even when the definition of human has radically changed. 

This is a harder-SF book that deals with the near-term search for life in our solar system. What I found great about Landau’s writing is that everything seems incredibly realistic, well thought out, and researched. The life that is found is not a carbon copy of our own (hint, hint), and has come through an altogether different evolutionary pathway. This book made me want to go back to university and study anything that would get me into space.

Isaac Asimov rarely wrote about aliens, but this Hugo and Nebula award-winning novel contains an astounding thought experiment, not only imagining a truly alien species but placing them in a different universe with different physical laws from our own.

I first read this novel as a teenager and was blown away by Asimov’s ability to make me understand and care about the fate of such vastly different alien creatures that possessed three distinct sexes and derived their life energy from photosynthesis.

The fact that the novel inextricably links the fate of these creatures with the fate of our own universe gave me a greater appreciation of how truly diverse life can be. A fact–along with the lessons I learned from the other novels listed here–that continues to inform my own writing on aliens and alien cultures. 

This book sat on my parent's bookshelf when I was a child, and I would sporadically remove it and read it at various stages of my life. As an adult, I returned to it when I had three kids of my own. It reminds me how important family is and how fleeting childhood is. Angela learns this the hard way in my own book, and I pictured her reading this book after her children had been stolen from her. As I was writing, it always left me in tears.

This series is set 6 million years in the future. In a universe entirely peopled by humanity and various iterations of human evolutions. Only one of which seems to be immune to the inevitable failure of their society that plagues literally every other outpost of humanity in existence. This world is rich, layered, and complex. It makes you wonder about what it means to be human and makes you fear. It definitely makes you fear. Shatterlings, man just typing the word makes me clench my teeth. I enjoyed this book and loved the rich world and vastness of the thought put into the creation of a universe that is empty but full at the same time. If you’ve made it this far down my list and have liked the others so far this is definitely in your lane.

Oh, what’s not to love? Space travel, poetry writing aliens, a criminal galactic president, the end of the world, a depressed robot … this book has it all, and I reread it (and the other 4 volumes in the trilogy, yes, trilogy) every year or so.

This is a fun escape, I discovered this volume as a kid, fell in love with it, and it’s my favorite book still to this day all these centuries later.

I loved the complex plot structure and the moral questions!

Earth discovers a sentient civilization with the potential to surpass our own. But the aliens are trapped in a solar system that they cannot escape without Earth’s faster-than-light technology. How should Earth respond? 

What would I do in that situation? 

Partially because I credit Jack for inspiring me to give my own fiction writing one more try when I decided to retire from sports writing. Having read this book and being hooked on the entire series, I read about his life’s journey and saw many similarities to mine. As for the book itself, the thought of how future archaeologists would approach their craft on a galactic scale, and how solving ancient mysteries could impact current events so, really captured my imagination.