Here are 100 books that The Bees fans have personally recommended if you like
The Bees.
Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I have a weird imagination and care deeply about being kind in all areas of life. I think people, in general, need to be kinder to one another and to the earth. I find humanity to be too anthropocentric and dismissive of the intelligence of other creatures. The incredible complexity and interconnectedness of nature fascinate me, and I constantly look for connections between two seemingly disparate systems. Writing my book allowed me to put insects at the focal point of planetary control. It was an incredibly fun story to write.
I loved the nuanced solutions Robinson proposes in this book to fix the biggest problems of today. Although the book wasn’t my favorite in terms of plot, I appreciated Robinson’s work in detailing realistic solutions that meaningfully address climate change. It provoked me to really scrutinize what we are and are not doing to tackle rising global temperatures.
“The best science-fiction nonfiction novel I’ve ever read.” —Jonathan Lethem
"If I could get policymakers, and citizens, everywhere to read just one book this year, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future." —Ezra Klein (Vox)
The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, postapocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us. Chosen by Barack Obama as one of his favorite…
I used to love dystopian books, but recently, I’ve become increasingly interested in hopeful narratives. I’ve been a climate activist in a couple of movements, and I care deeply about the world, but with all the challenges and negativity we are facing, it’s easy to fall into despair. That’s why I think stories that show cooperation, community, respect for nature and each other, working for a better world, and making it happen are so important. We need those stories to get inspired to act instead of thinking that we’re all doomed anyway. They are also healing—a refuge for a tormented mind.
This is such a beautiful, gentle and cozy book that I couldn’t put it down. In this story, people were left with no choice but to completely rebuild their society, and they did something wonderful.
This book is like a breath of fresh air, like a quiet, healing journey that doesn’t rely on action—it’s an exploration, a celebration of nature, and society, and connection. It touched me in a profound way. It made me go outside to check if it was raining and stand with my bare feet in the grass, enjoying the coldness and softness of the sensation.
It's been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools; centuries since they wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again; centuries since they faded into myth and urban legend.
One day, the life of a tea monk is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honour the old promise of checking in. The robot cannot go back until the question of 'what do people need?' is answered.
But the answer to that question depends on who you ask, and how. They're going to need to ask it a lot.
My day job is as a sustainability academic, so it’s hard to escape
concern for our future and what we’re doing to our wonderful planet. I
seek refuge in writing fiction. For me, if I can write the solutions,
then maybe people will adopt them. But first and foremost, I love
fiction as an escape, so I write and seek out books that make me happy
and are filled with love and hope and exciting ideas to keep you turning
the page. I also run the Green Stories project which hosts free writing
competitions to help us imagine positive visions of a sustainable
society.
I love this book because it shows how we can save our lovely planet.
Each story has climate solutions at its heart. Some are nature-based like planting sea grass. Some are technical, such as bringing water to the desert and carbon capture. Audacious solutions include refreezing the Arctic.
Several focus on our political economy like switching from the GDP to a wellbeing index or citizen assemblies to ensure climate-friendly decision-making. Some are incredibly innovative such as giving the Ocean nation-status.
Genres range from romance to action, family drama to whodunit. There are 24 stories so something for everyone and each story links to a webpage where you can find out how to make them happen. It’s also great value.
A collection of inspiring, funny, dark, mysterious, tragic, romantic, dramatic, upbeat and fantastical short stories.
These 24 stories are written by a variety of authors, with the aim to inspire readers with positive visions of what a sustainable society might look like and how we might get there.
The stories are diverse in style, ranging from whodunnits to sci-fi, romance to family drama, comedy to tragedy, and cover a range of solution types from high-tech to nature-based solutions, to more systemic aspects relating to our culture and political economy.
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
My day job is as a sustainability academic, so it’s hard to escape
concern for our future and what we’re doing to our wonderful planet. I
seek refuge in writing fiction. For me, if I can write the solutions,
then maybe people will adopt them. But first and foremost, I love
fiction as an escape, so I write and seek out books that make me happy
and are filled with love and hope and exciting ideas to keep you turning
the page. I also run the Green Stories project which hosts free writing
competitions to help us imagine positive visions of a sustainable
society.
We may have visions of what a sustainable society might look like, but how could we possibly get there?
This story imagines a giant music festival which allows free access to those who need care and their carers and designs a care-based mini-society. But they love it so much, no one wants to go home when the music stops. So they don’t!
David Fell brings to this novel all the knowledge he has gained in his years working as a sustainability consultant, and packages it with engaging characters and an exciting plot.
Jo Castle, Londoner and thirty-something firefighter, wants to save the world by being the opposite of Jack Reacher. She starts with care – care for her friends and family, care for community, care for the planet. Together with best friend Miranda, step-brother Mike and ex-boyfriend Robert, Jo turns a giant music festival on an island in the River Thames into the living city of Visco. Visco is a ‘carnival of care’, a radical experiment that challenges the very bedrock of capitalism. The story of its emergence, and how it overcomes the Establishment, is a ray of hope in dark times.
I’m a novelist and game designer from Bangalore. I’ve been a lifelong reader of science fiction and fantasy. Growing up, I almost never encountered futures that included people like me—brown women, from a country that isn’t the UK/ US, and yet, who are in sync with the rapidly changing global village we belong to. Over the last decade, though, I've found increasing joy in more recent science fiction, in which the future belongs to everyone.The Ten Percent Thiefis an expression of my experiences living in dynamic urban India, and represents one of our many possible futures.
I picked this novel because, for lack of a better phrase, it’s too real. In an entirely believable and horrifying future lies Silicon Isle, an island made of trash. It’s where the world dumps all its electronic waste, for generations of poor, marginalized people to sort through, while pollutants make the tiny world they call home uninhabitable and hostile.
It also happens to be where a powerful biological weapon is hidden, unknowingly discovered by Mimi, one of the novel’s protagonists. It transforms her. Class disparities come to the fore, leading to revolution. This is classic cyberpunk, refreshingly set in a future outside the UK/ US, translated from the original Chinese by Ken Liu.
She's a 'waste girl', a scavenger picking through towering heaps of hazardous electronic detritus. Along with thousands of other migrant workers, she was lured to Silicon Isle, off the southern coast of China, by the promise of steady work and a better life.
But Silicon Isle is where the rotten fruits of capitalism and consumer culture come to their toxic end. The land is hopelessly polluted, the workers utterly at the mercy of those in power. And now a storm is gathering, as ruthless local…
I am a young adult fantasy author and paranoid survivalist. I have spent years curating items for my end-of-days go-bag, and nothing gives me greater pleasure than hanging out in universes that are about to go bang!
I have a twelve-story climbing rope in my storeroom in case the building catches fire. There’s a fire blanket in there and a go-bag, too. Talking about bomb shelters does something to my blood. Preparations excite me; maybe it’s a competitive streak. When I come face-to-face with disaster, I want the groundwork taken care of so I can focus on what’s important, like grabbing my children, our passports, and snacks for the road.
Reading this book was like living through the nightmare of my dreams. Communities came together, scrounging for food and water. Disaster after disaster was ingeniously avoided with other people’s refuse, raw brain power, and the occasional bullet. Man was pitted against man, and the only prize was survival. It was everything I needed to get a true appreciation of the bricks and mortar surrounding me and the covers…
Set in the UK in the immediate aftermath of a mysterious illness which swept the country and left millions dead, the series follows the trials facing a reluctant hero, Dan, and the group he forms around him. They must battle the elements, find sufficient supplies and equipment to survive, and protect themselves against the most destructive force on the planet: other people. Banding together those he found along the way, he has to fight to keep them safe. To keep them alive. To survive.
This climate fiction novel follows four generations of women and their battles against a global giant that controls and manipulates Earth’s water. Told mostly through a diary and drawing on scientific observation and personal reflection, Lynna’s story unfolds incrementally, like climate change itself. Her gritty memoir describes a near-future Toronto…
I’ve always loved to dip into speculative worlds as a way of gaining a new perspective on conundrums in the real world. In the real world, so many of us are plagued by concerns or frustrations having to do with connection and commitment, and those concerns transcend whatever place or moment we’re living in. So, by dropping those concerns into a surreal setting, I get another way to tussle with them.
As a writer who’s interested in what comes next—after climate change, after fascism—I love how Diane Cook uses broad brush strokes to show us the future, without going into too much history or detail.
Instead of hyper-focusing on what the future holds for us, Cook directs our attention to one small, outlier community that’s doing weird things. This is a great technique: she paints a picture of a future world by painting a picture of a fringe group that’s trying desperately to be different from the main one.
A mother-daughter drama drives the plot forward, and we learn about the rules and ruminations of the fringe group as the characters sort out their power struggles.
I am an Associate Lecturer and Adjunct in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta. After being a piano teacher, working in communications for an NGO, and heading up the children’s department at a public library, I returned to university. While in graduate school, I underwent treatments for breast cancer, leading me into researching and teaching medical narratives, while focusing on works by breast cancer survivors. Introduced to graphic literature by a colleague, I began exploring a whole new world of literature. I now teach courses on graphic literature: memoirs, histories, speculative fiction, and the occasional comic.
This compelling graphic novel adaptation captures Butler’s Afrofuturist science fiction in its dark-toned palette and relentless movements in and across panels, with pages crammed with characters traveling within and outside of an urban enclave surrounded by gangs and criminals. The red of apocalypse and the California desert saturate pages, signaling current and immanent violence and danger and a landscape in environmental crisis. Through it all, Lauren reflects on how a new vision is required to liberate the oppressed without reproducing the conditions that brought it about. Amidst the bleak and violent scenes, we read excerpts from her Earthseed journaling of an unfolding religion where God is Change.
A futuristic world portrays the ongoing struggles of Black Americans for equity, racial justice, and economic and cultural futures. Its spirituals and Black culture form a new platform for Lauren’s exodus to a new land, a journey fraught with danger and difficult decisions,…
The graphic-novel adaptation of Octavia E. Butler's groundbreaking dystopian novel, Parable of the Sower, the follow-up to Kindred, a #1 New York Times bestseller
In this graphic-novel adaptation of Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower by Damian Duffy and John Jennings, the award-winning team behind Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation,
the author portrays a searing vision of America's future. In the year
2024, the country is marred by unattended environmental and economic
crises that lead to social chaos. Lauren Olamina, a preacher's daughter
living in Los Angeles, is protected from danger by the walls of her
gated community. However,…
My mom always read creepy paperbacks and left them around for me to gawk at the covers but not actually able to read the words inside. I probably started with all the Nancy Drew mysteries and then switched to Stephen King (Carrie, The Shining, Misery, etc.), Flowers in the Attic books by V.C. Andrews, Jaws by Peter Benchley, and anything I could get my hands on! I’m a devoted fan of all creepy and scary books! I’ve never been bored reading this genre, whether it’s adult or YA and that is what I think reluctant readers need–creepy page-turners!
This book is creepy! When girls are sixteen they are sent away for a year, into the woods, to get rid of their ‘magic’. It is called their Grace Year, and it is very extreme, and nothing fun about it. This story has a creepy atmosphere, and creepy old men trying to choose their innocent teenage brides (if those brides make it back from the journey!). There are some sick and twisted death scenes, and romance, which of course I love a little romance in all the creepy stories I read.
The Instant New York Times Bestseller! Kim Liggett's The Grace Year is a speculative thriller in the vein of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Power.
Survive the year.
No one speaks of the grace year. It’s forbidden.
In Garner County, girls are told they have the power to lure grown men from their beds, to drive women mad with jealousy. They believe their very skin emits a powerful aphrodisiac, the potent essence of youth, of a girl on the edge of womanhood. That’s why they’re banished for their sixteenth year, to release their magic into the wild so they can…
This book is set in Montauk, under looming threat from a warming climate and overdevelopment. Now outsider Clancy, a thirty-six-year-old claims adjuster scarred by his orphan childhood, has inherited an unexpected legacy: the power to decide the fate of Montauk’s last parcel of undeveloped land. Everyone in town has a…
Apocalyptic fiction is my go-to genre and a theme that got me started in my own writing. I love the human stories of struggle in an aftermath that encompasses the world. There is truth in apocalyptic fiction – and a warning to us all. I've been writing since I was a child, creating stories and comics of my own, binding them and circulating them to family and friends. I went to school for visual arts, where I thought my passion was taking me, but returned to writing as my main creative outlet. As of 2022, I've 14 books published. Creativity keeps me sane, and without it I'm not me.
This book has a unique take on the apocalyptic genre and the interest the story and characters offered.
In old New York, living in the tunnels of the ancient subway system, the book documents what might happen to those left to fend for themselves in a city whose social and political construct collapsed due to a violent strain of some virus. (Sound familiar?)
The way the female lead, Deuce, discovers this new world where the sun is a threat and the wide-open spaces, claustrophobic, is a testament to the way the author captured the character’s innocence. Aguirre expertly relates Deuce’s apprehension when discovering anything could be different from the darkness she’d grown up in.
Ann Aguirre's thrilling young adult novel Enclave is the story of two young people in an apocalyptic world--facing dangers, and feelings, unlike any they've ever known.
New York City has been decimated by war and plague, and most of civilization has migrated to underground enclaves, where life expectancy is no more than the early 20's. When Deuce turns 15, she takes on her role as a Huntress, and is paired with Fade, a teenage Hunter who lived Topside as a young boy. When she and Fade discover that the neighboring enclave has been decimated by the tunnel monsters--or Freaks--who seem…
