Love The Book of Phoenix? Readers share 100 books like The Book of Phoenix...

I like books that are about something. Frank Herbert created a sweeping world that uses religion, politics and personal relationships to build his story.

I love the diversity of the characters and the unusual places he creates. But ultimately, the book is about building a society and personal redemption. I like the way he weaves the social issues into a compelling narrative that makes us re-examine our worldview.

It's all about the unlikely alliance between a woman and her clone in this gripping revenge thriller.

Evelyn Caldwell learns that her husband Nathan is cheating on her when she discovers that he has stolen her cloning technology and replaced her with a more docile substitute. They work together to conceal Nathan's murder and preserve Evelyn's scientific reputation.

However, Evelyn discovers her clone standing over Nathan's body and crying, "It was self-defense." Its juicy premise raises eerie questions about love, justice, and the nature of identity.

I first read this book over 40 years ago when I was struggling to learn how to write fantasy for young readers. I loved it so much that it became a foundational text for me. Lloyd Alexander's gift for building characters that fairly leap off the page, characters that made me laugh but then broke my heart as they were forced to deal with painful decisions, gave me something to aspire to in my own writing.

The series grows in depth and complexity, and the final book makes me weep every time I read it. It provided one of my greatest joys as an elementary school teacher when I used all five volumes as a year-long reading text with a group of gifted fourth graders.

This tale of two African demigods bound together in a centuries-long exploitative relationship was a revelation to me. Wild Seed is an arresting allegory for slavery, eugenics, and dehumanization, but it’s also a large-hearted and sometimes tender work of fantasy. (Or is it science fiction?)

Several of Butler’s works—for example, Kindred and Parable of the Sower—deal directly with class and inequality. But nowhere does Butler handle those themes with greater artistry than in this book.

This book starts and ends with the story of Dr. Jiankui He, the infamous Chinese researcher responsible for the first CRISPR experiment resulting in genetically modified children.

It chronicles Dr. He’s “meteoric rise to fame” followed by his “dramatic fall from grace.”

In telling this story Kirksey, a cultural anthropologist, entertains the reader with details about interesting characters he meets and places he visits in his quest to both situate this debacle in relation to earlier efforts at genetic engineering and cell therapy in the United States and to confirm some of the contested details about what did or did not happen in China in the years leading up to this “first”.

Along the way, Kirksey lays bare salient facts about conflicts of interests among scientists, the corporate world’s vaunted pursuit of profit, and the ways in which nationalistic aspirations seed unhealthy competition.

Somewhat paradoxically, this treatise against genetic enhancement starts with the case of a deaf couple who want to have a deaf child.

This is a case I often discuss in exploring the difference between disease, disability, and diversity. Following on from this case description, Sandel asks, “Is it wrong to make a child deaf by design?” And what if the desired trait was not deafness but height, athletic prowess, health, or intelligence, and the aim was to gain a competitive advantage?

Would your answer be the same? In the pages that follow, Sandel builds a case against “reengineering our nature” grounded in an ethic of giftedness (i.e., a reverence for life as a gift).

He eschews the drive to mastery and insists that “[t]o appreciate children as gifts is to accept them as they come, not as objects of our design, or products of our will, or instruments of our… show more.

I walked into this expecting dinosaur horror and came away with science and intelligent social commentary. Dr. Malcolm has significantly more space on the written page to delight us with Chaos theory and criticisms of human arrogance, and I am here for it!

While Jurassic Park delivers on horror, death, and danger, it also manages to deliver some thoughtful themes that go deeper than “science is dangerous.” We explore the responsibility we have to keep the power of scientific advancement with experts operating with the temperance that expertise confers.

Thoughtful sci-fi like Jurassic Park must always come with a dose of how we maintain our humanity and navigate our relationship with the natural world as technological advancements flood in.

Butler is known for bringing a black, feminist, and queer perspective to science fiction, a genre of futuristic and outer-space storytelling that traditionally features white male protagonists.

But what really captivates me about this book, which is set in a post-apocalyptic future where human survivors are mated with their alien rescuers (really!), is the way it asks icky-yet-intensely-meaningful questions. What does it mean to “be human” in a future of genetic hybridity and gender fluidity? What does it mean to love a partner or children whose genetics and culture are radically different from your own? When is violence futile, and when is it the only way to be heard?

I’m pretty much obsessed with this book, and I promise that any reader who has thought deeply about what it means to be really different will love it too.

This work of fiction highlights the potential dangers of genetic engineering.

It invites the reader to imagine a world in which it is possible to genetically modify early-stage human embryos, making changes that will determine the life-trajectory of the newborn.

In this world, Dr. Saul Kramer, a geneticist, and the head of a successful IVF clinic, uses CRISPR technology not to correct disease-causing genes in unhealthy embryos, but rather to insert a gene for a fatal genetic disease into healthy embryos.

Children born of these genetically modified embryos die in the first year of life. Notably, this is not a whodunnit, but a morality tale framed around the question of whether Dr. Kramer is a murderer. 

I thoroughly enjoyed reading nine of Westerman's books, some of them twice. This is literary contemporary history. Aside from a place, a period, and a prism through which to look, Frank combines award-winning literary skills with a journalistic journey. His stories are both big and small, personal and universal. Here he follows a fascinating 20th-century journey of the so-called ‘most pure’ horses of Europe. Through that story, you will find yourself cantering through the nature versus nurture debate that defined much of Europe’s recent history. On top of all that, I also recognise his journey through life, from his studies to ‘development’ work to foreign journalism to literary non-fiction writing on the big issues at the people & places interface.