Fans pick 78 books like The Dark and Other Love Stories

I like to think I’m pretty good at guessing where a book is going to go—this is not the case with Gideon the Ninth. Every time I thought I had a grip on what was going on and where we were going, it took a turn. Every time I thought I had an idea of how I felt about a character, new lore dropped, and I fell in love (or in hate, or in a complicated love/hate thing that I have yet to figure out).

By the time I finished, I was torn between picking up the second book in the series to learn what happened next or rereading the first just to see how different it would be once I had a better understanding of the book.

The Merry Spinster falls into my big bucket of fairytale retelling faves, but it hardly sticks to tradition: rather than simply following old plots, Lavery draws on the tone and style of classic fairy tales to create a gender-warped world where daughters use he/him pronouns and mermaids are sort of, but distinctly not, girls. Even better, the playful attitude towards gender now seems to foreshadow Lavery’s own coming out and transition, both occurring after he published this book—something that fills me with a special kind of trans-author love. Reading this for the first time, I had the sensation of slipping pleasantly into an utter dreamworld of gender/sexuality beauty, like a warm bath: I recommend you fall in, too.

With her singular art style and effortless storytelling skill, Emily Carroll has long been a favorite of mine. When I Arrived at the Castle is a tour de force in erotic horror, comic artistry, and, yes, a very complicated catgirl x vampiress relationship. This is one of those books I am shocked even exists, so thoroughly does it cater to my deepest desires: lush shots of catgirls in bathtubs, peeks at vampiresses through their bedroom keyholes, metaphors so subtle I always find something new when I reread. Carroll outdoes herself with suspense, sexuality, and a sexy red-black-and-grey limited color palette.

As a friend sputtered to me over a voice call: “I don’t understand. It’s free to read online; where is everybody?!” 

I agree wholeheartedly. O Human Star is that rare breed: a webcomic taken up over a decade ago, thoroughly plotted from the start, executed with masterful grace and gravitas by an author who loved it enough to do it justice. While executing this story of gay and trans self-understanding, Delliquanti themself realized they were trans, so the pronouns in my (signed!!) copies are different based on when they came out. Finding even a well-written cis gay man was hard in 2012, let alone such a deeply loving story about the entire LGBT community—and all that is to say nothing of the robots. Trans robots FTW!

Set in the near future, this novel imagines that the Americans and Chinese are racing to get to Mars. Meanwhile, a group of teenagers team up with an astronaut forced to retire in disgrace. One of the teens has invented a new type of drive that might just allow them to beat both governments to Mars. The book is fast-paced, fun, and shows how a team can come together to solve a problem, without ignoring the very real dangers of space travel. It also gives a nod to how technology developed for space travel can help us right here on Earth.

For someone who’s read every book in the Hornblower and Aubrey-Maturin series, it’s hard to find an age-of-sail book that has anything truly new to add.

Or so I thought until I picked up this book. It asks the question, what if Jack Aubrey could have sailed a wooden frigate to a Barsoomian version of Mars? The obvious answer, of course (and the one in this book) is that Britain would have extracted every plank of Marswood, ounce of Marsspice, and bag of Marstatoes it could get its imperialistic little hands on.

That’s Arabella’s world, where cannons boom in the interplanetary air currents, and spaceships are driven by sail power. As a fan of both sea stories and space operas, I’m there for it.

While The Directorate follows a fairly typical path for sci-fi thrillers, its characters are what stand out. The Earth and human colonies on the moon and Mars have united after years of war and created one military/police force. Lieutenant Theresa Gannon is a loyal, young officer suddenly thrust into stardom as the person who foiled a terrorist attack. But as a broiling rebellion heats up and Gannon is now rubbing shoulders with generals and politicians, she starts questioning where her loyalties truly lie. 

"The One Who Waits," one of my favorite stories in this collection, would be regarded more commonly as science fiction, as it takes place during an Earth expedition to Mars. But Ray Bradbury’s story also pioneers the classic horror trope of a small group of people falling one by one to a mysterious creature they cannot see—and with a means of disguise highly imaginative, beautifully written, and fundamentally terrifying. Bradbury is a phenomenal writer and it’s difficult to recommend any one story without feeling certain you’ve dropped the ball in not recommending another--you really can't go wrong with this entire collection--but the quick, clever, nuanced "The One Who Waits" is one of the best sci-fi/horror hybrids ever written.

Robert Zubrin is the foremost authority on how to get to Mars, and in addition to his engineering expertise, he is one of the most prominent advocates of colonizing it. This classic book, now in its updated 25th Anniversary edition, should be read by everyone interested in the future of humankind. It contains more technical detail about space travel than some people will care to learn, but that can be skimmed; the section about colonization, and the concluding chapter explaining why going to Mars is important, are what I chose it for. In Zubrin's opinion and my own, Mars is "the door to an open future, a new frontier on a new world, a planet that can be settled, the beginning of humanity's career as a spacefaring species."

Be transported to Mars in this simply told yet factual history of the Red Planet.

You’ll discover the weather, the atmosphere, what it’s like to walk amidst the dusty clay ground and what it would be like to traverse it via a rover. But from that point, the author conjectures how Mars came to be in its place in our solar system.

Highly readable for all ages. A necessity if you think you’d want to move there someday.