Fans pick 78 books like The First Men in the Moon

I recently re-read this book, and it returned me at once to the joy and strangeness of the first time I read it.

Lewis offers up the theory that perhaps what we know in this world as myth and archetype exists in reality on other planets. The book brings that thought to vivid life. It detonates all the power and perplexity of the first chapters of "Genesis" and replays "Paradise Lost" on the floating blissful islands of Venus.

Though the endnote is one of glorious joy, few have been as good at depicting evil as Lewis was. Written at the height of the horrors of the Second World War, the Un-Man has haunted my nightmares for much of my life.

No book has had a bigger influence on me as a person or a writer than this one. I suppose a lot of hoopy froods could say the same. It’s an adventure on a galactic scale, and yet, at its core, it’s just about a guy who wants to go home and have a cup of tea.

It’s a brilliantly funny satire and full of jokes and moments I’ll never forget. All four books in the series are amazing, and I’ve re-read them countless times. The fifth and final book is a downer worth skipping. 

Though I admire her classic work, The Left Hand of Darkness, it’s The Word For World Is Forest that most lingers in the mind.

Ursula Le Guin worried that the book was too simple and that its portrait of the mad colonialist soldier, Captain Davidson, was too unshaded a vision of militarist evil. Well, perhaps. However, men like Davidson can be found in equally brutal forms in accounts of the European invasion of the Americas or in Roger Casement’s report on the Belgians in the Congo.

But it is the otherworldly Selver who possesses my imagination, that archetypal ‘little green man,’ that strange new god of a person, poised between the innocent world he seeks to protect and the violence he must unleash to ensure its survival.

It was Star Trek, Star Wars, and, most of all, Doctor Who that first made me fall in love with science fiction.

Some will think it an odd choice to include this novelization of Terry Nation’s television story, The Genesis of the Daleks, but Terrance Dicks is a much-underrated writer, and this portrait of war-devastated Skaro offers a fantastic image of humanity and inhumanity. Just as much as C. S. Lewis in Perelandra, the book has the Nazis on its mind, and the bunker where Davros creates his army of autonomous half-machine warriors replays the Berlin bunker where Hitler awaited the end.

In the midst of it all, the Doctor himself stands for goodness, for good humor, for compassion–a compassion that even includes at the climax of the book, the Daleks themselves. Aged ten, the Doctor was to me an image of what it might be to… show more.

This is one of my all-time favourite books I used to read to my children at bedtime.

It has all the beauty of a completely stylized, detailed, and yet seemingly believable world both on earth and on the moon, yet includes aliens! I think the marriage of story and pictures works perfectly, with the reader finding aliens on every page, seemingly unbeknown to the writer!

It makes for fantastic squeals of delight as children find aliens, more seeming to appear on each consecutive read. I think it’s a great book to let the imagination run as well as stimulating conversations about what really might be on the moon. Brilliant!

The title pretty much speaks for itself—I mean, who wouldn’t want to have their birthday party on the Moon? And what would it be like? This book makes the perfect birthday gift (or anytime gift!) for any child questioning what it’s like on the Moon. The reader discovers what it’s like to swing at a pinata in low gravity, make moon-angels, and discover what happens to candles and balloons in Moon’s atmosphere. There are tons of facts about space woven throughout the book, as well as a glossary of terms at the end.

When NASA’s manned spaceflight program began, engineers focused on technology to launch men, sustain them in orbit, and eventually take them to the Moon and back. But U.S. Presidents approved the program to improve America’s image, not for scientific purposes. They wanted to counter the successive shocks of the USSR’s first artificial satellite and first person in space. This wasn’t about bragging rights, but to deter emerging nations from choosing communism over democracy. NASA launches welcomed media and US astronauts were sent abroad, guided by the State Department. They gave unscripted speeches, so listeners could relate to them as regular folks. After John Glenn orbited Earth, his Friendship 7 capsule went on tour, drawing 4 million visitors in Bombay alone. Operation Moonglow explains the unspoken politics that drove early NASA.

Haynes Manuals: they’re not just for cars anymore. Haynes also publishes books dedicated to the technical details of planes you’ll never own or service, and spacecraft you’ll never fly in. They’re detailed, they’re technical, and they’re geek gold. With a million color pictures and cutaway diagrams, and text crammed with comprehensive engineering details, the Haynes' Apollo 13 volume is a perfect companion to my Woods pick, or a great standalone in getting literally beneath the skin of the Apollo spacecraft and seeing exactly how all the moving parts worked. By all means buy the Haynes' Apollo 11 Manual too (I did), but I think this one has the edge in terms of technical depth–and you obviously get the full backstory of this aborted and almost disastrous Lost Moon mission too.

The Face of the Moon was the most important lunar book of the 20th century and perhaps of all time. Ralph Baldwin was an astronomer who studied stars, but while waiting to give public lectures at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium in 1941 he became fascinated by huge photos of the Moon on the planetarium’s walls. Baldwin saw that craters were everywhere, from tiny ones to giants hundreds of miles wide that had gouged surrounding terrain and ejected bright streamers of debris in all directions.

During World War 2 he recognized that myriads of craters from the Allied bombardment that had devasted France and Germany were tiny versions of what he saw on the Moon. The Moon’s craters were not volcanoes as commonly believed, they formed by explosions of projectiles – asteroids and comets. After the war, Baldwin investigated the physics of crater formation by setting off dynamite charges along the sandy… show more.

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon drew me in with its beautiful illustrations and glimpse into the rich mythologies of China.

Minli, a poor girl, lives where Fruitless Mountain and Jade River meet and like Haroun, has a storyteller father. When she spends two copper coins on a talking goldfish, it tells her how to find the Old Man on the Moon and change her family’s fortune. Minli sets off on her quest in the company of a dragon who cannot fly and discovers that good fortune means more than riches.

A delightful fable of friendship and family, with stories from Chinese folklore embedded within the main narrative.