100 books like The Handmaid's Tale

J.R.R. Tolkien's masterful storytelling is unmatched, and The Lord of the Rings weaves together moral dilemmas and profound philosophical ideas seamlessly, encouraging me to contemplate the nature of power, the importance of preserving the natural world, and the significance of individual choices.

The book's themes of heroism, friendship, sacrifice, and the struggle between good and evil resonate deeply. In addition, each of his characters feels like an aspect of oneself; the introspection it inspires is brilliant!

The Lord of the Rings instills a sense of wonder, ignites the imagination, and imparts timeless wisdom, which heavily transformed my perspective on life, my values, and my understanding of the human condition.

This is a straight whisky of a dystopian novel. The prose is stark, all bones, no flesh, and the story fizzes along with a simple ‘journey’ plot. What you get along the way is skeletal poetry, honed so finely, so sparsely, so skillfully.

The prose is stripped of ornamentation, floridity, anything that detracts from the deep magnetism of this father and son’s quest through a dystopian wilderness. You end the novel breathless, praying this scenario never comes to pass, and in awe of McCarthy’s storytelling skills.

This is a multiplayer chess game, each side with their own agenda. Some play for love, others for revenge, others just to survive. 

It’s a treat to cheer for one side, only to find out we chose wrong. No side is pure good, and no side is pure evil. They’re all just people, and it’s impossible to cheer for only one person when in each chapter, someone else does something amazing or terrible.

The best part about this book is the wisdom. Every character clings to their own principles, and the author chooses the best words to describe these principles. Like, a dwarf who’s principle is “Never forget what you are. Wear it like armor and it can never be used to hurt you.” 

Words to live by.

This is the grandmother of all great utopian fiction, my favorite science-fiction novel by my favorite science-fiction author, and the number-one source of inspiration for my book.

The novel opens on a moon (not ours) where a utopian anarchist society has long existed, but is now under threat from a host of antagonists on the mother planet. The novel is masterful because it is both enormous in scope (covering entire economies and political structures) but also extremely intimate (following one man, one relationship, one family).

The novel does not have to do with the climate crisis, or Earth, but I’m including it here because of the role it played in my writing; when I set out to write a climate crisis utopia, The Dispossessed was absolutely instrumental, offering me a blueprint on how to build tension and make a utopia personal. Most of all, it will give you so much… show more.

Well, I suppose a few words have been devoted to Dune already, but I’m going to chime in!

I read Dune the first time as a teenager, and found some of it (Paul’s adventures, everything to do with Jessica) exciting and engrossing. On the other hand, some of it I couldn’t puzzle out—mostly politics. Now, that’s my favorite part! Honestly, I got my first and most vital lesson in world building from Dune, and it remains a huge influence on my writing.

What does it smell like, this new world? What happens if you get caught outside in a storm? What do your clothes look like and do they mark you as an outsider? What do you eat and when? And so on, ad infinitum. And I loved the quotes that open the chapters, so much that I created my own book-within-a-book just so I could similarly quote it.

I’m awed by Chinese sci-fi author Liu Cixin’s imaginative daring in depicting barely conceivable challenges to humanity. Cixin takes us from a China making first contact with an alien civilization through an increasingly bewildering series challengings into a barely comprehensible future.

Humanity has faced some nasty surprises of late. Cixin’s series is a breathtakingly imagined depiction of futures in which the real challenges are not those we’ve been expecting and preparing for, but barely imagined ones. One of the themes of my book is that we must make the most of our species’ imaginative resources if we are to cope with the future’s surprises. If humanity follows the path of radical enhancement we’re going to have to prepare for a lot of the crazy weirdness described by Cixin.

Netflix is releasing a series based on the novel. Please let them capture some of the craziness of Cixin’s imagination.

In the dystopian future that Bradbury creates, technology has eliminated the need for books.

We are not smarter in this future without history or literature, in fact, we are dumber, relying on meaningless entertainment to fill the intellectual void created by the written word’s eradication. Many successful science fiction authors are masters of the craft of writing, but Bradbury is on another level.

His stark vision of the future is propelled by ordinary characters living in extraordinary times, with each setting painted with beautiful prose that is both prophetic and thought provoking. The Dewey Decimal System has no hold on where one can find literature in a bookstore, nor do the critics.

For me speculative fiction is about twisting one aspect of the real world, and then playing with the consequences. I love the way that Philip K Dick does this.

Some of his ideas seem absurd, but as a reader you quickly buy into them. This is not a traditional crime novel in any sense, but is about a bounty hunter tracking down escaped androids. As he confronts questions about his own humanity, it raises ethical issues for the reader as to what it is to be human.

Like all Dick’s works it is clever, entertaining, and thought-provoking.

This is the book that got me into Science Fiction in the first place and it remains, perhaps, my favorite novel. The setting is a near-future dystopian society where a subculture of young, roving gangs control the streets through extraordinarily violent antics (ultra-violence). This violent behavior is enhanced by “milk plus,” a drink laced with synthetic drugs available at the Korova Milk Bar, which is where we first encounter our main character, Alex, a 15-year-old gang leader.

When Alex is arrested for murder, he is selected to undergo an experimental therapy (The Ludovico Technique) designed to wean him off violent behavior forever, after which his sentence will be commuted. During these treatments, he is injected with (yet another) drug called Serum 114. This drug induces extreme nausea while he is made to watch horribly violent films. Utterly changed, Alex is released back onto the streets to a world in which… show more.

This book is a mix of memoir and advice, taking you inside the life, mind, and writing processes of one of the most successful fiction writers of our time. It’s an oldie-but-a-goodie, having come out in 2000, but the advice on craft is timeless.

Much like Everybody Writes, this book also serves as a great case study in making your writing distinctive and leaning into your lived experiences when you write. Admittedly, I’m not a big fan of the horror genre, but I’d wager that this quick read is almost as compelling and thrilling as many of his other works.