100 books like The Space Merchants

I think this book is a masterful work that offers insights into the human experience. Through its richly imagined worlds and characters, the story invites readers to ponder timeless questions about society, relationships, individuality, and the pursuit of a better world.

I liked exploring the two worlds in the story, one a society where individual achievement is overshadowed by the collective good, and another was a portrayal of capitalism with hierarchy and stark social divisions. The protagonist finds himself alienated from both worlds, unable to reconcile his ideals with the realities he encounters. 

I liked the way the story confronts fundamental questions about the nature of society and the individual's place within it.

As a librarian, I loved how books were deemed a threat in this work. Through fear-mongering and keeping people distracted by technology, people are imprisoned by ignorance without access to books. I particularly enjoyed the symbolism in the robotic murder dog—it can hunt down anyone and can find you anywhere.

Living under that level of technological threat searches for what it means to be human that much harder—but vital. But my favorite idea is that the knowledge we carry collectively has the power to save our humanity.

This is a captivating and thought-provoking novel set on a multi-generation starship traveling to another star. Robinson skillfully develops the characters' backgrounds and personalities.

I found the meticulous detail Robinson provides about the ship's design and operation particularly fascinating. The rotating artificial gravity, the precarious workings of the ship systems, and the ecological balance required to sustain life on the starship are described with such precision that Aurora feels like a real place.

The story takes unexpected turns, and through the struggles of the characters and the harsh realities of space colonization, he emphasizes that our home planet is irreplaceable and that it's a better choice to preserve it than to depend on the hope of life in outer space.

I liked this book because it's a collection of stories about unrelated people's exploits, real and imagined, as they work together to make their mark in a new frontier.

The stories portray amazing accounts of people ranging from the mundane to the supernatural. It's one of the last stories to describe Mars with a somewhat hospitable climate, and that doesn't matter.

The incredible storytelling of Ray Bradbury makes anything that his characters are doing always believable no matter where they are because he writes from the heart.

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.

Multidimensional books tend to focus on either the existence of higher and lower dimensions, or on parallel universes. The Dark Forest (book 3), like my novel, is one of very few that take the string theory approach rather than show parallel universes.

The Three-Body Problem is an epic three-novel series that takes you from the cultural revolution in the ’60s, all the way to…well, the end. There’s a lot of cryogenic freezing to get the main character through time. 

The final theme of the series, introduced in The Dark Forest, is the unfolding and collapsing of dimensions. In the first book, a radio telescope operator finds out that we aren’t alone. A battle with the alien species ensues, including a scene in the Panama Canal that convinced me to spend a few days visiting the modern marvel. It’s well worth the 1500+ pages.

While Neuromancer presents one of the most well realized examples of a lived-in future ever committed to ink, the origins of William Gibson’s Sprawl – a metastasizing concrete-and-neon megalopolis that has consumed the US eastern seaboard – can be found in the short stories he published between 1977 and 1984. Later collected in the anthology Burning Chrome, four of the stories – “Fragments of a Hologram Rose”, “Johnny Mnemonic”, “Burning Chrome” and “New Rose Hotel” – create the skeleton of a post-World-War-III future where corporations rule, life is cheap and technology is God. There’s actually a movie version of New Rose Hotel, and despite starring Willem Dafoe and Christopher Walken it’s even worse than Keanu Reeves’s Mnemonic.

I first read Pohl’s Jem when I was a kid, and his fatalistic, even cynical take on first contact and interstellar colonization, along with the works of Harlan Ellison, Philip K. Dick, and Ursula LeGuin, greatly informed my developing views on politics and society. A near-future Earth divided into three major power blocs discovers a world ripe for exploitation and populated by not one, but three, sentient species, It’s not long before each bloc is currying the favor of different species in order to set each against the other, with absolutely no one thinking beyond their own immediate needs or with any concern about the consequences of their actions.

Swipe Right for Murder is a thriller with LGBT themes that will gobble up every moment you can spare for reading. Set in 2019, the book nonetheless has a raucous, cyberpunk feel. Main character Aidan, through the use of a Grindr-style hook-up app on his senior Spring Break, stumbles into an unfortunate series of events that lead him into close contact with a domestic terrorist organization bent on killing homophobes. Swipe Right for Murder is a page-turner if there ever was one, and it’s fucking funny. Seriously, there are some legit laugh-out-loud moments in this book—generally a tough order for a written medium. If you’re looking for a smart thriller that is turned up to eleven at all points, then this book is an absolute must-read.

Neon Helix is probably the most cyberpunk book of my recommendations, at least in a classical sense. It’s set in a mega-city of the future and features mega corporations, rogue AI, clones, and some really crazy scientists. It’s a fast-paced story told from multiple perspectives and the first book in a series.