54 books like The Stars Are Legion

I couldn’t finish this list without including one of the most famous examples of pregnancy in science fiction.

Humanity comes face-to-face with an alien species, the Oankali, who use gene editing, cloning, and mating to refresh their gene pools. The focus is on Lilith, a black woman taken hostage by the aliens who must learn about their plans for her and strategize her responses.

I really appreciate the way Butler’s work manages to speak to the legacy of slavery, particularly through a scene where the aliens create the circumstances for Lilith to breed with a human man in aid of their experiments. Lilith’s refusal to succumb to this animalistic treatment confronts the legacy of breeding humans during slavery.

I find Lilith (like many of Butler’s other characters) a driven character who deals with outlandish situations and the potential invasion of her own body with a pragmatic determination that invites me,… show more.

The novel presents a range of archival material, including graphical elements. The main account has an objective restraint that reads almost like a scientific report, which makes it moving at times. The main character Bella develops rapidly from a child-like state into a mature woman and way her language and insight progresses is skillfully handled.

I found it fascinating how reasonable-sounding scientific ideas can become barbaric actions. The novel is multi-layered, with competing narratives and Bella undermining most of what appears in the Lanthimos film, Poor Things. In the end, I was left in a state of exhilarated confusion and went to read it all again. 

The unnamed protagonist of this book is a pregnant woman who has recently moved to the isolated Australian outback with her (pretty useless) husband. The couple have fled the city in part because of our narrator’s fear of a novel pandemic that is sweeping the land. As her pregnancy develops, skin cells replicating inside her body, the narrator fears that her fetus may harbour the virus.

This virus really speaks to my interest in difficult, gory pregnancies and births: cutis is an illness that causes the skin cells to hyperactively replicate, sealing over the body’s orifices and suffocating or starving its victims.

 While this book has a Wicker Man-style horror of small-town life, I particularly appreciate the way that its dystopian setting reflects and distills the anxieties that many women really experience during pregnancy. 

In this book, Doris Lessing tells the story of the Lovatts, a perfectly normal middle-class English family with four children and a seemingly idyllic life. The idyll is spoiled when the wife, Harriet, becomes pregnant with her fifth child.

The novel tells the story of the child's (Ben’s) life until he is in his teenage years, but the early scenes that describe Harriet’s difficult pregnancy and her foreboding that something is deeply wrong with her unborn child are the ones that I find particularly sinister.

Here, Lessing shows how pregnancy can be an experience that wreaks unpredictable consequences on the smooth functioning of life. 

So many times with tie-in novels, you have the issue of trying to predict what a fanbase wants while still trying to keep a story original. I’ve read a lot of tie-in novels that fail in this, and as a result, their stories fall flat and become hollow narratives. The Warhammer 40k universe has a long, rich, and storied history of lore. Sometimes, that lore boils down to “Space Marines are cool,” and that is as far as the depth of the worldbuilding goes. 

This book succeeds where many others do not. In this story, I got to see the effects of a universe that is dominated by war played out in the lives of these characters. Rather than a string of events between one fight to the next, I saw the toll that such an existence would have on the people who live it. It does this in a… show more.

The best book recommendation my dad has ever given me was The Forever War. I tend to find the shorter, pocket book sci-fi a bit rushed on details for my liking, but they’re entirely his jam, and The Forever War had such a unique setting I still became immersed.

It tickled all of the motifs I love most about 70’s science fiction: space is dark and cold and unforgiving. And what’s not to love about a dystopian military-industrial complex? Because of the setting, it is a time travel story in which the time traveling happens progressively throughout, which gave me the sense of a new type of adventure with every jump forward.

Reath Silas is a very relatable Jedi, though perhaps not the most heroic at first.

He deeply doesn’t want to leave the comfort of his home on Coruscant, especially for his first assignment in the outer rim. He would rather explore the Jedi archives and attend historiography. Maybe, like Anakin Skywalker, he too dislikes sand. But reluctantly he faces the challenge.

When his group’s ship is pulled out of hyperspace, they take refuge in an abandoned space station. Reath is thrust into a world of pirate looters, shady guild members, and a dark-side mystery concerning the station itself.

What lessons will this young padawan learn?

I downloaded the audiobook because Cara Gee reads it, and I am so glad I did! This military sci-fi novel completely undermines any sense of triumph or jingoism and will leave you thinking about it for a long time.

Dietz is fresh out of the academy and ready to fight in the war against Mars. As Dietz breaks through their conditioning and supposed insanity to uncover the truth, the ‘triumph’ of the war is undermined as the brutal reality becomes clear. Dietz is a fascinating character.

They sign up desperate for revenge, but things start unraveling from their first mission. This book is seriously mind-bending; like Dietz, I was unsure what was real and what wasn’t, and I fully empathized with them even if their actions weren’t always the most… er… well-advised. 

Parts of Gust Front hit home. I read this while living in the Appalachians, so seeing Cally preparing for an invasion in a remote valley in Georgia, and the subsequent fighting that takes place in and around the Appalachians, struck a nerve with me. If the worst happened, up to and including the alien invasion depicted here, would the mountains be the best place to hold out and resist? The scope of the novel covers many settings, including other familiar ones like Washington D.C., all of which ground the speculative premise of an alien invasion in a story that feels very real; something that any of us could be forced to live through.

Nothing about the Warhammer 40,000 universe says ‘funny’. The fact that it’s fans call it the ‘grimdark’ is a proud testament to this. I’ve read a lot of Warhammer books, but was surprised when I came across this series. It follows Ciaphas Cain, a Commissar who is trying to survive and find the cushiest job for himself in a universe of constant war, yet somehow, he constantly ends up being the hero.

This book really opened my eyes to the fact that you can humor even in the grittiest settings, and that just because a book is funny, it doesn’t mean it can’t be action-packed and have high stakes. Much of the humor comes from Cain’s futile attempts to avoid any sort of combat and save his own skin.