Here are 100 books that The Sunlit Man fans have personally recommended if you like
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I used to love dystopian books, but recently, I’ve become increasingly interested in hopeful narratives. I’ve been a climate activist in a couple of movements, and I care deeply about the world, but with all the challenges and negativity we are facing, it’s easy to fall into despair. That’s why I think stories that show cooperation, community, respect for nature and each other, working for a better world, and making it happen are so important. We need those stories to get inspired to act instead of thinking that we’re all doomed anyway. They are also healing—a refuge for a tormented mind.
The book offers an in-depth exploration of how an anarchist, anti-capitalist society without money or government would work and juxtaposes it against a more familiar, wasteful, capitalist world. It's thought-provoking and can be a great tool for self-exploration because this world isn’t easy to live in and has its own challenges. Even though it took me a long time to get into the story, once I did, I was fascinated by all the details. It's unlike other stories. It offers ideas that don't often get explored in speculative fiction, and it left me with a lot to think about.
One of the very best must-read novels of all time - with a new introduction by Roddy Doyle
'A well told tale signifying a good deal; one to be read again and again' THE TIMES
'The book I wish I had written ... It's so far away from my own imagination, I'd love to sit at my desk one day and discover that I could think and write like Ursula Le Guin' Roddy Doyle
'Le Guin is a writer of phenomenal power' OBSERVER
The Principle of Simultaneity is a scientific breakthrough which will revolutionize interstellar civilization by making possible instantaneous…
I have always been fascinated with morally grey or complex characters. For me, the sign of a great novel is one where you find yourself talking about the characters as if they were real people you know. I want to experience something when I read, and characters that are flawed, imperfect, or morally grey have always intrigued me because they can take me to places I haven’t (or wouldn’t!) go myself. And, of course, they provide ample grounds for fun discussions with my friends! Sci-fi apocalyptic fiction is fertile ground for such characters, so I’ve tried to pick books you may not have heard of. I hope you like them!
This was a book club choice, and as soon as I finished it, I bought the other two books in the trilogy. I literally couldn’t put them down! Another post-apocalypse for this list, this time, the story is told through the memories of Jimmy/Snowman. But make no mistake, the novel is about Crake, a brilliant, lonely, and terrifying young man.
As Jimmy tries to recover his past, shadowed by the gentle, green-skinned ‘children of Crake,’ he recalls the events leading up to the end of humanity. This is very much a mystery, so I must be careful what I reveal, but if you are all about misguided genius and hubris, you will adore this novel. Needless to say, with an author like Atwood, the writing is superb.
By the author of THE HANDMAID'S TALE and ALIAS GRACE
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Pigs might not fly but they are strangely altered. So, for that matter, are wolves and racoons. A man, once named Jimmy, lives in a tree, wrapped in old bedsheets, now calls himself Snowman. The voice of Oryx, the woman he loved, teasingly haunts him. And the green-eyed Children of Crake are, for some reason, his responsibility.
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Praise for Oryx and Crake:
'In Jimmy, Atwood has created a great character: a tragic-comic artist of the future, part buffoon, part Orpheus. An adman who's a sad man; a jealous…
Ever since reading Heir to the Empire (Timothy Zahn), I’ve been fascinated by science fiction stories with amazing characters and intriguing concepts. I love finding a new story, especially one that isn’t being talked about, and falling into that world. I still get lost in the worlds of the Deathgate Cycle and Rose of the Prophets because they introduced me to concepts and places I’d never imagined or thought to imagine before reading them. I crafted a world and characters both familiar and alien because of these influences and I’m still drawn to them when I start a new book no one is talking about, like those on this list.
From the moment I first began listening to the audiobook, I fell in love with this story. I was all in the moment Ryland Grace stumbled through answering the question “What is 2 plus 2?” The layering of the story, the threat to Earth concept, the educational presentation of very high-level scientific concepts to an audience of all ages, and the way Andy Weir made this reader feel so many emotions over a rock just keep drawing me back to it.
I literally just finished another listen less than a month ago and already want to go back to a story. I still don’t see many people talking about it. And the ending? Every story has its own perfect dismount landing, and this one nailed it.
Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish.
Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.
All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.
His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through…
A hundred years in the future, in a world where technologically enhanced bodies are valued above organic ones, Complete Life Management (CLM) is selling perfection in the form of the latest and greatest bionic model, the Apogee. As an elite runner and inadvertent spokesperson for the humanism movement, NYPD Detective…
If you regard science fiction, fantasy, and horror as throwaway literature, think again. It is within such tales that the contest between good and evil is given center stage, wherein heroic acts are celebrated, and virtue discussed in all its many permutations. I would call speculative fiction a worthy successor to the medieval morality play, a dramatic form that used allegorical characters to teach moral lessons. To wit—stories are an instrument of culture, a way to promote common values and an important activity for any civilization that intends to stick around. You won’t find an abundance of this vibe in ‘serious’ fiction—and when you do, it’s not as much fun.
Let us move toward the light, shall we, into the realm of satire and farce—and set aside for a moment the profoundly significant intentions of the author. At least long enough to say the book was fun to read. Witty, sophomoric, frivolous, irreverent, ridiculous. Meanwhile, taking a jab at pride, greed, sloth, ignorance, carelessness, and all the other deadly sins, as demonstrated by the cruel, blind, destructive arrogance of bureaucracy.
A political/philosophical manifesto, if you will, penned by a Literature MFA who wrote gags for the Monty Python troupe and scripts for the BBC television show Doctor Who. (Cover art by fellow Python alumnus Terry Gilliam.)
The book was a huge success and is still worth reading for entertainment value. If, somewhere along the journey, you begin to fret over the cost of surrendering autonomy to unelected pencil-pushers, good for you.
This box set contains all five parts of the' trilogy of five' so you can listen to the complete tales of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Zaphod Bebblebrox and Marvin the Paranoid Android! Travel through space, time and parallel universes with the only guide you'll ever need, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Read by Stephen Fry, actor, director, author and popular audiobook reader, and Martin Freeman, who played Arthur Dent in film version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He is well known as Tim in The Office.
The set also includes a bonus DVD Life, the Universe and…
I love sci-fi because it’s so optimistic about humanity’s future. I’m fascinated by new worlds and technologies and the vision of mankind spreading through the stars. But my favorite part about sci-fi is the freedom authors have to develop intriguing characters and let the story revolve around them and their decisions. I love it when a writer takes an imperfect person (someone I could see myself in) and shows them growing in unexpected ways and doing incredible things. That’s the theme of all my writing: no matter what we’ve done or had done to us, we can pick ourselves up, brush ourselves off, and do some good!
Ender Wiggin is such a fascinating and deep character. Those who read only Ender’s Game miss out on so much! I was floored when I read this second book in the series. The main character, Ender Wiggins, goes from a boy soldier trained to destroy the enemy to a grown man desperate to prevent another genocide.
I also love the idea of using relativistic travel to stay alive for millennia and witness humanity's development. Card does an excellent job of writing a deep set of characters, making us feel like we could step into their shoes if called upon.
'There aren't too many recent sf novels we can confidently call truly moral works, but Speaker for the Dead is one. It's a completely gripping story.' - The Toronto Star
'Achieves and delivers more than almost anything else within the science fiction genre, Ender's Game is a contemporary classic' - New York Times on Ender's Game
A FALLEN HERO - HAUNTED BY HIS PAST, BUT CAN HE CHANGE THE FUTURE?
Ender Wiggin was once considered a great military leader, a saviour for mankind. But now history judges his destruction of an alien race as monstrous rather than heroic.
I love sci-fi because it’s so optimistic about humanity’s future. I’m fascinated by new worlds and technologies and the vision of mankind spreading through the stars. But my favorite part about sci-fi is the freedom authors have to develop intriguing characters and let the story revolve around them and their decisions. I love it when a writer takes an imperfect person (someone I could see myself in) and shows them growing in unexpected ways and doing incredible things. That’s the theme of all my writing: no matter what we’ve done or had done to us, we can pick ourselves up, brush ourselves off, and do some good!
No list of character-driven sci-fi novels is complete without something from Timothy Zahn. Take a hardboiled detective, a mysterious and beautiful assistant, and a nefarious and unknown villain. Now add in trains in space!
This one is a page-turner, and not just because the idea of riding relativistic rails is so fascinating. Zahn excels at writing surprisingly complex characters whose motivations change as the story progresses. I read this entire five-book series from front to back and loved every minute.
More than two hundred years from now, the Quadrail transportation system run by the enigmatic Spiders connects civilizations throughout the galaxy. But someone is threatening the entire system and the worlds it serves with a military force that could wreak interstellar havoc. Frank Compton, a sharp investigator, lost his job with Earth's security forces when he exposed a corrupt scheme that had roots in high places. Enlisted by the Spiders to find out who's trying to take over the Quadrail, he's got his hands full. Beings of many races are gunning for him, trying to keep him from discovering a…
Who Gave Sleep and Who Has Taken It Away?
by
Carole McDonnell,
In the Malku universe, fae, merfolk, and humans live together in varying degrees of harmony. Over the millenia, through the use of fae magic, these humanoid groups have inter-married thus creating the faekind (humans with fae ancestry) and webbies (humans with merfolk ancestry.) The story takes place in the land…
I love sci-fi because it’s so optimistic about humanity’s future. I’m fascinated by new worlds and technologies and the vision of mankind spreading through the stars. But my favorite part about sci-fi is the freedom authors have to develop intriguing characters and let the story revolve around them and their decisions. I love it when a writer takes an imperfect person (someone I could see myself in) and shows them growing in unexpected ways and doing incredible things. That’s the theme of all my writing: no matter what we’ve done or had done to us, we can pick ourselves up, brush ourselves off, and do some good!
I’m new to Jenny Schwartz’s writing, but I find her books hard to put down! It’s character-driven sci-fi at its best. In this series, you follow two excellent characters, Nora and Liam. Nora ultimately becomes a bit of a Mary Sue. Still, her journey to power and influence is fascinating, and it’s a lot of fun watching her face down and outmaneuver those who consider themselves her better.
I also love how Schwartz throws you curveballs. Those you think are enemies unexpectedly become friends, and vice versa. It’s one of the best ways I’ve seen an author drive home how wrong our first impressions of people often are.
Nora Devi is a xeno-archaeologist with a complicated past. She has buried more secrets than she’s dug up. Widowed in the recently ended twelve year war between Capitoline and Palantine, she now makes a living as an independent tagger in border space.
Captain Liam Kimani could be credited with ending the latest royal war. Instead, he’s blamed for it. Dirty commoners aren’t meant to lay their hands on royalty.
He has no regrets.
When Liam and his crew of the battlecruiser RC Genghis Khan are exiled to Capitoline’s border they discover that life in unexplored space can be more dangerous…
I’m a science fiction and fantasy author with an obsession with outer space and dragons. I grew up on those genres and managed to convince my college professors to let me write about dystopian science fiction for my senior thesis. I’ve always loved sci-fi and fantasy because of their unique ability to take imagined worlds that seem so distant and show how, actually, those worlds can be within reach. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if that’s for better or for worse.
I toyed with recommending a different book by Adrian Tchaikovsky for this but ultimately went with this one because it is one of the most wildly imaginative books I’ve ever read. Tchaikovsky could have settled for speculating on one or two different evolutionary alternate histories of Earth, but nah. He went for ten.
I was so drawn into the way he developed societies around which species had become the surviving dominant in each timeline, from the trilobites to the rodents and everything in between. This book takes the question “What if?” and chucks it out the window with the strength of an Olympic shot put athlete without sacrificing raw character, emotion, and connections. I loved every page.
Lee and Mal went looking for monsters on Bodmin Moor four years ago, and only Lee came back. She thought she'd lost Mal forever, now miraculously returned. But what happened that day on the moors? And where has Mal been all this time? Mal's reappearance hasn't gone unnoticed by MI5 either, and their officers have questions.
Julian Sabreur is investigating an attack on top physicist Kay Amal Khan. This leads Julian to clash with agents of an unknown power - and they may or may not be human. His only clue is…
I’ve been mesmerized by paranormal stories since grade school when I first read The Chrysalids by John Wyndham. Paranormal, supernatural, and magical books capture my imagination, probably because I’ve always wished I could fly like I can in my dreams. But since gravity is real, I make the magic happen in my writing. I especially enjoy when the magic takes place in a contemporary setting but is hidden to all but the reader and the ones who possess it. It feels like being in on a very big secret. The books I’ve recommended are a mix of secretive and outed magic. I hope you enjoy them.
It was Spirit Legacy’s cover that drew me in, but it was the ghosts that kept me reading. I love the paranormal and I especially enjoy unique stories with strong characters. Holmes created both with this series. Her pairing of the protagonist, free-spirited Jess Ballard, with Tia, an ultra-organized and grounded roommate, makes for some hilarious situations. I love these two together. As the story progresses, intrigue builds, strange phenomena occur, and motives are questioned. Someone has deadly intentions, but who? No one’s beyond suspicion. Not even Jess’s friends or her family. Holmes kept me guessing right to the end. Thankfully, this is a series, so I have more books to enjoy.
These cryptic words wake college student Jess Ballard from a terrifying dream into an even more terrifying reality. Jess’ life has never been what anyone would call easy; doing damage control in the wake of your nomadic, alcoholic mother doesn't exactly make for a storybook childhood.
But now her world has fallen apart just when it should be coming together: her mother gone—dead under mysterious circumstances; her life uprooted to stay with estranged relatives she’s never met; and there’s something odd about some of the people she’s been meeting at…
6-book series set in a haunted roadside inn in 1821 Alabama!
Cassie Fairhope longs for only one thing: to escape her mother’s tyranny. Her plan? Seduce the young man, who is acting as innkeeper while her father is away on business, into marrying her. But Flint Hamilton has his own…
I am a historian of Russia and Eurasia at Hamilton College. I teach courses on Russian history, Central Asia, and the modern Middle East. We usually think of these as separate regions of the world, but in fact they are all connected across the vast Eurasian continent. Russians, Turks, Iranians, Mongols and more have been intertwined with each other throughout their histories. My formal research specialty is Soviet Central Asia. I have written on Stalin’s attempt to destroy Islam, on education and creating a historical narrative for Uzbekistan, and on cotton and manual labor under Khrushchev.
Many people are fascinated by the ancient Silk Road, but don’t know much about how we got from there to the “Stans” that emerged out of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. These books showcase the most recent scholarship on how Central Asia was gradually taken over by the Russian and Chinese empires, and how the republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan were created, as well as Xinjiang Province in the People’s Republic of China.
The Kazakhs suffered a devastating famine 1928–1932 that was caused by Stalin’s collectivization campaign. Because the Kazakhs were nomadic herders, the first step was to “modernize” them by forcing them to become settled farmers. Cameron uses Russian- and Kazakh-language sources to show how Soviet communism’s obsession with creating modern nations led to near-genocide.
The Hungry Steppe examines one of the most heinous crimes of the Stalinist regime: the Kazakh famine of 1930-33. More than 1.5 million people, a quarter of Kazakhstan's population, perished. Yet the story of this famine has remained mostly hidden from view. Sarah Cameron reveals this brutal story and its devastating consequences for Kazakh society.
Through extremely violent means, the Kazakh famine created Soviet Kazakhstan, a stable territory with clear boundaries that was an integral part of the Soviet economy; and it forged a new Kazakh national identity. But ultimately, Cameron finds, neither Kazakhstan nor Kazakhs themselves integrated into Soviet…
