100 books like To Your Scattered Bodies Go

There’s a sadness to this book that captures the sense of futility many soldiers feel when they’re in the thick of combat. Why are we doing this? Is it even okay to ask that question? Not that Forever War is a sad book – the narrative carries a sense of hope that reflects the optimism of youth as our heroes travel to strange planets to fight.

Joe Haldeman’s military experience shines through as he builds the relationships between the men and women who serve together. He also understands how isolated veterans can feel coming home after combat—how their society doesn’t understand what they’ve been through and cares even less. But the book is always a tribute to the soldiers and is ultimately an inspiration.

Another work spanning more than a hundred years and featuring many rich characters, crises, and drama, the Mars Trilogy makes a great summer read. At a little more than 1600 pages, the trilogy is like three seasons of a really engrossing television series.

The trilogy contains ample portions of science, science fiction, politics, and explorations of the human condition. There’s even some boom-boom for those who like a few explosions in their stories. Like my other preferences, there’s little “magic” in the Trilogy’s universe; instead, things mostly make sense after accepting a couple of assumptions. The richness of the characters really stood out for me, helped by the fact that the characters, by and large, experience long lifetimes!

This is a classic that I read about at about 10 years old, a decade after its first publication. It was absolutely formative of my future preferences in that it paints on a huge canvas spanning 1800 years.

This book presents much for both religionists and atheists to ponder. Cynics and nihilists will find themselves smiling. The book is presented as three semi-distinct novellas separated by 600 years. Similar to my book, the way the drama unfolds contains no element that appears out of left field. Things make sense.

Despite being written on a fairly high level, the text is breezy and easy to binge-read. It's still one of my favorite books!

Forgive me for citing another classic in the Science Fiction genre. My interpretation of Seldon’s Psychohistory is that it is a reasonable premise, being based on the law of large numbers. If only there was something in our present day based on large data models, like maybe language? Yes, we’re living in the dawn of “psychohistory,” but instead of predicting fundamental shifts in human society, today’s AI is telling us what detergent to buy and which politician to vote for. Sad.

It takes a lot of time and a great deal of commitment to read the Foundation Series and the titles I have listed do not include several set in the same universe but not written by Asimov. But consider, it’s Asimov, one of Science Fiction’s gods. This series is nothing if not foundational to Science Fiction.

A teasingly insightful glimpse of the Victorian Oxford of Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell, the two protagonists – and yet they aren’t! Yes, there is an Oxford University don with a penchant for photography, and yes his favourite subject is a ten-year-old local girl, and yes the text is scattered with subtle Wonderland and Looking-Glass references, but this is otherwise a quite different, very cleverly contrived, story. Structured as the inner thoughts of the main characters, After Such Kindness engagingly explores the dilemmas posed by the unusual friendship between a mature clergyman bachelor – Arnold convincingly captures Carroll’s playful sense of humour – and an inquisitive and trusting young girl, while sustaining a lurking sense of foreboding through to a thought-provoking finale.

This fictional interpretation of the creation of Alice’s Adventures is seen from the viewpoint of a constant, yet largely unremarked, fixture during these critical years: the Liddell family governess, Mary Prickett. The Oxford context of the time is convincingly depicted, and some of the burning issues of the day – Darwinism and Nonconformism, for instance – are interwoven with the more immediate tensions within the Liddell household, interpreted by an author who has more right than anyone to comment because Tait is the great-granddaughter of the real Alice herself. To sustain the pace she condenses the real events of 1857 to 1863 into a single fictionalised year, drawing on many well-known facts and suppositions – including Carroll’s rumoured amorous interest in Miss Prickett – and some lesser known details from her own family’s archives.

We are accustomed to thinking of ourselves as a species mentally superior to all others. This view was challenged in the 19th century with the discovery in Europe of the Neanderthals, an extinct large-brained human-like species. Our superiority seemed to be restored by evidence that Neanderthal extinction followed the arrival in Europe of seemingly dominant Homo sapiens from Africa. Accumulating archaeological and genetic evidence is changing that comfortable picture. Another large-brained but extinct human-like species, the Denisovans, are now also known to have existed in widespread regions of Russia, Asia, and Oceania. Not only were these archaic species technologically and culturally on a par with sapiens, but they also mated occasionally with each other and with our own species. Many people throughout the world carry genetic material from them, and these have contributed to our own regional adaptations. This book challenges our view of ourselves, and implies greater affinity and… show more.

This is the most entertaining (and informative) book on archaeology, prehistory and the cave art of our early ancestors that I have ever read.

It’s back to the future in Riley’s Journey.

A young woman volunteers for a “research project” unaware she’ll be taking a one-way trip into past—40,000 years. She’s sent to provide companionship for Nathan, a modern man also trapped in the past.

The descriptions of primitive Earth and its dangers were so realistically portrayed the book put me right there with the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon. I sympathized with Riley’s shock and betrayal and with Nathan’s crushing loneliness and despair.

I’ve recommended this book over and over again.

There’s a lot of thoughtless talk by techno-optimistic philosophers about futures in which we all get to become superintelligent and live for thousands of years if we can apply the right tech to ourselves.

Sykes describes fascinating research on the Neanderthals, beings who were almost, but not quite, us. Reading her book, I wondered what it might have been like to grow up as the child of a union between a Homo sapiens and a Neanderthal. I found this especially useful when we consider future relationships between people determined to remain human and others who want tech to make them posthuman ASAP.

There’s so much information to gleen from Sykes to help us guess at how posthumans might treat beings whom they view as different and possibly inferior.