100 books like Triplanetary

This is the story that first got me interested in science fiction. Of course, we now recognise some of the flaws in the science, but consider that at the time of its writing steam propulsion was still in its infancy, most ships were still built of timber, and Verne envisaged a ship capable of indefinite travel beneath the ocean surface – something not even possible until the advent of nuclear power almost a century later. Even today Verne’s vision and the story he wove around it can inspire.

What I liked most about this book of the Discworld series, in particular, is the characters. They are very well written and the dialogue of banter between them is fantastic. The world, too, is something I will always remember, how it sucks you in and is so vivid.

But the best part of this book is Ricewind's ability to stumble into trouble and always come out on top.

To take a break from his day job as Professor Emeritus of Higher Mathematics at Caltech, Eric Temple Bell (John Taine was his pen name) wrote a series of science fiction novels that dealt, not with mathematics, but largely with biology. Any of these are still quite readable today, and notable for their discussion of biology and related fields when most writers of science fiction were focused on physics and space travel.

The Greatest Adventure deals with mutated dinosaurs in Antarctica, which sounds like something out of a 1950s horror film but which Bell uses as the basis for an investigation into science and not schlock. I suspect he utilized the pen name John Taine so as not to embarrass his supercilious colleagues in the math department (or possibly himself).

I am not frightened by Cthulhu, the tentacled monsters waiting in the depths of outer space or the ocean. I am mesmerized by them. Lovecraft, often labeled a horror writer, is one of the greatest literary fantasists. His imagination is boundless, and he is as adept at describing strange new environments as he is at evoking a sense of cosmic dread.

This classic novel combines Lovecraft’s signature monsters with an incredible dreamlike atmosphere that grips you and does not let you go. When you stand at the summit of the Mountains of Madness and glimpse what lies on the other side, you are torn between fear and fascination. For me, at least, fascination always wins.   

In addition to his Sherlock Holmes mysteries, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s dinosaur adventure story delivers world-class excitement and deeply satisfying reading. Doyle’s story of explorers who find living dinosaurs in the Amazonian rainforest can hardly be matched for its originality.

I read it long ago and found it so memorable it was worth another read more recently. And I’m glad I did. The dinosaurs are portrayed dramatically, to say the least, but I was also impressed by rereading that the characters were quite ingenious. Professor Challenger, the expedition leader, is a gruff, highly irascible fellow, given to brawling as much as to debate. Ned Malone, newspaper reporter, and central “I “ character is a riveting taleteller and keen observer of dinosaurian and human nature.

This is an oldie but a goody. I read this as a kid and have read it since then many times as an adult, and it’s still great. The writing is dated, but the story absolutely rocks.

Our hero, John Carter, is a Civil War veteran. When he enters a mysterious cave, he is transported to Mars. A version of Mars where Mars is inhabited by all sorts of incredible beings.

Everything about this story is larger than life. The description of Mars. The warring tribes. The fight scenes. Our hero as he tackles the villains. How he saves a world in peril. In the end, our hero gets the girl (who is a beautiful princess). The dynamic between both of them over the course of the story is well worth the read alone.

Urban fantasy novels following the adventures of a police officer called Peter Grant who discovers he has magic powers and is brought under the wing of Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale - the last officially sanctioned police Wizard with the rivers themselves represented by various magical characters. The series starts as a sort of police procedural and is very enjoyable and easy to read.

A three novel serial with tones of Victorian adventure and steampunk fantasy that sets three disparate characters against a mysterious cabal with influence in the government of an unnamed European country (possibly an analogue of Victorian England) – with the sinister glass of which the books are made able to record and play back real-life events (quite often sexual or violent) to be experienced (quite literally) by the reader.

Each chapter of the books are seen from the point of view of one of the main characters; Miss Celeste Temple – a stereotypical Victorian adventuress and heir to a fortune who finds herself drawn to both Cardinal Chang – neither a cardinal nor Oriental, he is a dichotomy, capable of extreme violence but with a decent side and a love of poetry; and to the Contessa – ostensibly evil, she is a beautiful, cunning and deadly woman who seems to… show more.

As a reader, I am drawn to both noir and science fiction because they are both puzzles. They present a mystery seeking an answer, whether it is a question about the rules of a strange new world, or the question of who killed who and how. In Far from the Light of Heaven, we start with a locked room murder mystery set on an interstellar vessel. The seemingly impossible crime is enough to keep one reading to the end, but then the book provides other, more enticing mysteries that grow in scale and scope the deeper the story goes.

Stanislaw Lem, the Polish philosopher and science fiction novelist, had the talent of writing novels that raise profound questions about the human condition. One of the issues he tackled was whether our human form of intelligence is just one of many types of intelligence that might be found in the universe.

In one of his most gripping and mind-stretching novels, The Invincible, an Earth spaceship lands on an apparently uninhabited planet only to find that many years previously, another race had crash-landed on the planet, and their small, robotic assistants were the main survivors of the crash. Those automata evolved into a collection of tiny “flies,” which, although not individually conscious or possessed of reasoning, use evolved herd behaviors to destroy their surviving alien masters and all other living creatures on the planet’s surface. When the humans from Earth explore the planet, they encounter clouds of these tiny metallic… show more.