world of book recommendations
Naturally I recommend my own books and shorter fiction. But I find these books inspiring and well worth recommending.
SF for CHILDREN...
I have a page that discusses how to use science fiction to teach and another that describes how science fiction opens readers to the exciting possibilities of the future. Here I list my SF recommendations for children.
Susan Cooper: The Dark is Rising
Bruce Coville: My Teacher Is an Alien
Peter Dickinson: Eva
Diane Duane: So You Want to Be a Wizard
Jeanne DuPrau: The City of Ember
Neil Gaiman: Coraline
Margaret Peterson Haddix: Running Out of Time
Madeleine L'Engle: A Wrinkle in Time
Lois Lowry: The Giver
Susan Beth Pfeffer: Life As We Knew It
Daniel Pinkwater: Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars
Terry Pratchett: Only You Can Save Mankind
Philip Pullman: The Golden Compass
Neal Schusterman: The Dark Side of Nowhere
... and for YOUNG ADULTS
What books can we give our teens and young adults that don't mire them in a swamp of vampires, domineering wizards or nostalgia for feudalism? These are just a few of my personal science fiction favorites, weighted more toward SF with a little common sense mixed in with the sense-o-wonder.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
by Philip K. Dick
A post-apocalyptic story of the near future. Bounty hunter Rick Deckard tracks down and kills escaped androids. Served as the basis of the film, Bladerunner.
The Hunger Games Trilogy
, by Suzanne Collins
"Today, we need more sophisticated legends, that show us not only possible failure modes, but humanity buckling down to get things right." (read more)
Feed
, by M. T. Anderson
A futuristic consumer-mad world where news and advertisements are fed continuously to the brain -- till a hacker disrupts the flow during a teen trip to the moon...
Against Infinity
, by Gregory Benford
A coming of age story of a young man on the icy surface of Ganymede, searching for a dangerous alien artifact that haunts the dreams of humans.
The Foundation Trilogy
, by Isaac Asimov
Gibbon's Decline of the Roman Empire with an interstellar twist. The Galactic Empire is going to fall, but Hari Seldon has a plan.
The Engines of God
, by Jack McDevitt
Two archeologists struggle to preserve the alien artifacts on planet Quraqua before terraforming destroys all traces of the alien civilization -- which may hold essential clues to humanity's survival!
The Stars My Destination
, by Alfred Bester
A classic of Science fiction, this is a story of revenge. Gulliver Foyle, left stranded in space, is determined to track down those responsible. (Predicted an entrenched wealthy subculture, and a tattooed-tribal subculture.)
Lest Darkness Fall
, by L. Sprague de Camp
The classic timeslip tale about an achraeologist who finds himself in 435 CE Rome. Can he stop the Dark Ages from coming? Terrific. Started the modern era of "Connecticut Yankee" tales.
The House of the Scorpion
, by Nancy Farmer
In the land of Orpium, an opium-producing estate between Mexico and the United States, a drug lord enslaves illegal immigrants, through chips planted in their brains. Our protagonist, Matt, has been raised as a clone for organ replacement.
Brave New World
, by Aldous Huxley
A dystopia fast becoming more likely than 1984. Also more fun, but creepy. Thought provoking and on college reading lists.
Rite of Passage
, by Alexei Panshin
A multi-generation colony ship tests its youth by casting them out to survive for a month of Trial upon the hostile colony worlds. Truly the classic YA science fiction novel and a pioneer at the young-female point of view.
The Stars Are Ours!
by Andre Norton
No one wrote escapist adolescent adventure in space better than Andre Norton. Her Young Adult novels were legend, and SFWA's YA award is named after her. (Any book by this author will please a bright teen.)
Earth Abides
, by George Stewart
In this post-apocalyptic story, most of humanity has been wiped out by pandemic. Ish Wiliams emerges from his solitary cabin to find the land deserted... almost. A gentle, thoughtful book, easy to read but very literary.
Orbital Resonance
, by John Barnes
Through his 13-year old protagonist, Melpomene Murray, Barnes presents a riveting portrayal of life in space aboard the Flying Dutchman, an asteroid colony which supplies the overpopulated home planet Earth.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
, by Jules Verne
Verne wrote brief, captivating "go there" adventure tales that still read well. Choose a direction: up, down or into the sea and Verne's intrepid adventurers head that way! But his Captain Nemo was a character with tragic depth.
The Martian Chronicles
, by Ray Bradbury
A short story collection about the colonization of Mars, as terrestrial expeditions set off to explore the planet, often with devastatingly poignant consequences for the native inhabitants.
Leviathan
, by Scott Westerfield
This steampunk novel presents an alternate history of World War I, pitting the Central Powers and their steam-powered war machines, against the British Darwinists, who have genetically modified animals for fighting. Our protagonist, the son of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, rides into battle on the Leviathan, an enormous biological dirigible.
The Graveyard Book
, by Neil Gaiman
To escape the clutches of Jack the man who killed his parents, Nobody Owens was raised in a graveyard -- learning history from the ghosts among the headstones.
Tunnel in the Sky
, by Robert Heinlein
Teens who want jobs in space must spend a week surviving an alien world, but what if they're stranded? Heinlein's answer to Lord of the Flies.
Ender's Game
, by Orson Scott Card
Boy genius Ender Wiggin trains to save the world from alien Buggers. A blatant "chosen one" fantasy that appeals to the Harry Potter "I'm a demigod" reflex.
The Postman
, by David Brin
After much of America has been devastated by war, a survivor comes across an abandoned mail truck, finds long abandoned letters... and delivers hope to isolated towns. (Okay, this is a self-plug. Though lots of kids prefer the lighter tone in The Practice Effect!)
See a more complete list of recommendations for young readers on my blog.
GREAT SCIENCE FICTION THEMES
I've listed elsewhere my Top Ten Science Fiction Novels. But now let's try something much more ambitious -- a bigger, broader reading compilation. I will divide this column according to my own unique interest-categories, beginning with...
DIRE WARNINGS & SELF-PREVENTING PROPHECIES
These novels and shorter works inspire the reader to imagine the dreadful-but-avoidable dangers that may lurk down the road ahead. A few of these books even attained the most powerful status any work of fiction can achieve: they changed the future by alerting millions, who then vowed that the bad things should never happen.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
The Sheep Look Up
A Canticle for Leibowitz
Make Room! Make Room!
Brave New World
"Harrison Bergeron
On the Beach
We
The Cool War
The Disappearance
Flood
The Windup Girl
The Unincorporated Man
HARBINGERS of HOPE
These tales offer something almost as important as warnings... a tantalyzing glimpse at (guardedly and tentatively) better tomorrows. (It's actually much harder to do than issue dire warnings!)
Stand on Zanzibar
Beyond This Horizon
Rainbow's End
Consider Phlebas
The Golden Age
Island
Pacific Edge
HUH! I never REALIZED!
Some tales simply rock readers back with wondrous stories that also broaden their perspective... from strange cultures to alternate social systems to unusual ways of thinking.
Lord of Light
Dune
The Dispossessed
Courtship Rite
The Years of Rice and Salt
A Deepness in the Sky
Snow Crash
the HARD STUFF
Take me someplace new. Boggle me with possibilities grounded in the strange-real universe of science!
Timescape
Eon
The Foundation Trilogy
Flashforward
Tau Zero
Ringworld
Diaspora
To Crush the Moon
Vast
Anti-Ice
The Web Between The Worlds
Spin
FANTASY — WITH BRAINS
Just because there's magic and wizards and kings and such... doesn't mean it has to be lobotomizing. There really are exceptions!
The Drawing of the Dark
The Lord of the Rings
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (free online fanfiction), by Eliezer Yudkowsky (aka Less Wrong)
Neverwhere: A Novel
The City & The City
Boneshaker
GEDANKENEXPERIMENTS
Or... what if things were different?
The Stars My Destination
Dying Inside
Childhood's End
Brainwave
The Yiddish Policemen's Union
Blindsight
RIP-SNORTING GOOD STORYTELLING
Just go along for the ride.
The Forever War
Gateway
The Mote in God's Eye
Old Man's War
The Great Time Machine Hoax
The Princess Bride
ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES & PARALLEL WORLDS
Extra points if it seems plausible that this might-have-been really might have been. And even more points if the reader goes, "That world seems more plausible than this one I'm living in!"
The Man in the High Castle
1632
Cryptonomicon
The Great War series (American Front
Bring the Jubilee
Lest Darkness Fall
TIME TRAVEL
Here the biggest test is whether you can offer a new or surprising logical twist. Bring on them paradoxes!
The Man Who Folded Himself
Up the Line
Run, Come See Jerusalem!
The Big Time
Doomsday Book
The Technicolor Time Machine
"All You Zombies
HUMOR
The hardest thing of all to do well. Someday I might dare to try this most-difficult type!
The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Bored of the Rings: A Parody of J.R.R. Tolkien's the Lord of the Rings
Hoka!
The Color of Magic
"Blued Moon" in Fire Watch
SHEER BEAUTY
Forget science, logic and other superficialities. Just love it. The words... the words...
The Martian Chronicles
Gravity's Rainbow
Riddley Walker
Hyperion
Volume One of the Book of the New Sun
The Rediscovery of Man
More Than Human
"'Repent Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman
QUIRKY CLASSICS
Hey, it's a kind of time travel!
The Time Machine
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Last and First Men
Herland
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan
The World, The Flesh & The Devil
When Worlds Collide
PREDICTIVE SUCCESSES
We SF authors often disclaim any intent to foretell the future. We explore it, test possibilities, perform gedankenexperiments, even warn or entice. But predict it? Well, at times we do try... and even keep score! My fans maintain a wiki tracking hits and misses from my most predictive near-term book to date Earth. Here are some looks-ahead that have been impressively on-target.
The Shockwave Rider
Beyond This Horizon
"The Brick Moon
Neuromancer
Age of the Pussyfoot
AND SF ISN'T JUST ANGLO-AMERICAN
International contributions to this genre are undeniable. Indeed, it would be churlishly socio-centric to ignore great titles like Roadside Picnic
NONFICTION FOR SF FANS
Here are some of my favorite nonfiction books, which I read for a grounding in the science behind my science fiction and nonfiction.
Contact with Alien Civilizations
I recommend the latest book to ponder the topic of "where is everybody out there?" Contact with Alien Civilizations was written by former senior U.S. diplomat Michael A.G. Michaud, who chaired the committees that developed the well-regarded "SETI Protocols." I served with Michael on those committees...
... until they unraveled under the strain of the increasingly tense METI imbroglio, or the debate over whether humanity (or rather, a few peremptory individuals) should start shouting into a strange and dauntingly silent universe. An excellent book, covering these issues from many angles!
The Republican War on Science
Will the first decade of the 21st Century be known as the time when our Scientific Age came to a whimpering end? The one trait shared by anti-modernists of both left and right appears to be disdain for our ability to learn and do bold new things. My published review of Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science, explores how partisanship can explain much of this collapse of confidence... and why partisan interpretations don't cover everything.
The Past And Future of America's Economy
The Past and Future of America's Economy By Robert D. Atkinson explores measures that would allow us to play our roles better in the world economy.
The Singularity Is Near
Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near pursues his argument that our scientific competence and technologically-empowered creativity will soon skyrocket, propelling humanity into an entirely new age.
The Progress Paradox
The clichés that most hobble us are those we don't notice, because we accept them so readily. Like the common belief -- shared across the political spectrum -- that the world is going to hell. Or the truism that "our wisdom hasn't kept up with technology." In December 2003 I reviewed a book that challenges this truism. In The Progress Paradox, Gregg Easterbrook suggests we may be better than we thought. There's a world to be saved and those who spread either complacency or gloom aren't helping. What we need is confidence and a sense that our efforts can matter. That will come, if we open our eyes to how much good has already been done.
The Coming Democracy
In The Coming Democracy, Ann Florini dares to raise a long-neglected question -- how will Planet Earth be governed during the next century and beyond? Some say we are living in just the latest in a long series of imperial ages -- an era of Pax Americana. Even if the USA is the 'best' pax the world has ever known, should we count on its 'beneficial hegemony' lasting forever? Or might it be wise to start thinking now about using that great influence for its most noble and most pragmatic purpose -- by taking a lead in helping to design Whatever Comes Next (WCN)? Before history inevitably takes that power and leadership away from us.
Out of Control
Out of Control, by Kevin Kelly, explores the new field of "emergent properties," showing how marvelous and surprising new complexities and capabilities often arise out of systems that began simply or primitively. Wonderful examples.
Why Things Bite Back
Why Things Bite Back, by Edward Tenner, says we are often fooled by our own best-laid plans. Possibly the most tragic human character flaw is our tendency to avoid the very criticism that may help us find our mistakes before they erupt and ruin our hopes. Tenner's look at this phenomenon is dour and incomplete... I point out some cause for hope in The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Freedom and Privacy?
Networks and Netwars
Prescient, spooky and worrisome, Networks and Netwars, by John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, remains hopeful about our ability to cope -- over the long run -- with terror threats to our complex civilization.
Mother Nature
and The Woman That Never Evolved
In Mother Nature and The Woman That Never Evolved, author, anthropologist and feminist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy takes a fresh look at evolution fact and theory, then moves on to a cross-cultural view of motherhood, in this pair of stimulating books, re-evaluating things we thought we knew.
The Tangled Wing
A good companion volume, with a wider focus on the biological foundations we all have to work with, is Melvin Konner's recently updated The Tangled Wing. (For my own anthropological speculations, click over to my essay, "Neoteny and Two-Way Sexual Selection in Human Evolution: Paleo-Anthropological Speculation."
A Brain for All Seasons
A Brain for All Seasons by William Calvin is the latest in a series of wonderful scientific speculations by neurologist / evolutionist Calvin. It takes you on a tour of the new science that links deep ocean currents with the climate patterns that made Earth a crucible for human development. Did ice ages and hot spells act as a 'pump' forcing our ancestors to adapt and change? Europe lies at the same latitude as Canada, yet supports 20 times as many people, because of the Gulf Stream... which may 'switch off' because of Global Warming. Find out more, it's important.
Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.0
Again, touching on topics discussed in The Transparent Society, anyone interested in the dilemmas we face in the digital age should look at legal scholar Lawrence Lessig's Code: and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.0.
Secrets and Lies
From a more technical background, encryption expert Bruce Schneier talks common sense in Secrets and Lies.
The Life of the Cosmos
Striking off to the very boundaries of this universe -- and about a trillion others -- fasten your seat belts for one of the boldest ideas of our era in The Life of the Cosmos, by physicist Lee Smolin, who lays out the notion that universes may behave like a form of life, evolving within the context of a meta-time far, far vaster than mere billions of years. This book inspired my novella "What Continues... and What Fails," which is contained in the story collection Otherness.
Ray Bradbury
I wrote this tribute to Ray Bradbury upon his passing, June 5, 2012.
Ray was the last living member of a "BACH" quartet -- writers who transformed science fiction from a pulp magazine ghetto into a genre for hardcover bestsellers. Isaac Asimov, Arthur Clarke and Robert Heinlein helped shatter barriers for the rest of us, establishing the legitimacy of literature that explores possible or plausible tomorrows. But it was Bradbury who made clear to everyone that science fiction can be art. An art form combining boldness and broad horizons with sheer, unadulterated beauty.
Jack Williamson
I appended a memorial addendum to this 10 year-old tribute to my dear friend, Jack Williamson, on the day of his passing, November 10, 2006.
Jack Williamson is no Yankee trader, but he might have been. His life is one long tale of hoodwinking fate, of turning adversity into advantage, and above all, changing the world through the sheer magic of his perceptions. By seeing the universe in a new way -- and conveying his vision through science fiction -- Williamson helped break the old spell that held human beings enthralled for so long. The tradition of static sameness. The old fear of innovation.