48 books like From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy

This is, in my humble view, the best science fiction novel ever written. I have read it no less than ten times so far and intend to keep rereading it. What nowadays seems incredible is that it was written back in 1961, when most science fiction was still in its age of innocence, full of naïve assumptions about extraterrestrials and their malevolent ambitions.

It will be many years before the first ideas of benevolent aliens appear and even more before we fully realize Lem's wisdom from Solaris: there isn't going to be any First Contact because Others are neither bad nor good, but indifferent, as it is the planetary intelligent ocean on Solaris. We aren't still mature enough even for contacts with ourselves, let alone Others.

I first encountered Douglas Adams when I caught The Hitchhiker’s Guide on late-night radio, and I was hooked. The novel is slightly different, with Adams giving a bit more consideration to plot and logic, but it has the same wonderful, rapid-fire dialogue style, which has seldom been replicated.

I absolutely love Arthur Dent’s ludicrous accidental odyssey, meeting characters like Zaphod Beeblebrox and the wonderfully named Slartibartfast. The Guide sits in the background, popping up to provide superbly funny explanations of the history of the universe, humanity’s obsession with money, and a lot more.

For me, the thing that sets this apart from a lot of SFF humor is its ‘Britishness’—there’s a distinct feel of the surreal comic legacy of, for example, Monty Python and The Goon Show.

You might know Hugh Laurie as the actor who played Dr. Gregory House in House, though he’s been great in lots of other stuff, including playing Bertie Wooster in Jeeves and Wooster. He’s also a hell of a writer. The Gun Seller has the pacing of a spy novel and the sentences you might expect if P.G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler went into that gene-combining teleportation portal from The Fly and emerged as P.G. Chandlerhouse. Sample sentence: “But Rayner was also three inches taller than me, four stones heavier, and at least eight however-you-measure-violence units more violent.”

Dave Barry is most famous as a humor columnist and nonfiction writer. His first novel Big Trouble, with a story that reads like a suspenseful thriller, is full of comedic events and clever twists. It’s worth reading, however, for the prose alone. Sample sentence: “En route to the polling place, the old man picked up seven other voters, all men, some quite aromatic.”

The Code of the Woosters might be the best funny novel of them all. The all-knowing valet Jeeves and the hilarious narrator Bertram Wooster helped inspire the relationship in my novels between the coffeebot narrator Arjay and private investigator Frank Harken. Wodehouse’s plotting is superb and beyond clever, but it’s the prose—the playful and inventive sentences and paragraphs—that makes me come back to read this book again and again. A sample sentence: “He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled, so I tactfully changed the subject.”

It was the comic book titles of HG Wells early science fiction books which drew me in as a teenager, including this, his most famous. You never had to guess what it was about. And I was never disappointed. They took me into a different world.

What I always liked about HG Wells was his attention to detail and his attempts to provide a rational scientific explanation for the events which occurred in those books.

I specifically recall the scene in which a mind-uploaded character is being subjected to interesting psychological experiments, such as having his neural processing slowed, sped up, and even completely halted without feeling any awareness of those changes.

This book is a fascinating philosophical deep dive into the relationship between functionalism and consciousness. The other thing I was personally drawn to was the story’s use of cellular automata and artificial life since these areas of computer science have been passions of mine even longer than mind uploading.

Being a great fan of Dostoevsky, I have reread all of his books but by far the most often—Demons. In 2020 only I have read it as many as three times while working on a special annotated Serbian edition of the novel that I have published myself.

I love it for many reasons, perhaps most importantly because it is a book full of ingenious paradoxes. It is, at the same time, Dostoevsky’s most tragic and most comical novel… Besides, the way the novel originated is in itself a superb story…

Arthur C. Clarke is my favorite of the “Big Three” giants of the golden age of science fiction. His clear prose and hard-science background mix with big ideas, optimism, and flashes of poetic brilliance, and these qualities are all just getting off the ground in his first novel. Clarke wrote it in 1947, right after he had left his work as a radar engineer for the RAF.

It is the realistic story of an international effort to put men on the moon, written 10 years before NASA was founded and 22 years before humanity succeeded. I was amazed by the foresight into the difficulties in administration, fundraising, secrecy, public relations, anti-science zealotry, good ol’ engineering, and problem-solving as they sent humanity on its first moonshot. It’s a real case of art inspiring life, as Clarke and other visionaries showed other engineers that the fantastic was feasible.

It is not only that I have read many times Milan Kundera's only collection of stories—I have read it aloud to each of the ten generations of my students in a creative writing course I taught at the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade, from 2007 to 2017. They should have read themselves stories by Kundera and other grand masters of literature that I recommended, but since I couldn't rely that they all would do that, I had no alternative but to read them myself.

Seven stories from this book were very useful and instructive to my students because they contained the very quintessence of the storytelling. It was just enough to listen attentively my readings and comments and many secrets of the prose writing would have been revealed…