Here are 52 books that From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy fans have personally recommended once you finish the From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy series.
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I am a retired university professor who taught creative writing at the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade, and a not-yet-retired author, although I have on several occasions solemnly stated that I have written my last prose book. I believe these two qualities make me competent to create a list of 5 books that I have reread the most often.
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.
When Kris Kelvin arrives at the planet Solaris to study the ocean that covers its surface he is forced to confront a painful, hitherto unconscious memory embodied in the physical likeness of a long-dead lover. Others suffer from the same affliction and speculation rises among scientists that the Solaris ocean may be a massive brain that creates incarnate memories, but its purpose in doing so remains a mystery . . .
Solaris raises a question that has been at the heart of human experience and literature for centuries: can we truly understand the universe around us without first understanding what…
Sci-fi has been part of my life since Sunday afternoons in front of the radio listening to Journey to the Moon and the original Quatermass serial. Then it was Doctor Who and Star Trek. Despite this, I have never written a serious sci-fi book until now, but I can boast of knowing all the characters in both the radio and TV sci-fi shows. I guess I can admit to being a Trekkie.
Another pioneer writer and the writer who started the cyberpunk genre. I loved this book because it is different, and if you are a true sci-fi nut, this one is for you.
I think Adams must have been on another planet when he wrote this. It is sci-fi comedy, and unlike many others who try and fail with comedy in this genre, this is a giant of a series. It is funny and serious with unforgettable characters. I love it.
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’ve been teaching “Writing Humor and Comedy” at Drexel University (where I’m an English professor) twice a year forever, and I’m proud (and still a little awed) that at least one of my students has gone on to have a successful humor-writing career. My very first publication was a satirical story back in 1996, and in more recent years, my humor has been published in The Oxford University Press Humor Reader, McSweeney’s, and Points in Case. Writing funny fiction is my main focus as a novelist, and my sequel, The Great American Betrayal, was named one of "The Best Comedy Books of 2022" by New York magazine's Vulture.com.
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 Sellerhas 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 Flyand 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.”
When Thomas Lang, a hired gunman with a soft heart, is contracted to assassinate an American industrialist, he opts instead to warn the intended victim - a good deed that doesn't go unpunished.
Within hours Lang is butting heads with a Buddha statue, matching wits with evil billionaires, and putting his life (among other things) in the hands of a bevy of femmes fatales, whilst trying to save a beautiful lady ... and prevent an international bloodbath to boot.
A wonderfully funny novel from one of Britain's most famous comedians and star of award-winning US TV medical drama series, House.
I’ve been teaching “Writing Humor and Comedy” at Drexel University (where I’m an English professor) twice a year forever, and I’m proud (and still a little awed) that at least one of my students has gone on to have a successful humor-writing career. My very first publication was a satirical story back in 1996, and in more recent years, my humor has been published in The Oxford University Press Humor Reader, McSweeney’s, and Points in Case. Writing funny fiction is my main focus as a novelist, and my sequel, The Great American Betrayal, was named one of "The Best Comedy Books of 2022" by New York magazine's Vulture.com.
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.”
Dave Barry makes his fiction debut with a ferociously funny novel of love and mayhem in south Florida.
In the city of Coconut Grove, Florida, these things happen: A struggling adman named Eliot Arnold drives home from a meeting with the Client From Hell. His teenage son, Matt, fills a Squirtmaster 9000 for his turn at a high school game called Killer. Matt's intended victim, Jenny Herk, sits down in front of the TV with her mom for what she hopes will be a peaceful evening for once. Jenny's alcoholic and secretly embezzling stepfather, Arthur, emerges from the maid's room,…
I’ve been teaching “Writing Humor and Comedy” at Drexel University (where I’m an English professor) twice a year forever, and I’m proud (and still a little awed) that at least one of my students has gone on to have a successful humor-writing career. My very first publication was a satirical story back in 1996, and in more recent years, my humor has been published in The Oxford University Press Humor Reader, McSweeney’s, and Points in Case. Writing funny fiction is my main focus as a novelist, and my sequel, The Great American Betrayal, was named one of "The Best Comedy Books of 2022" by New York magazine's Vulture.com.
The Code of the Woostersmight 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.”
Follow the adventures of Bertie Wooster and his gentleman's gentleman, Jeeves, in this stunning new edition of one of the greatest comic novels in the English language. When Aunt Dahlia demands that Bertie Wooster help her dupe an antique dealer into selling her an 18th-century cow-creamer. Dahlia trumps Bertie's objections by threatening to sever his standing invitation to her house for lunch, an unthinkable prospect given Bertie's devotion to the cooking of her chef, Anatole. A web of complications grows as Bertie's pal Gussie Fink-Nottle asks for counseling in the matter of his impending marriage to Madeline Bassett. It seems…
Sci-fi has been part of my life since Sunday afternoons in front of the radio listening to Journey to the Moon and the original Quatermass serial. Then it was Doctor Who and Star Trek. Despite this, I have never written a serious sci-fi book until now, but I can boast of knowing all the characters in both the radio and TV sci-fi shows. I guess I can admit to being a Trekkie.
I think this is everybody’s favourite. A classic from the master storyteller.
I love the building tension in the story and the way Wells has the knack of making the story an exciting adventure at the same time. I prefer the book to the movie, which did not convey the mystery and tension build-up as in the book.
The plot is very simple but clever. Nothing seems to stop the Martians, but in the end, they are defeated by our diseases on Earth. A good story to enjoy at any time.
A powerful, delightful new edition. Cylinders land on earth and the invaders, from Mars, with their huge, round bodies and tentacles, start to vaporize the people of Earth. Houses, towns and cities are soon destroyed in a spiral of violence, creating civil panic and mass evacuations before a foul black smoke is released by the aggressive alien force. But the fightback must begin, and it comes from an unexpected quarter. H.G. Wells' classic tale of invasion has stirred our imagination for over a hundred years. Its intense mix of realism and fantasy continues to prick at anyone interested in a…
I love first contact fiction. When I was a kid, my uncle once told me about seeing a UFO, a ship landing in the Varangerfjord in northern Norway. No one believed him, of course, but the way he told that story made me feel like I was right there with him.
These books pull me in because they highlight the difference between what we experience and reality. All of them left me with more questions than answers. I am a math teacher and an indie science fiction writer, and I'm still not entirely sure if that uncertainty is a good thing or a warning.
As a math teacher, I thought Egan’s world of numbers would give me some kind of home-field advantage. I admit I lost that feeling rather quickly. The story explores post-human minds, simulation theory, and far-future consciousness, and Egan keeps the pace intense.
His skill with math makes the confusion feel real. By the end, I wasn’t sure of anything. Even now, I'm still not sure.
A quantum Brave New World from the boldest and most wildly speculative writer of his generation. "Greg Egan is perhaps the most important SF writer in the world."-Science Fiction Weekly "One of the very best "-Locus. "Science fiction with an emphasis on science."-New York Times Book Review
Since the Introdus in the twenty-first century, humanity has reconfigured itself drastically. Most chose immortality, joining the polises to become conscious software. Others opted for gleisners: disposable, renewable robotic bodies that remain in contact with the physical world of force and friction. Many of these have left the solar system forever in fusion-drive…
I discovered mind uploading in 1997 via a nonfiction book by Earl and Cox. That book literally changed my life, opening my eyes to concepts I had never previously considered. I joined groups and organizations that advocate for and advance research toward eventual mind-uploading technology. My enthusiasm for the topic ultimately culminated in my 2014 nonfiction book and then again in my 2024 novel, Contemplating Oblivion. The novel presents my philosophy concerning the purpose of existence and the universe, offering an answer that is closely tied to our destiny to one day computerize the brain, upload humanity, and populate the galaxy.
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.
"Egan is determined to make sense of everything - to understand the whole world as an intelligible, rational, material (and finally manipulable) realm - even if it means abandoning comfortable and comforting illusions. This is fundamental to the whole project of SF and it's why Egan's Best - and his Rest - is worth any number of looks. -Locus
What happens when your digital self overpowers your physical self?
A life in Permutation City is unlike any life to which you're accustomed. You have Eternal Life, the power to live forever. Immortality is a real thing, just not the thing…
I love first contact fiction. When I was a kid, my uncle once told me about seeing a UFO, a ship landing in the Varangerfjord in northern Norway. No one believed him, of course, but the way he told that story made me feel like I was right there with him.
These books pull me in because they highlight the difference between what we experience and reality. All of them left me with more questions than answers. I am a math teacher and an indie science fiction writer, and I'm still not entirely sure if that uncertainty is a good thing or a warning.
This book could have been first on this list, perhaps it should have been, but then it might not have been a list—because Lem, with the particular patience of a man who had clearly lost all faith in the genre he was writing in, and possibly in the human species as a whole, decided to write a novel that doesn’t so much engage with the first contact premise as slowly, methodically, and with what I can only describe as contempt, dismantle every single assumption the premise rests on, including the assumption that we would be able to recognise an extraterrestrial signal if we ever received one, or that we could decode a signal if we in fact managed to recognise it, or that we could, in any sense, agree on what it meant if we actually did manage to decode it, and furthermore, that meaning itself would even survive such…
Scientists attempt to decode what may be a message from intelligent beings in outer space.
By pure chance, scientists detect a signal from space that may be communication from rational beings. How can people of Earth understand this message, knowing nothing about the senders-even whether or not they exist? Written as the memoir of a mathematician who participates in the government project (code name: His Master's Voice) attempting to decode what seems to be a message from outer space, this classic novel shows scientists grappling with fundamental questions about the nature of reality, the confines of knowledge, the limitations of…
I love first contact fiction. When I was a kid, my uncle once told me about seeing a UFO, a ship landing in the Varangerfjord in northern Norway. No one believed him, of course, but the way he told that story made me feel like I was right there with him.
These books pull me in because they highlight the difference between what we experience and reality. All of them left me with more questions than answers. I am a math teacher and an indie science fiction writer, and I'm still not entirely sure if that uncertainty is a good thing or a warning.
Watts says Blindsight isn’t complete without Echopraxia, and I agree. Following the same logic as #1, I’ve put Firefall on the list, which includes both.
I must admit that at first, I was unsure about Watts because vampires in serious science fiction seemed straight-up cringe to me. But in Firefall, vampires have a purpose. They show how evolution doesn’t care about self-awareness. The book is full of truly alien minds that are scary because they work without the inner life we think makes us human.
Watts uses biology the way Egan uses mathematics, and I bow to it.
Firefall is the omnibus edition of the novels Blindsight and Echopraxia.
February 13, 2082, First Contact. Sixty-two thousand objects of unknown origin plunge into Earth's atmosphere - a perfect grid of falling stars screaming across the radio spectrum as they burn. Not even ashes reach the ground. Three hundred and sixty degrees of global surveillance: something just took a snapshot.
And then... nothing.
But from deep space, whispers. Something out there talks - but not to us. Two ships, Theseus and the Crown of Thorns, are launched to discover the origin of Earth's visitation, one bound for the outer dark…
