Here are 31 books that Gaia fans have personally recommended once you finish the Gaia series.
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Ever since high school, I've been passionate about societies, communities, and institutions that allow true prosperity to emerge—in one fashion or another. This thread runs through all my writing—both fiction and nonfiction. And what I’ve found is that a sense of well-being can wear many social guises.
I built this list because portraying worlds worth living in appeals to me endlessly more than immersing in bleak ones.
The medieval Polish backwoods community feels startlingly alive—crude, superstitious, and the rest of it.
The Okoits, and later Conrad’s people, are rough villagers who drink, farm, and then get up the next day and do it again. At the same time, their sense of being part of a genuine community is unmistakable.
Frankowski doesn’t just portray a functional medieval society in an alternate timeline; his engineer protagonist builds one, bolt by bolt. There’s this no-nonsense optimism coursing through the story: the conviction that one can literally make a better world equipped with nothing but grit, crudely smelted iron, and the guts to try.
What stuck with me is how this villager society absorbs innovation in a matter-of-fact manner. It’s messy, uneven, and wildly productive. You don’t have to co-sign every norm of its community to be impressed by how solidly it holds together.
Accidentally plunged back in time to Poland in the year 1231, Conrad Schwartz is determined to build up the country before the Mongol invasion that will come ten years later
Ever since high school, I've been passionate about societies, communities, and institutions that allow true prosperity to emerge—in one fashion or another. This thread runs through all my writing—both fiction and nonfiction. And what I’ve found is that a sense of well-being can wear many social guises.
I built this list because portraying worlds worth living in appeals to me endlessly more than immersing in bleak ones.
Mammoths grazing outside the protagonist’s dwelling—yeah, that was love at first sight.
And the lived-in environment? Homes carved into colossal, cultivated trees, and people served by public, stackable electric vehicles—yes, please. The land thrives, and no species has been driven to oblivion.
Sawyer’s parallel-Earth Neanderthals truly appealed to me: the emotional restraint, the honesty, the structural elegance of their culture. Even their norms around maintaining a sustainable population are handled with startling clarity—seasonal, communal parenting.
No prisons, no poverty, no religion weaponized into hierarchy. Life runs on calm confidence, as if evolution took a gentler branch, and society—as it’d scaled up—managed to keep its soul.
Robert J. Sawyer, the award-winning and bestselling writer, hits the peak of his powers in Humans, the second book of The Neanderthal Parallax, his trilogy about our world and parallel one in which it was the Homo sapiens who died out and the Neanderthals who became the dominant intelligent species. This powerful idea allows Sawyer to examine some of the deeply rooted assumptions of contemporary human civilization dramatically, by confronting us with another civilization, just as morally valid, that has made other choices. In Humans, Neanderthal physicist Ponter Boddit, a character you will never forget, returns to our world and…
In the summer of 1999, the second book in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series (The Chamber of Secrets) was published. It seemed that everyone was reading it–kids, young adults and grownups. More than that though, kids were getting excited about reading, maybe for the first time. Parents were reading it with their kids. The excitement they shared was inspiring. I thought Rowling had achieved something remarkable–something worthwhile–for a writer of fiction. It compelled me to change the story I was working on–a rather violent, edgy tale–into a book for young adults.
I love a book that makes me laugh. But if I immediately feel guilty or disturbed for laughing, if the story makes me re-examine my values page after page, that is a home run.
This – the first of the Dancers at the End of Time series of books and short stories – had me pondering the boundaries of scientific reality as well as right versus wrong while also being galactically entertained.
The (objectively awful) main characters are time- and space-hopping immortals. Virtually all-powerful, they can change their own appearance and environment at will. When one of them decides to experiment with the concept of Love…everything, and nothing, starts to change.
A vicious, delicious satire of unchecked indulgence that tests the bounds of good taste.
Reading was my one true refuge in a childhood marked by uncertainty and chaos, which was also my gateway to writing; I wanted to create the kinds of stories that also saved me, and I found the novel to be my form. Fortunately, I grew up a feral GenXer in Northern California in the 70s and 80s, before computers and video games were handheld, with plenty of time to dream. I was drawn to fierce and outspoken characters, girls and women standing up against powerful forces, and parallel or alternate realities where bad guys are beaten. I hope you’ll find power and inspiration in the badass protagonist of these books!
I guess we have a theme because this second book is also a story in which a woman discovers unusual powers and must use them to outsmart a cunning man who seeks to dominate her. It’s hard not to be taken by protagonist Anyanwu, who learns to navigate her shapeshifting and mindreading abilities, not for ill intent.
Yet, like many stories of powerful women, she ultimately must use her wiles and intelligence to play the long game against her foe. It’s full of gripping plot, harrowing scenarios, beautiful writing, and a powerful protagonist you won’t ever forget.
I took an introduction to philosophy class in college and the professor showed us how to think about thinking. Can you know something if it’s actually untrue? Can people in a universe with an omniscient god who knows what they’re going to do have free will? Are there universal principles of justice, or is justice based on circumstances? The class changed my taste in reading. I’d read science fiction and fantasy since I was a child, but after this class, I looked for fiction that made my brain hurt but also told a wonderful story. I try hard to meet this standard in my own fiction.
I actually got to read this book before it was published because Jessica Freely was in my writer's group.
I fell in love with the characters and was thrilled whenever we got a new chapter. The plot twists and turns, and the finale is nail-biting suspense with mind-altering twists along the way.
It’s a book I wish I had written. Jessica passed away last year, but this novel is a powerful legacy.
It sucks being the son of a super villain. At home, Harry spends half of his time getting medical treatments and the other half tied up in his father's underwater lair. It was different when his mother was alive, but she disappeared when Harry was six. He can't seem to stay out of trouble at school, and his new roommate, Antonin, thinks he's a spaz, but somehow Harry has to find a way to stop his father's evil plans. Antonin Karganilla wants to become a comic book artist, but other than that, being gay is the most normal thing about…
I took an introduction to philosophy class in college and the professor showed us how to think about thinking. Can you know something if it’s actually untrue? Can people in a universe with an omniscient god who knows what they’re going to do have free will? Are there universal principles of justice, or is justice based on circumstances? The class changed my taste in reading. I’d read science fiction and fantasy since I was a child, but after this class, I looked for fiction that made my brain hurt but also told a wonderful story. I try hard to meet this standard in my own fiction.
A single starship crewed by three different species and captained by a human explores space using a series of wormholes created by… whom, exactly? No one knows.
Then an unknown ship with no visible propulsion system drops out of a wormhole and we're catapulted into an adventure that brings us to the mind-twisting origins of the universe as we know it. Rob Sawyer lives across the river from me in Canada, and we ran into each other at several local science fiction conventions.
He gave me a copy of Starplex, and I accepted it with a vague, “I look forward to reading it.” I didn’t actually intend to. But a couple weeks later, I idly flipped it open and started reading—and couldn’t stop.
Twenty years after the discovery of artificial wormholes launches Earth space exploration to unforeseeable heights, Starplex Director Keith Lansing investigates a mysterious vessel that soon threatens the station with intergalactic war. Original.
I first stumbled on the idea of colonizing space when I read Adrian Berry's The Next Ten Thousand Years and T.A. Heppenheimer's Colonies in Space, back in the late 1970s. In those post-Apollo, pre-Space Shuttle years, colonizing outer space seemed inevitable. I was hooked: this stuff was real, and it was going to happen. It might even happen to me. But living in space isn't very exciting to read about. Of course, just a few years after reading those books I was watching Indiana Jones dodge deathtraps in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Combine the two: space colonies full of danger and surprises are much better!
Revenger is a ripping space pirate yarn, but grounded in solid science. Amid all the yo-ho-ho tropes it includes a gripping section in which a rag-tag crew of scavengers penetrate into a sealed asteroid tomb-world. They must survive perils, find what they're looking for, and get out before it seals itself up again. I expect this book will be considered a classic in future decades.
The galaxy has seen great empires rise and fall. Planets have shattered and been remade. Amongst the ruins of alien civilisations, building our own from the rubble, humanity still thrives.
And there are vast fortunes to be made, if you know where to find them . . .
Captain Rackamore and his crew do. It's their business to find the tiny, enigmatic worlds which have been hidden away, booby-trapped, surrounded with layers of protection - and to crack them open for the ancient relics and barely-remembered technologies inside. But while they ply their risky trade with integrity, not everyone is…
I became hooked into science fiction as a kid the day I read an illustrated book of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. From then on, science fiction became an important part of my reading repertoire. Having wide-ranging interests, I enjoy military techno-thrillers, Anglo-French naval warfare, Greek/Egyptian/Roman mythology, most sciences, history of religions, with an occasional novel that strays from the norm and adds a sparkle to my reading. Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave and The Hollow Hills are very close to my heart. Just shows that I’m different. After all, I must do something when I am not writing my own novels! Although I have an extensive library of modern science fiction works, I am fond of many oldies.
Set in man’s far future and vast in scope, I was plunged into this novel without managing to catch my breath. This is science fiction that epitomizes the best in the genre: a powerful story, strong characters, vast vision, and lots of drama.
It is a hard book to put down, and I did not want to! I enjoyed the intricate tapestry the story weaves and, importantly, entertains. The interaction between the main characters is vividly real, as are genuine emotions vented when it is revealed an alien species manipulated man’s development. I would be kind of sore at that as well. This novel left me appreciating powerful writing and gave me a lot to think about, influencing my own writing.
Pierson's puppeteers, strange, three-legged, two-headed aliens, have discovered an immense structure in a hitherto unexplored part of the universe. Frightened of meeting the builders of such a structure, the puppeteers set about assembling a team consisting of two humans, a puppeteer and a kzin, an alien not unlike an eight-foot-tall, red-furred cat, to explore it. The artefact is a vast circular ribbon of matter, some 180 million miles across, with a sun at its centre - the Ringworld. But the expedition goes disastrously wrong when the ship crashlands and its motley crew faces a trek across thousands of miles of…
Ever since high school, I've been passionate about societies, communities, and institutions that allow true prosperity to emerge—in one fashion or another. This thread runs through all my writing—both fiction and nonfiction. And what I’ve found is that a sense of well-being can wear many social guises.
I built this list because portraying worlds worth living in appeals to me endlessly more than immersing in bleak ones.
What moved me is how much it means to belong to the Acoma estate.
Nacoya with her sharp wisdom, Keyoke with his unyielding honor, Arakasi with his chosen allegiance, even the grey warriors—they all belong to something bigger than themselves. When danger hits, the fear ripples through everyone. When triumph comes, it lifts all of them.
A big draw of the book was seeing people pull together not because they’re supposed to, but because they genuinely care. The Acoma isn’t just a political house; it feels like a place where being needed gives everyone a kind of quiet dignity.
From the imagination of two of fantasy's greatest names comes a magnificent epic of heroic and dynastic struggle.
At age 17, Mara's ceremonial pledge of servantship to the goddess Lashima is interrupted by the news that her father and brother have been killed in battle on Trigia, the world through the rift.
Now Ruling Lady of the Acoma, Mara finds that not only are her family's ancient enemies, the Minwanabi, responsible for the deaths of her loved ones, but her military forces have been decimated by the betrayal and House Acoma is now vulnerable to complete destruction.
Fantasy has been at the heart of our friendship for as long as we can remember. We are Adelina Cortese Pons and Valentina Branca, co-authors of our book, listed below, and our journey as writers began when we were eleven, sharing a single copy of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, reading it aloud, taking turns with each chapter. That love for fantasy only grew stronger over the years—through travels, studies in International Relations, and countless late-night writing sessions. Today, despite living an ocean apart, we still meet every Friday to write together, crafting new worlds and unforgettable stories because, for us, fantasy is more than a genre—it’s home.
While you read this story, you step into a world where magic and science intertwine, where armored bears rule the icy north, witches soar through the skies, and every person has a daemon—a living reflection of their soul. The adventure takes us across breathtaking landscapes, from the bustling streets of Oxford to the frozen wastelands of the Arctic, uncovering secrets that shake the very foundation of reality.
Lyra’s journey is thrilling, full of mystery, danger, and a sense of wonder that never fades. Philip Pullman weaves a story so immersive and thought-provoking that it makes us question everything we think we know. It’s a book that sparks curiosity, adventure, and just the right amount of rebellion.
Philip Pullman invites you into a dazzling world where souls walk beside their humans as animal companions and powerful forces clash over the nature of the universe.
When fearless young Lyra uncovers a sinister plot involving kidnapped children and a mysterious substance called Dust, she sets out on a daring quest from Oxford to the frozen Arctic. With armored bears, witch queens, and a truth-telling compass as her allies, Lyra must face choices that will shape not just her destiny—but that of countless worlds. A thrilling blend of adventure, philosophy, and wonder, perfect for curious minds.
