Here are 4 books that The Glass Books fans have personally recommended once you finish the The Glass Books series.
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I was born in 1957, the year the Space Race started when the USSR launched its first satellite and grew up with astronauts and cosmonauts on the TV. Yuri Gagarin and Gordon Cooper were familiar names to me as a child but I only really started to take notice as the Apollo programme ramped up. Science fiction influenced me at an very early age with books like Kemlo and Tom Swift and, having pestered my English teacher with my embryonic works decided at seventeen to write my own novel. Some years later and just short of sixty I finally wrote Sirkkusaga and now have seven published works out there - as well as two anthologies.
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.
Peter Grant, having become the first English apprentice wizard in fifty years, must immediately deal with two different but ultimately inter-related cases. In one he must find what is possessing ordinary people and turning them into vicious killers, and in the second he must broker a peace between the two warring gods of the River Thames.
If you regard science fiction, fantasy, and horror as throwaway literature, think again. It is within such tales that the contest between good and evil is given center stage, wherein heroic acts are celebrated, and virtue discussed in all its many permutations. I would call speculative fiction a worthy successor to the medieval morality play, a dramatic form that used allegorical characters to teach moral lessons. To wit—stories are an instrument of culture, a way to promote common values and an important activity for any civilization that intends to stick around. You won’t find an abundance of this vibe in ‘serious’ fiction—and when you do, it’s not as much fun.
I was 9 years old when I read this title for the first time—which is not to say the John Carter series is suitable for that age group. In 1959, I was given a junior bookworm card for the library at Union Church, Metro Manila, Philippines, where I discovered a lot of material I was too young to read.
Burroughs was a man of his times—scholar, cowboy, rancher, drifter, would-be soldier—a young adult at the turn of the 19th century when every house on every street was occupied by durable, resilient people. That was his reality. It shows in the work.
In 1866, a U.S. Army captain is mysteriously transported into conflict on the planet Mars. Airships, monsters, warring clans, beautiful women, giant doglike creatures. You name it, Mars has it. Preposterous, right? I took another read just to see and suspended disbelief right away. There’s that Magical Realism act…
Rediscover the adventure-pulp classic that gave the world its first great interplanetary romance-now featuring an introduction by Junot Diaz
In the spring of 1866, John Carter, a former Confederate captain prospecting for gold in the Arizona hills, slips into a cave and is overcome by mysterious vapors. He awakes to find himself naked, alone, and forty-eight million miles from Earth-a castaway on the dying planet Mars. Taken prisoner by the Tharks, a fierce nomadic tribe of six-limbed, olive-green giants, he wins respect as a cunning and able warrior, who by grace of Mars's weak gravity possesses the agility of a…
I was born in 1957, the year the Space Race started when the USSR launched its first satellite and grew up with astronauts and cosmonauts on the TV. Yuri Gagarin and Gordon Cooper were familiar names to me as a child but I only really started to take notice as the Apollo programme ramped up. Science fiction influenced me at an very early age with books like Kemlo and Tom Swift and, having pestered my English teacher with my embryonic works decided at seventeen to write my own novel. Some years later and just short of sixty I finally wrote Sirkkusaga and now have seven published works out there - as well as two anthologies.
I read these as a young teenager and loved them, they’re star-spanning, rip-roaring tales of civilisations pitted against each other across the universe. Triplanetary is the first book of the Lensman series but we have to wait until book two; First Lensman, for the arrival of the titular characters.
The good guys (Hooray! Including Earth, of course) have an advantage in that certain of them have been selected by the Arisians to wear a device called the Lens - which allows them to harness their mental powers against the Boskonians (the bad guys - boo!), who are assisted by the evil Eddorians.
It’s all good fun, and I admit to the stories having influenced me slightly.
Triplanetary is a space opera by E. E. Smith. This is the original version first serialized in Amazing Stories magazine in 1934. Smith later reworked the story into the first of two Lensman prequels which was then published in 1948. Triplanetary covers an eons-long eugenics project of the super-intelligences of the Arisians an alien race breeding two genetic lines to become the ultimate weapon in their cosmic war with the Eddore.
In school, I wasn’t fond of physics. Most of my education focused on the history of human civilization and culture. I rediscovered physics partly thanks to the books mentioned here—and the strangeness of quanta. My studies, exposure to Tao and Zen philosophies, and exploration of physics have given me a unique perspective and awareness: humanity is merely a tiny particle in the universe, neither central nor the king of all creation. Nothing new, of course—Buddha, Heraclitus, and Shakespeare all knew it well.
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld hooked me from the very first pages—cliché as that may sound, it’s true. Virtually the entire book (as well as others from the Discworld) I read with a smile on my face.
Pratchett’s unique humor, his satirical take on human nature, the imaginative world of Discworld, and his reflections on reality come together in a brilliant mix that made me read… and read… and read.
On a world supported on the back of a giant turtle (sex unknown), a gleeful, explosive, wickedly eccentric expedition sets out. There's an avaricious buy inept wizard, a naive tourist whose luggage moves on hundreds of dear little legs, dragons who only exist if you believe in them, and of course The Edge of the planet...
