Books like Alien Safari

Told by a master storyteller I enjoy reading, this book grabbed me immediately and drew me inexorably into the main character’s life as an eternity technician.

Not a unique theme – man manipulating his future – but I liked the twist when all future is threatened for the love of one woman. I kept turning pages, wanting to know how my hero would reconcile forbidden love at the price of eternity’s end.

This is a thoughtful book that denied me peace until it ended. I liked the technical concepts revealed in the story and how they were woven into very human reactions. A lesson for our modern time?

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.

Realistic space settlement stories balance infinite optimism against terrifying risk. The celebrated authors of this science fiction masterpiece explore this cosmic equation without mercy. The veritable utopia of Camelot, mankind’s first interstellar settlement, is about to go very, very, very wrong. After reading this book, I stopped visiting the river behind my house and I lost sleep for weeks. It taught me that when we audaciously plan our real-world space settlements, the details really do matter. Living on another planet requires the consideration of thousands and thousands of important details… and unfortunately, the doomed settlers of Camelot have overlooked one.

When planetary scientists study Mars, we characterize resources and—distantly and coldly, visualize how those resources might be used someday. Yet you can’t truly understand a place until you have lived there. This book invites us to live on Mars by following the troubles of Amber, a teenager growing up in a remote pressurized trailer with her larger-than-life father. What are her goals and talents? What does she worry about every day? Who does she love, hate, and strive to understand? Since Mars is all she has ever known, she struggles to relate to settlers who carry old-Earth baggage around with them. Mars is new and exciting! Getting inside Amber’s head lets us get inside our own. We can never think like Amber, but we can try.

This coming-of-age story centers on Jaxom, a young dragon rider and future lord of a hold, and his bonded dragon Ruth, a rare, small, and often silly white dragon. Jaxom thinks his greatest problem is the bullies who mock him for his status and his dragon’s unusual size, but as he strives to prove his naysayers wrong, he ends up thrown in the middle of political machinations far beyond what he could have dreamed. I love Ruth’s almost childlike nature and his fearless willingness to rise to whatever challenge they faced. Their friendship, and unique relationship with the tiny fire lizards of the land, was charming at every turn. 

Carl Sagan was that most unusual of creatures: a top scientist who was also a lyrical writer. In an era when scientists were still wary of dealing with the press – an aversion that he helped overturn – his books were particularly influential in promoting the search for extraterrestrial life, both on the planets of our own Solar System (notably Mars) and on planets of other stars. In nearly 40 short, varied essays, The Cosmic Connection outlines our links with the cosmos around us, raises the possibility that we are not alone, and discusses what we might do if an extraterrestrial contact were to be received.

This is the real-life account of a professor who gets caught up in “The Phenomena,” a term used to describe the appearance and interaction with extraterrestrial activity and encounters.

Diana Pasulka is a professor of religious studies who is researching the similarities between encounters with angels and demons, which are very similar in description to encounters with aliens and UFOs. Professor Pasulka is blindfolded and driven by a NASA scientist to a desert in New Mexico, where she is shown a secret “UFO crash site.” She doesn’t believe any of it. She says the ground is covered for miles by deteriorating aluminum cans that the government placed there over fifty years ago to obscure the UFO crash site and hide it. Later, her friend, Dr. Gary Nolan, a Stanford University scientist, verifies the objects from the crash site are not from this “universe.” 

I love this book because it is… show more.

This book is the grandfather of the modern small-town horror story–few novels before or since have developed such a sense of creeping dread and paranoia.

Aside from being impressed with Finney’s writing, the masterful way he manages mood, and the gradual deterioration of trust (which underpins the most admirable qualities of small-town life), I can trace my lineage as a horror writer back to this novel. 

I read this book on its release, and it blew me away. I’d always been a SciFi fan, but this was the first time I’d read an ‘alternative history’ book with science fiction leanings. It took a historical event, like WWII, and threw an invasion into it.

I love ‘what if’ scenarios. Most first contact books look at aliens arriving on a united Earth, but what if extraterrestrials arrived at a point where the world was most divided? It was my first time reading a book with multiple character perspectives. What did this invasion look like from an Allied or Axis perspective? How did it differ from the soldier to the civilian? This was a form of writing that became heavily influential to my writing.

Two fantastic cities are even better than one.

At the center of the story is Spearpoint, the tallest skyscraping megabuilding that you could imagine. It is so enormous that it is divided into segments from bottom to top with different levels of technology (Horsetown and Steamville at the bottom, cybertowns, and then the fantastic Celestial Levels at the top). But wait, there’s more.

Roaming the rest of the planet is the Swarm, hundreds of giant aircraft that function together as the neighborhoods of a “distributed city” much like the fleet in Battlestar Galactica. The very different cities do not play well together, and you get to choose which one you’d rather live in. I like flying, myself.