100 Books Like Bloodchild

I'm the perfect age for this book that is steeped in 1980s nostalgia. I listened to much of the same music on my Walkman and even worked in a VHS movie rental store—the cover design of the paperback mimics VHS packaging, including the "Be Kind Please Rewind" sticker. If you were in your teens or early twenties in the '80s you'll love all the references. If you weren't, you're getting a great glimpse into the time. And it's also truly creepy and scary!

I'm a fan of classic sci-fi of the '50s, and you don't get much more classic than Andre Norton. There's a lot of interesting nuts and bolts stuff going on for a book written before we landed on the moon. Of course, the science is dated, the characters are all men, and there are a couple of unfortunate colonizer-type comments expressed toward extraterrestrials, but if you're able to look past those outdated viewpoints, it's an interesting yarn, and the beginning of a four-book series featuring the crew of the starship Solar Queen.

I have never read a novel so close to prophecy.

Published in 1995, Parable starts in July 2024 amidst the election of an autocrat who, by the sequel Parable of the Talents, literally pledges to “make America great again.” I started my platform in 2015 in the same context.

This novel pulled me into its harrowing tale of how to survive civilizational collapse: the dismantling of systems, norms, and climate change that we are all currently going through.

The lesson is ultimately about embracing change, caring for and trusting each other in community, and coming up with our own ways of being together. So many of our ancestors have survived periods of collapse by the same principles. These ancestral lessons still guide me, and I believe are critical to surviving AI dystopia.

Kindred shocked me, and in both good and bad ways. I knew it was going to be a compelling story, but once I got into it was stunningly surprised by the timeline shifts and various lens scopes it relays. Octavia's a brilliant storyteller.

What if reproduction required people to mate with another species—creatures more alien than bacteria?

In this book, Lilith Iyapo awakes after a nuclear war to find her alien saviors expect just that. The alien Oankali are organisms whose cells modify their own genes to perfection. But their genes run short of diversity, until they are compelled to share genes with a population as alien to them as—humans.

This disturbing novel asks us how much of our own humanity would we trade for survival? Would I welcome a half-alien child if its monstrous traits cured cancer? A science fiction novel that made me imagine the biological dilemmas of gene exchange.

This is the second time I've read Wild Seed. The first time I read it, I found it a page turner. I liked it so much that I loaned it to a friend, who must also have loved it, because they never gave it back. I didn't mind. I hope they gave it to someone else when they were done with it, because Wild Seed deserves a wide audience.

After many years, I bought myself another copy, and still found it a page turner. Butler has crafted a compelling heroine with unique abilities who still manages to be utterly human and relatable. The latter two characteristics also describe several of the supporting players; Butler takes pains to properly flesh them out. Even the villain's motivations are understandable, given his nature and history. This is one of a handful of books I recommend to others utterly without reservation.

I love this book because it explores the end of the world in the most intimate and emotional way possible.

What moved me deeply was not the apocalypse itself, but the quiet relationship between father and son, trying to preserve goodness in a world where goodness no longer seems to matter. I felt a constant weight while reading, as if hope itself was fragile and rare.

It made me reflect on what it truly means to carry faith and humanity when everything else is gone.

It is a profound and unsettling dive into societal decay that feels terrifyingly prescient. Atwood’s brilliance lies in the details—how she exposes the weaponization of language and the stripping of individual identity until even a birth name becomes a forbidden memory. Offred’s internal act of storytelling is a breathtaking form of rebellion; it’s a reminder that even when we are silenced, our internal narratives and small acts of defiance are what keep us human. It isn’t a "feel-good" read, but it is an essential one.

This book helped me release shame after a colleague of mine told me my work wasn’t “science.”

Here’s the truth: to create a healing platform, I needed to tap into ways of thinking that academia sees as “woo woo” and “savage.” I looked to the stars. I meditated. I did rituals and read myths.

Dr. Kimmerer, trained as a traditional botanist, realized that the Indigenous myths and stories she was told as a child contained scientific knowledge passed down for generations by her tribe.

She realized there were scientific truths her community knew for millennia that traditional scientists only discovered within the last 100 years. This is the power of Ancestral Intelligence, disregarded by the same science that ultimately created AI.

What stories, fables, and myths have taught you valuable lessons about the world?

This sweeping epic of the relationship between ourselves and the natural world is not only amazing, it is breathtaking in its breadth and ambition. Weaving together the story threads of nine character whose lives have been deeply affected by trees and forests, the non-linear narratives join the nine from their initial captivations with nature to their political empowerment as they eventually join forces as activists. The writing is in turns beautiful, suspensful, and fascinating, as when two of the characters live on a tree stand an ancient redwood to protect it from loggers. Those passages are nothing less than revelatory. A must read for anyone who has enjoyed a walk in the woods and who would like to do so agin.