Books like Divers Down! — picked by fans

I recommend this book because it was one of the first books that made me feel like the world was bigger than anything I’d known.

When I read it, I remember feeling that rush, that sense of being lifted out of my own life and dropped into a place where courage mattered, and strange new landscapes waited around every corner. It wasn’t just adventure; it was escape, wonder, possibility. 

Readers who love getting lost in another world will understand that feeling immediately. And it fits my theme because it reminds me that stepping into the unknown, whether on Mars or in an ancient story, can change the way you see everything.

This pick reflects changes to speculative fiction that had taken place by the 2010s, including common publication by smaller publishers and frequent mashups of multiple genres. With robots (okay, so they’re called automatons), werewolves, ghosts, and a steampunk 1800s feel, the story is quite different from others in my list, but it shares the mystery, the fun adventure, and the proper romance.

Lucy Pickett comes to a dark manor house, ala Jane Eyre, and must use all her deductive skills and biological knowledge to solve a mystery and perhaps exonerate the dark and dangerous Lord Miles. In this story, I not only found those elements of mystery, discovery, and relationship that draw me in, but I also found the motivation to begin writing again myself.

I’ve picked this story from the 1950s because, as a teenager, it stirred my sense of wonder at time and space.

Dard Nordis must get safely to the ship that will carry him, his family, and his friends from the tyranny that has overtaken Earth to freedom among the stars. Halfway into the book, hundreds of years pass with the turn of a page, the tyranny of old Earth is just a distant memory, and Dard is in a new world far from the troubled world that he knew.

The story opened up for me the potential for a profoundly new life. It stirred my desire to discover the universe through scientific exploration. There is no romance here, but there is family, friends, and an adventure like no other!

This fun story from the 1990s revived my youthful joy in reading at a time when the busy-ness of adulthood had stolen it away. Siri has forgotten who she is and is swept into multiple space adventures as she tries to reconstruct her lost memories and regain the power and place she once held with her people. In the process, she finds friendships (the Drapsk!) and romance (Morgan!), and comes to understand herself better.

In reading this book, I realized that the science fiction stories I like best are ones that deal with relationships, mystery, and discovery and not just complicated technologies and their implications for society. I realized that I could have fun reading again if I had some fun science fiction with adventure, romance, and exploration!

Although the author is a runner, these stories don’t focus solely on that, but the adventures she can do because she is a runner. Anna speckles her life with adventures she can manage all the time instead of waiting for an epic adventure that you might only get to once or twice a year. She embodies my philosophy that life is meant to be lived. Do what inspires you right now. Sometimes that’s a race with a team number, and sometimes it’s a climb to the top of a mountain. Anna retells her tales of adventure in a collection of fun stories about epic undertakings and colors her stories with personality. 

Where can I even begin with the magic and immersion of Naomi Novik’s Uprooted?

Saying an unlikely heroine with an affinity for the forest meets an aloof, powerful wizard thus starting her quest to uncover the potential of her own magic barely scratches the surface of the enchanting world Novik creates. The allure and power of the dark forest that runs tangled roots beneath the story’s unspooling narrative is an unmissable experience.

And Novik’s uniquely beautiful language is perfectly matched by the magic of the fairy tale world itself and the weaving of the spells therein! 

Here we enter the topic of time travel, a concept very dear to me from both a fictional, moral, and scientific point of view. Many novels have attempted to show how one change in the past could change our future. Elton’s novel struck me for its originality in picking a notorious historical event largely ignored by fiction when it comes to time travel and alternate history. The assassination of the Franz Ferdinand of Austria is used not just as the spark of World War I but as the start of the ideological and warmongering terror that would spread through Europe. The novel is an example of man’s fixation with trying to find one cause for all problems when maybe there are multiple causes going back years and years. The search is as vain as the main character’s attempts to change history.

I love this book for the same reason that I loved the 1970s TV series of the same name: Johnny Ball loves maths, and his infectious enthusiasm for the subject is enough to make the most reluctant mathematician raise a smile. 

This book delves into the history of maths and ancient peoples from all over the world. It shows how ridiculously complicated our daily lives would be without some way of counting and generally shows maths to be magical, fascinating, and sometimes funny!

Not her most famous speculative novel, but one which has a lot to say about where our societies might be headed. Automation and the soaring cost of living have wrecked the economy. The solution seems bizarre at first – people spend half their lives in prison – but as the novel progresses, it starts to seem normal, plausible even. Atwood is asking us how much we really value our freedom, and what conditions might prompt us to surrender it willingly. This has a dotted line to human relationships and love, exploring why people get together and stay together – or not. More than ever Atwood’s dark wit is on display here, though whether we should be laughing about these things is an open question!

I loved Mary Norton’s book for its narrative hook: size. This is Gulliver’s Lilliput without the satiric political overtones. The main characters are a miniature Edwardian family called the Clocks because they live underneath one. The father, Pod, his wife, Homily, and their daughter, Arietty, are so small they fit under the floorboards of a human-sized house.

All their ingenuity is devoted to adapting their smallness to the world of Big People while preventing them from being “seen” by them. Everything they use must be “borrowed” from the bigger world and adapted to their circumstances. Matchboxes become dressers and chests of drawers; postage stamps serve as wall hangings and pictures; a thimble does duty as a soup tureen, while an actual tureen becomes a bathtub.

The discovery of a fully furnished doll’s house has become an occasion for wholesale redecoration. A crisis comes when Arietty is “seen” by the human… show more.