Books like Flora Curiosa — picked by fans

I grew up with and write horror stories, so it’s very difficult for a book to unnerve me; this is one of the only books I can think of that earns the honor. It is half an ecological text and half a horror story, with its romantic prose balanced by intense natural research to create a surreal, unnerving description of the natural world.

This book made me hyper-aware of everything from the grass outside my window to the cells that make up my body, and I love how it uses both existential horror and the real, biological horror of being a living creature to leave a lasting unease. Are you aware you’re breathing? Can you feel your tongue in your mouth? Your heart’s nonstop beating? You can, now.

Like H.G. Wells, Wyndham is excellent at depicting normal people who are dealing with an unusual event in normal locations. This creates a level of reality that makes the circumstances more horrific. I could imagine myself in those places, with those people.

The Triffids have never translated well to the screen because the plants look awkward. This isn’t the case in the book. This is my favorite of all the Wyndham books because of their journeys and their descriptions of the landscape around them.

A brilliant science fictional idea changes everything about the world, and in Tade Thompson’s Arthur C Clarke Award-winning Rosewater, where an alien dome has appeared in Nigeria and opens once a year to heal the sick, the world has been thrown dangerously off-kilter.

The murder-mystery is not a conventional one as our hero Kaaro, a human sensitive created by this alien intrusion and now government agent, is trying to figure out why those like him are suddenly dying. There are many strange science-fictional ideas driving this book, but it is Kaaro – a former thief trying his best to do good in difficult circumstances – that gives this book its wonderful heart.

I believed in and rooted for him even though he doesn’t ever seem to believe in himself.

If it’s hard to make readers side with spiders, what about plants?

The planet on which an unlucky group of humans are stranded in Semiosis is indeed home to sentient plants that see humans as just another resource. But this isn’t some Day of The Triffids monster tale. The plants can’t move anything like humans can, which, in the hands of a lesser author, might make for quite a static, boring story.

Burke demonstrates her boundless imagination by taking the reader into the "mind" of the plant, seeing the world, its threats, and resources in a completely different and plant-like way and bringing a sense of urgency as the survival of plant and humans alike become bound together.

It’s a fascinating read, and the follow-up, Interference, is just as good. 

I fell in love with this book when I was eleven years old, and I still love it now. That’s despite the fact that I now see just how corrupt and vicious the first human visitors to the moon truly are.

Yet there are moments here that still hold the old enchantment. There’s the instant when the "hero" grasps that night is falling on the moon, and as the shadow of a new, strange "sunset" starts to lengthen that he has perhaps only minutes to live, or there’s the encounter with the Selenites and the realization that he faces an absolutely alien consciousness with no connection to his own.

No-one outdoes Wells in making the fantastic utterly real to the reader.

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.

During a lengthy hospital stay once, I needed to escape. Magazines were formulaic and newspapers dark. This book materialized on a library trolley. A plain dark blue hard cover looking dull and aged amongst the same-old paperbacks. After only the first story of this magical collection I was hooked away from all around me and into Wells’ tales of incredible imagination. Wells’ other shorts have become well known to the masses but here contained over forty lesser-known proto-sci-fi gems. In the way that Dickens did with characters that others could not, Wells was not constrained by conventions of science. The thought-provoking The Door in the Wall and The Red Room remain today are examples of skill for all contemporaries to aspire to.

This book was first published in 1910. When I think of H.G. Wells, I think of his story about a time machine but this story, which I studied in school, was about changing your life, living your dream. Magic happens when Mr. Polly attempts suicide with the result that he becomes a hero and frees himself from the chains that bind him. I learned that all is possible. One does not need to be young, beautiful, and run a 4-minute mile to achieve one’s goals. With this thought in mind, I have run a marathon and entered two triathlons, finishing both and not coming last! I began my writing career at 70 years of age and am now the author of 5 books on mystery, history, and magic. 

A work of fiction rather than a travelogue, this is a gently told story of a young cockney draper’s assistant, Hoopdriver, who sets off on a two-week cycling holiday along the south coast of England in the summer of 1895 – when the great Victorian cycling boom was at its peak. Revelling in his independence and the sense of boundless possibility that comes over him as he pedals grandly through the countryside, Hoopdriver finds himself coming to the aid of the mysterious and beautiful Young Lady in Grey, an upper-class female cyclist who is seeking to avoid the attentions of another cyclist, a wealthy cad named Bechamel. A shrewd social observer and a keen cyclist himself, Wells saw the bicycle as a vehicle for change, equality, and the breaking down of class barriers. Wheels of Chance captures beautifully that all too brief fin de siècle period when the future really… show more.

I absolutely love the concept of this book. The idea that someone could make human-animal hybrids intrigued me. 

Of course, typical of most humans, the characters in this story never see the hybrids as “good enough”. I do understand that one of the themes in this story is the struggle humans go through with their more “animalistic” nature. However, I’ve never understood that. 

I saw the Beast Folk as better than humans, especially once they accepted who they are. I love that about animals. They don’t care what they look like or who they love. They are wholeheartedly themselves at every moment in their lives.