Books like From the Earth to the Moon — picked by fans

This is my favorite hard sci-fi classic. I love the beautiful mix of real science (wormholes excepted), compelling story, and characters, and it touches on both first contact and the way in which human nature might cause us to react to it. That is the power combo, in my opinion!

The movie of the book was very good — Robert Zemeckis is a brilliant director — although it left out some fantastic details that, as a math and science fan, I really loved! (I won’t spoil it here; it’s too good.)

I love Arthur C. Clarke’s work. A fantastic story about artificial intelligence and how man can be manipulated by it.

What amazed me was how a computer named HAL could disobey a human command. The film version of 2001 was made with both director Kubrick and Clarke involved. The original idea came from a short story written by Clarke, titled "Sentinel."

To me, this partnership worked well, but it is an unusual project that produced an iconic book and movie at the same time. Like all of Clarke's works, it is a book to keep on the shelf so it can be read whenever you need to experience sci-fi at its best.

I love this book for its poetic, dreamlike quality. Bradbury’s writing pulled me in and didn’t let go, painting a picture of Mars that was both beautiful and tragic. As a pre-teen and a teen, in my imagination, I had red dust stuck to my feet, and I was there with the characters. What captivated me was the way the stories felt timeless—each one was like a snapshot of a moment layered with meaning.

I felt like I wasn’t just reading a book about colonizing Mars; I was exploring humanity’s deepest fears, hopes, and regrets. We have companies only today working on getting to Mars, I feel so upset that I know I will likely never set foot on those dusty red shores, but I am thrilled to know it may still happen for others.

Bradbury’s work made me think about the consequences of exploration—how, in our quest to conquer… show more.

Set in the near future, this novel imagines that the Americans and Chinese are racing to get to Mars. Meanwhile, a group of teenagers team up with an astronaut forced to retire in disgrace. One of the teens has invented a new type of drive that might just allow them to beat both governments to Mars. The book is fast-paced, fun, and shows how a team can come together to solve a problem, without ignoring the very real dangers of space travel. It also gives a nod to how technology developed for space travel can help us right here on Earth.

I am old enough to remember the first lunar landing. I watched it as it happened, on a black-and-white TV screen. I was intrigued by the notion that we, here on Earth, would someday be in conflict with people who were born and raised on the Moon. It’s almost inevitable that you will eventually argue with your neighbors. This novel marks the first occasion that I can recall reading about how such a conflict might start. Even if I do live long enough to see humans walk on the moon again, I will still be thinking about this book.

I absolutely love reading this book to my son. No matter how many times we read it, he keeps asking for us to read it again! He went through a phase (pun intended!) where he was obsessed with the moon and wanted to learn all about it.

This book is educational and teaches kids about the moon, but it is still a fun and engaging read with adorable illustrations. 

I recommend the entire Broken Earth trilogy, but the final book does the most interesting things with the series’ latticework of narrative symmetry. By this point, it’s clear that a mother and her daughter are the centerpieces of the story, and that they are both on track to collide. As they draw nearer and their journeys beget staggering losses and sacrifices, they switch polarities and the daughter, once meek, challenges her warrior mother, who has pacified after a life of war and loss. And amid all this is a story about why the Earth, which is a living being, rages against humanity. The layers amplify the thrills of the payoffs and reversals, and subtly unpack the cyclicity of revenge.

An eerie and sinister plot draws you in from the start. The three-part book gives you a historic overview of the origins of the town it plays off. Building up to a climax that had me up till late to learn the outcome. At first, I thought it was the epilogue that the author cleverly put in front to give you a taste of what's to come as the story unfolds, I realized my mistake and, in the end, was surprised that it ended in an unsettling end. 

This is one of my all-time favourite books I used to read to my children at bedtime.

It has all the beauty of a completely stylized, detailed, and yet seemingly believable world both on earth and on the moon, yet includes aliens! I think the marriage of story and pictures works perfectly, with the reader finding aliens on every page, seemingly unbeknown to the writer!

It makes for fantastic squeals of delight as children find aliens, more seeming to appear on each consecutive read. I think it’s a great book to let the imagination run as well as stimulating conversations about what really might be on the moon. Brilliant!

As explorers carrying cameras, the Gemini and Apollo astronauts (1965-72) were like the pioneer photographers of the 19th century who, with their cameras, responded to the unknowns of the American West. These astronauts, however, were responding to the new and unexplored by photographing their experiences inside their spacecraft and outside in the vacuum of space. During the late 90s the photographer Michael Light gained access to NASA’s Apollo-era photo archive and made the first drum-scanned digital files from perfect copies of the original flight films. Light’s artful editing and juxtaposition of superbly reproduced full-page black and white, and color images creates a cinematic-like journey to the moon and back. In the annals of published space photography, there are very few well-designed books as timeless.