100 Books Like Humans

This was one of the first books to open my mind to the possibility of a country that would put social responsibility and ecological sustainability at the forefront of its goals.

Ernest Callenbach’s story is told through the journalist reports and personal writings of William Weston, who visits Ecotopia to report on this unique country, originally the Pacific Northwest and Northern California.

I love how Weston’s skepticism turns toward understanding. He eventually embraces what Ecotopia stands for and decides to live there himself to be a conduit of connection to the world outside of Ecotopia.

I was so moved by how a fictional story could so illuminate our own fears, our own hopes, and the possibilities of our future, that my own writing turned toward eco-fantasy after reading this book. 

What moved me is how much it means to belong to the Acoma estate.

Nacoya with her sharp wisdom, Keyoke with his unyielding honor, Arakasi with his chosen allegiance, even the grey warriors—they all belong to something bigger than themselves. When danger hits, the fear ripples through everyone. When triumph comes, it lifts all of them.

A big draw of the book was seeing people pull together not because they’re supposed to, but because they genuinely care. The Acoma isn’t just a political house; it feels like a place where being needed gives everyone a kind of quiet dignity. 

I felt awe-struck stepping into Gaea’s hollow world—where zeppelin-sized blimps glide through a sky inside the giant, planet-like being, and forests and rivers hang overhead. Gaea feels both grand and intimate: cathedral-scale biology paired with tavern-table camaraderie. 

And then there are the titanides. Their society feels hand-tooled—full of music and unpretentious sensuality. No posturing, no greed, just beings who live in balance. The centaur-like titanides dwell beneath a colossal tree hung with lanterns… and it all feels alien and warm and cozy and wonderful. 

The medieval Polish backwoods community feels startlingly alive—crude, superstitious, and the rest of it.

The Okoits, and later Conrad’s people, are rough villagers who drink, farm, and then get up the next day and do it again. At the same time, their sense of being part of a genuine community is unmistakable. 

Frankowski doesn’t just portray a functional medieval society in an alternate timeline; his engineer protagonist builds one, bolt by bolt. There’s this no-nonsense optimism coursing through the story: the conviction that one can literally make a better world equipped with nothing but grit, crudely smelted iron, and the guts to try.

What stuck with me is how this villager society absorbs innovation in a matter-of-fact manner. It’s messy, uneven, and wildly productive. You don’t have to co-sign every norm of its community to be impressed by how solidly it holds together. 

We are accustomed to thinking of ourselves as a species mentally superior to all others. This view was challenged in the 19th century with the discovery in Europe of the Neanderthals, an extinct large-brained human-like species. Our superiority seemed to be restored by evidence that Neanderthal extinction followed the arrival in Europe of seemingly dominant Homo sapiens from Africa. Accumulating archaeological and genetic evidence is changing that comfortable picture. Another large-brained but extinct human-like species, the Denisovans, are now also known to have existed in widespread regions of Russia, Asia, and Oceania. Not only were these archaic species technologically and culturally on a par with sapiens, but they also mated occasionally with each other and with our own species. Many people throughout the world carry genetic material from them, and these have contributed to our own regional adaptations. This book challenges our view of ourselves, and implies greater affinity and… show more.

A planet in its equivalent of the stone age is passing through a galactic debris field. An alien stargazer realizes that sooner or later some object will strike the planet and destroy it. The only hope of survival his species has is to leave the planet before that happens. But the concept is a mere abstraction to his people, the equivalent of a Neanderthal saying “we need to travel to the moon,” and the task is further complicated by the fact that their technology is biological in nature, focused on the manipulation of living tissue. It is hard to imagine how such technology could ever produce a spaceship. 

The novel--structured as a series of novellas-- follows the development of a fascinating alien species from its primitive roots to an age of high technology, each chapter focusing on a different time period. Always the stargazer’s warning is proclaimed by a few… show more.

This is the most entertaining (and informative) book on archaeology, prehistory and the cave art of our early ancestors that I have ever read.

There’s a lot of thoughtless talk by techno-optimistic philosophers about futures in which we all get to become superintelligent and live for thousands of years if we can apply the right tech to ourselves.

Sykes describes fascinating research on the Neanderthals, beings who were almost, but not quite, us. Reading her book, I wondered what it might have been like to grow up as the child of a union between a Homo sapiens and a Neanderthal. I found this especially useful when we consider future relationships between people determined to remain human and others who want tech to make them posthuman ASAP.

There’s so much information to gleen from Sykes to help us guess at how posthumans might treat beings whom they view as different and possibly inferior.

It’s back to the future in Riley’s Journey.

A young woman volunteers for a “research project” unaware she’ll be taking a one-way trip into past—40,000 years. She’s sent to provide companionship for Nathan, a modern man also trapped in the past.

The descriptions of primitive Earth and its dangers were so realistically portrayed the book put me right there with the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon. I sympathized with Riley’s shock and betrayal and with Nathan’s crushing loneliness and despair.

I’ve recommended this book over and over again.

In The Inheritors, William Golding brings to life a creature from the distant past: Lok, a hairy, barely verbal hominid whose small band is the last of their kind. New words and thoughts confuse him, flashes of logic slip out of his grasp, and he discovers the existence of mysterious Others; invaders with the formidable technology of bow and arrow. But The Inheritors is much more than an exciting adventure. The story stays with me because Lok is a mirror of us—of the human urge to try, to fail, to push on despite the odds. We have no idea what the next thousand years will hold. Neither did Lok. But just like him, we can’t help moving forward.