Books like Kiln People — picked by fans

This book takes everything amazing about the mystery genre and transposes it into an endlessly fascinating, well-developed sci-fi world. I was captivated by the web of interconnected plot lines, told from the perspectives of rich and multi-faceted characters throughout the entire story.

Specifically, the fact that all of their seemingly disconnected backstories converge to form the real picture of the story was masterfully done. Furthermore, the final reveal of the story was quite literally the only plot twist in fiction that has given me a verbal “oh my god” moment.

It was a massive inspiration for me and led to my love of a combination of morally gray mystery, sci-fi, and action adventure.

The Ophiuchi Hotline is the first of four novels set in Varley’s Eight Worlds universe, where bodies are malleable things, and appearance, gender, and even your basic form can be changed on a whim. Its protagonist, Lilo, begins by escaping her execution by allowing an illegally produced replicant to die for her. Her situation deteriorates steadily from there, as she is repeatedly killed and resurrected while passing through the belly of the solar system’s underworld.

This book hits all my sweet spots—a morally ambiguous protagonist, an imaginative plot that provides a running commentary on the many ways we’re making a mess of the present world, and, as a bonus, someone getting chucked into a black hole for making a new kind of food called “bananameat” out of human DNA. What more could you ask?

It's all about the unlikely alliance between a woman and her clone in this gripping revenge thriller.

Evelyn Caldwell learns that her husband Nathan is cheating on her when she discovers that he has stolen her cloning technology and replaced her with a more docile substitute. They work together to conceal Nathan's murder and preserve Evelyn's scientific reputation.

However, Evelyn discovers her clone standing over Nathan's body and crying, "It was self-defense." Its juicy premise raises eerie questions about love, justice, and the nature of identity.

This one is a deep cut, first published in 1951. It begins as a straightforward adventure, with a protagonist tasked with hunting down a dangerous alien that’s gotten loose on Earth. It becomes increasingly clear that something isn’t right, though, and eventually, our hero realizes that he’s actually a replicant, sent to do this job because his original was too cowardly to do it himself, and that his only hope of survival is to murder his original and take his place. I first read this when I was nine or ten years old, and the growing sense of horror as the truth becomes clear has stuck with me ever since, as has the dark, dark twist of an ending. This might be a tough one to find, but it’s well worth the effort. 

I knew the film Blade Runner before I read this, the novel upon which it's based, but I was not prepared for the richer complexities of the novel.

My favorite parts of the novel, a bizarre new religion and the extinction of all but human and animal life, barely make it into the film. Even the androids, built to be slaves, are much more nuanced and complex than in the film. I loved the conclusion of the book, which affirms the beauty of life, both natural and mechanical.

Stanislaw Lem, the Polish philosopher and science fiction novelist, had the talent of writing novels that raise profound questions about the human condition. One of the issues he tackled was whether our human form of intelligence is just one of many types of intelligence that might be found in the universe.

In one of his most gripping and mind-stretching novels, The Invincible, an Earth spaceship lands on an apparently uninhabited planet only to find that many years previously, another race had crash-landed on the planet, and their small, robotic assistants were the main survivors of the crash. Those automata evolved into a collection of tiny “flies,” which, although not individually conscious or possessed of reasoning, use evolved herd behaviors to destroy their surviving alien masters and all other living creatures on the planet’s surface. When the humans from Earth explore the planet, they encounter clouds of these tiny metallic… show more.

There’s a lot of fear-mongering going around regarding the possibility of a superintelligent AI that could take over or even wipe out humanity. 

Larson gives a clear rationale for why this is not going to happen and further, why it is a big mistake to expect computer reasoning to be like human reasoning. He explains the ways computers think and how they differ from the ways we do. 

In short, we don’t have a clue how to give computers either consciousness or common sense. Without these, worrying about superhuman intelligence is worrying about the wrong thing. There is no way a computer using current AI methods could evolve into a general intelligence.  

Illuminae is the first book in a YA science fiction series called the Illuminae Files Trilogy.

The story is told through intersecting first-person narratives constructed from journals, letters, texts, reports, and pictures. You want to absorb all that “found footage” goodness on paper. Trust.

There’s almost no exposition in Illuminae, especially in the first few chapters. That’s the beauty of these books – the narration is so visceral and urgent that you get invested in the story long before you really understand what’s happening. Putting the pieces of the world-building together is an addictive mystery in and of itself.

I don’t recommend cracking open this book the night before anything requiring a good night’s rest and lots of focus – your mind will be in 2575 until well after you’ve finished the last page. 

I really loved this book because of its wide breadth. If you are only going to read a single book on AI and its ramifications, this would be my top recommendation.

It covers everything from the history of artificial intelligence to what the short- and mid-term future will look like. This book provides a solid foundation to help you prepare for a future dominated by AIs and robots. 

I recently discovered Reid’s writing and I love the slow literary suspense of Foe, his twist relying upon an unreliable first-person narrator.

Farmer Junior is selected by lottery as a possible candidate for an off-world workforce colonising space. The narrative takes place on earth, however, and it is a domestic portrait of a marriage as much as it is science fiction. Junior is a transparent and sincere narrator. His unreliability comes from what he himself does not know and his hazy memory of his own past. ("Everything blends into a nebulous fog.")

His narrative reveals more than he realises, including through his treatment of a horned beetle in their closet. As with the best fiction, it holds a mirror up to our own humanity.