93 Books Like Sea of Tranquility

I love this book for its Matroyska doll-style structure: The first five sections tell stories in different periods— from the mid-19th century to the 22nd—loosely connected by repeating characters and media, each ending abruptly and without resolution. The sixth section, set in the 24th century, is the spine of the novel, told in its entirety. Then Mitchell revisits the time periods in reverse chronological order, resolving each story, ending where we began in the mid-19th century.

It was a highly satisfying experience that changed my view of how a story could be told. It is widely considered one of the finest novels of the 21st century. It covers ideas I would normally balk at, like reincarnation and the existence of eternal consciousness. Still, the storytelling is so powerful that it all came across as believable to me. I loved the way Mitchell demonstrated how an idea in one time period… show more.

As a writer who’s interested in what comes next—after climate change, after fascism—I love how Diane Cook uses broad brush strokes to show us the future, without going into too much history or detail.

Instead of hyper-focusing on what the future holds for us, Cook directs our attention to one small, outlier community that’s doing weird things. This is a great technique: she paints a picture of a future world by painting a picture of a fringe group that’s trying desperately to be different from the main one.

A mother-daughter drama drives the plot forward, and we learn about the rules and ruminations of the fringe group as the characters sort out their power struggles.

Shocking reversal of fortunes exposes the lines of assumed gender-based reactions to power and human reactions to power. (Pun intended)

I’m fascinated by both the format Alderman used to tell her story and the way she exposed me to the psychology of human nature. I aspire to this level of storytelling.

I realized the reason men and other demographics of power fear women or other minorities gaining power is that they understand the underbelly of decisions made from positions of power. They’re scared of the tables being turned. Those people might escalate their fear to terror if they see how clearly we see their actions and consider using them ourselves.

I believe this book is one of the classic staples of surreal fiction. Its disjointed, spiraling narrative and sprawling non-linear plot lines challenge the definition of what a ‘book’ is. It uses everything from footnotes to text alignment to color schemes to make the act of reading itself increasingly difficult, which matches the house’s influence on the narrators’ memories and interests.

Reading it for me was like learning Latin or watching Casablanca–it gave context to decades of experimental media inspired by it, from TV shows to DOOM game mods. Love it or hate it, it’s a solid tool for any inhuman’s toolkit. 

Vampires kept me up at night when I was a kid.

When they got twinkly and dreamy in popular fiction, I was unimpressed. Then I read The Passage. These are your grandfather’s vampires, boys and girls, and they want to kill you. I loved the blend of horror, science fiction, and the dystopian near-future United States where the story begins.

From the scientist who wants to cure death to the quest a hundred years after the Virals appeared, this book is filled with a raw humanity and the struggle to survive that captivated me. It’s a long book, but when I finished, I dove right into the next one. I had to know what happened, and I needed another dose of vampires that scared the sh!t out of me.

Many dystopian books focus on the horror and give us little information about the event that led to the situation. In this one, I loved that I got a lot of backstory; I liked getting to know the main character, Candace, and learning how she ended up in her predicament.

The details of her job in publishing was strangely fascinating, the mundanity of her work life set against the dystopia was a unique perspective, it was also filled with humor that I found refreshing.

I love how George Saunders creates really weird alternate realities, but doesn’t make a big deal about it.

In Liberation Day, we learn about the inner lives of people who seem to be enslaved by being “pinioned” to a wall after they’ve been programmed to perform as storytellers for their owners. Because we’re learning about this world from the pinioned narrator, we are not subjected to any lecturing or moralizing about the situation.

Instead, we hear about his romantic yearning for his owner’s wife, and that’s the tension around which the story is built. He only gives us the details that are necessary for us to understand his yearning, giving the reader just enough information to suss out the scenario in which he finds himself captive.

This book is probably the most out-of-place of the five novels on this list. Where the others make their high-concept elements obvious early, the author chooses a different route in this one.

Like so many of his novels, Bret Easton Ellis opens his story with shallow and vapid characters behaving in absurd ways and uttering dialogue so outrageous I wondered if the entire enterprise was a joke. But despite the hilarious parody of substance-free celebrity and the inane repetition of idiotic phrases like “baby,” this story ultimately has more to say than, ahem, less than zero. It’s a takedown of capitalism and a bankrupt culture, so biting it would make Philip K Dick proud.

The second half of the novel, in fact, reads like PKD himself.

I loved this book because it has mathematics to the nth degree! Some of it in the form of inside jokes like “easy to use partial differential equations” that made me laugh out loud. Some of it, such as “equations that had sadness as a constant,” are in a “techno-poetic” style that I strive to achieve in my own writing. But this “meta-science fiction” novel is also filled with musings on writing and creativity. The self-referential recursion of a book within a book within a book makes the paradoxes of time travel even more interesting. The “reality portions” in which the main character pursues his quest to “find his father” are as deep and well done a theme as any I have read in sci-fi.

Bradbury remains my favorite author of all time, and this collection of short stories contains some of his best work, including my favorite time travel tale, “A Sound of Thunder.”

Imagine an avid hunter given the opportunity to stalk the king of prehistoric beasts, the monstrous T-Rex. Then imagine that things don’t go exactly as planned. The world will never be the same.