99 Books Like Sleeping Giants

From the get-go the reader is introduced to Lauren Fielding, a teenager living with a condition that makes her believe everything she is told. When the opportunity for her to surgically correct this comes up, she takes it and sets much of the plot in motion. What I love is the narrative style; a set of journal entries, scenes, and supporting materials which serve to present the events as Lauren and the people around her see it. This is a classic coming-of-age speculative fiction story with sprinkles of a possibly unreliable narrator, leaving the reader to follow along with the events and create their own conclusions about what is happening. Laura and the pacing her story provides are both memorable and noteworthy.

Emma Watson firmly places herself in the mind of the protagonist Renata Ghali. Through this semi-reliable narrator, we learn that in this perfect planned society, a lot is happening beneath the still surface. This novel unfolds slowly, layering the pieces on scene by scene until something startling (which I don’t want to ruin for you) happens to the main character. Often in sci-fi, you see the character make some monumental decision, and then they win, and everything’s happy. This book doesn’t do that. Instead, it looks at the very real-feeling impact of said “monumental decision” on those who made it. And despite all of the character depth, Emma Watson manages to deliver a juicy, thick alien world that will leave you salivating for more! 

I am a fan of the in medias res technique and this story has one of the best openings I have seen in a long time. Yes, it is a graphic novel, but the character of Forever Carlyle embodies pure science fiction goodness. As the champion or “Lazarus” of her family, she is strong, intelligent, and striving to find a balance between family loyalty and discovering what she wants out of life. The reader feels her doubts and insecurities just as prominently as they feel her strength. The connection between Forever and fellow Lazarus Joaquin is a personal favourite, and it is moments like this that provide a fairly hard and fast-paced sci-fi with some softness.

This is one of the first stories I ever read with a strong female protagonist at the helm. Dante Valentine is a bounty hunter, necromancer, and a no-nonsense kind of woman. She is stubborn, flawed, and her story is a classic answer to what happens when you make a literal deal with the devil. I appreciate that she is unapologetically human and blatantly admits to her faults as a person. She is honest—perhaps sometimes too much so—and perseveres when things go awry. If anything, I would say she is a stand-out not only as far as female protagonists are concerned, but protagonists in speculative fiction as well.

The second in his entertaining detective series in a near future where 2% of the population is paralyzed and has to teleoperate robots in order to interact with the world (interestingly, it was written before the pandemic). The protagonist, Chris (we never are told their gender, making for a delightful guessing game), is an FBI agent investigating a murder and along the way faces the kind of casual discrimination that the disabled undoubtedly face every day. Chris maintains a wry sense of humor through it all, adding an Elmore Leonard or Donald E. Westlake vibe that makes me laugh out loud. 

While many people expect that the future of space exploration will look like Star Trek, the reality is that robots will be blazing the trail around the solar system and beyond for some time.

This is an important and well-argued book that explains the realities of distance and danger that dictate the use of robots rather than humans for space exploration. It also explores the reasons why human-led space exploration is so popular in spite of its great expense.

I bought this book because of the great write-ups about it. The author won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and this was his first book following that award, so for me, it was recommended as soon as the author won the award.

It's a great read and has filled me with a mixture of emotions, so it will be interesting to see how you feel after reading it. For me personally, it's a book to study and learn from, as there is always room for learning in any career you decide to do.

It fascinated me because Klara is an 'Artificial Friend', which ties in with my research and interests in Artificial Intelligence.

Every now and then, I discover a book that has imagined a world and/or a character that takes me by surprise, and I can’t stop reading about them. Again, it’s all about character! In this book, I met a human cyborg enslaved by a computer program and built as a security unit rented out to corporate groups exploring planets for profit.

This sentient cyborg frees itself from enslavement, hilariously staves off the boredom of security work by watching its favorite media series, and as it watches characters in these shows, begins to learn about human behavior. I enjoyed the awkward, touching way it developed friendships and emotional connections. The character, which calls itself Murderbot, presents as if it’s on the spectrum.

Its first-person narration is snarky, occasionally hilarious, and endearing as it slowly learns what it means to have friendships. And oh, it finds all this wildly inconvenient, hates eye… show more.

A badass woman whose not quite a woman. I was absorbed in this speculative sci-fi tale. It’s an easy and quick read yet the characters are well enough developed that I became furious on the protagonist’s behalf. I liked that it had me asking many questions on the grey moral landscape that is robotics and artificial intelligence. 

I found the protagonist relatable in spite of the fact she wasn’t human. She was programmed to please a man, yet discovered a form of self-actualization through reading. Her growth as a character was refreshing and I was rooting for her the whole way. Under a desert sky as sweat trickled down my back, I couldn’t move, I had to keep reading.

I found this book in my high school library, fresh off of The Old Kingdom (trilogy, at the time), and while I needed a break from the Ender's series. Seeing it on the shelf, it looked like a perfect option against the cultural backdrop that was the success of The Matrix.

This is from the less-likely-to-happen end of dystopian spectrum and involves evil overlords ruling over everyone after anyone over the age of fourteen has "disappeared" due to the "Change". No one over fourteen exists due to something called a "sad birthday", of which the details here will be spared, except to say it makes the annual games between districts look like little more than fanfare. Also, please keep stocking this book in school libraries because it is terrifying.