Books like Some Features of Living Matter in the Neighborhood of the Sun

This book recommendation is a bit unusual because it is not officially a children’s book, but I promise your kids will love it!

When I taught third grade, I had this book in my classroom, and it was a very hot commodity during independent reading time (although it wasn’t so much read as marveled at). With stunning, close-up images of all the planets, as well as moons, comets, asteroids, and more, this book will inspire your children to consider the magnificence of God’s creation and God himself as the one who created it all!

This is a book you’ll want to have out on a table, ready to be explored and discussed as a family. I guarantee you and your kids will be fascinated!

Lots of stories are set on Mars, and each author makes the planet their own. I enjoyed how this story picks up steam as malfunctions and irritable colleagues balloon into deadly danger. I can see myself in this near-future crew, and I relate to the characters because they make mistakes as they prepare for the main colony's arrival. I was totally engaged.

“Mythology, Shakespeare, Cthulhu, oh my!” Not as well-known as his most famous sci-fi work, Hyperion, Dan Simmon’s Ilium is just as impressive. The book bounces back and forth between characters of Greek myth reenacting the events of the Trojan War on the Martian plains, humans reawakening to their purpose on a post-apocalyptic Earth, and a pair of philosophizing robots, all in the shadow of a dark god coming to devour them all. The first in a duology, Ilium weaves its disparate storylines to a climax where readers solve the riddle of how it is that Lovecraft’s monsters are living alongside Shakespeare’s characters and Homer’s epic poem in a world that has suffered a mysterious cataclysm. Any reader of mythology and literary allusion in their speculative fiction will hungrily devour this book. 

Zubrin’s book proposes a tantalizing what-if. Steve Squyres’ Roving Mars presents readers with an exciting and suspenseful blow-by-blow account of an awesome thing that actually happened: the successful landing on Mars of the rovers Spirit and Opportunity, and the jaw-dropping success of those lovable little robotic beetles. It was hoped that the rovers might function for as long as 90 days. Opportunity performed for 15 years. (Spirit, that slacker, phoned it in for only 6 years.) Squyres, an astronomer, was the principal investigator for the mission, and he proves to be an enormously appealing guide: enthusiastic, excitable, grateful, humble. One of the many likable things about this book is that Squyres lets us see how scientists in charge of a years-long multimillion-dollar one-shot mission with a high chance of failure are every bit as superstitious as village peasants: Squyres makes sure to wear his tattered good-luck jeans to every… show more.

For someone who’s read every book in the Hornblower and Aubrey-Maturin series, it’s hard to find an age-of-sail book that has anything truly new to add.

Or so I thought until I picked up this book. It asks the question, what if Jack Aubrey could have sailed a wooden frigate to a Barsoomian version of Mars? The obvious answer, of course (and the one in this book) is that Britain would have extracted every plank of Marswood, ounce of Marsspice, and bag of Marstatoes it could get its imperialistic little hands on.

That’s Arabella’s world, where cannons boom in the interplanetary air currents, and spaceships are driven by sail power. As a fan of both sea stories and space operas, I’m there for it.

A time travel novel that transcends the ages and carries a strange environmental message.

The secrets of Mars are open slather in this adventurous escape to the past of the solar system. The fact that it involves the canals of Mars lends a delicious irony to this tale, which was published in 1999, after NASA's first-ever Mars rover, dubbed Sojourner, touched down in Chryse Planitia on July 4, 1997, atop the landing vehicle, Pathfinder. 

But, of course, this novel is placed in the distant past, when Martians actually existed. Is the alien tree an enemy or is it endeavoring to spread a message?

I recommend this book because it was one of the first books that made me feel like the world was bigger than anything I’d known.

When I read it, I remember feeling that rush, that sense of being lifted out of my own life and dropped into a place where courage mattered, and strange new landscapes waited around every corner. It wasn’t just adventure; it was escape, wonder, possibility. 

Readers who love getting lost in another world will understand that feeling immediately. And it fits my theme because it reminds me that stepping into the unknown, whether on Mars or in an ancient story, can change the way you see everything.

A hapless astronaut is on a mission to find Life on Mars and explores a seemingly barren landscape. The astronaut is unaware of what is going on -- if only he would turn around! This becomes a source of great entertainment and an early lesson on irony. I enjoyed this book not only for the illustrations, which are well suited to this story, but more importantly for the way that the words do not match what is going on in the illustrations.

This is a short but comprehensive overview of why we need to colonize Mars and the problems that must be solved in settling it. We would already be there, Petranek points out, if we had preserved and improved the technology that got us to the moon. In his view, NASA has accomplished little of value during the hiatus. But now private companies are making real progress toward turning humankind into a spacefaring species, which is essential both as insurance against disaster on Earth and because “when the first humans set foot on Mars, the moment will be more significant in terms of technology, philosophy, history, and exploration than any that have come before it.” I recommend this book not so much for the information it contains as for the inspiration it offers.

Most realistic fiction set on Mars is about small exploratory expeditions. There is surprisingly little available about colonization that doesn't bring in the discovery of intelligent inhabitants or a lost civilization, or at least traces of one having existed in the past. And the few novels with no fantastic elements tend to focus on political controversy. So I was happy to find this recent book that depicts what a colony on Mars might really be like. It's based on the board game "Terraforming Mars," which I haven’t seen, but doesn't depend on any knowledge of the game. The story is part murder mystery and while it’s intended to be entertainment rather than serious literature, it will be enjoyed by readers who are excited by the idea of settling a new world.