Here are 100 books that State of Fear fans have personally recommended if you like
State of Fear.
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Growing up at a time when both Monty Python and ‘alternative comedians’ like Ben Elton were on the telly, I couldn’t help but absorb British humor, and coupling that with a love of science fiction and fantasy (Asimov, Heinlein, Moorcock, etc.), I was ripe for an introduction to Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett… And the rest is history. The world is too serious a place, and I find comedy of all kinds, but especially SFF, a welcome escape. My own writing has been inspired by all the books on this list, and while I work in a range of genres, almost everything includes at least some snarky humor.
I first encountered Douglas Adams when I caught The Hitchhiker’s Guide on late-night radio, and I was hooked. The novel is slightly different, with Adams giving a bit more consideration to plot and logic, but it has the same wonderful, rapid-fire dialogue style, which has seldom been replicated.
I absolutely love Arthur Dent’s ludicrous accidental odyssey, meeting characters like Zaphod Beeblebrox and the wonderfully named Slartibartfast. The Guide sits in the background, popping up to provide superbly funny explanations of the history of the universe, humanity’s obsession with money, and a lot more.
For me, the thing that sets this apart from a lot of SFF humor is its ‘Britishness’—there’s a distinct feel of the surreal comic legacy of, for example, Monty Python and The Goon Show.
This box set contains all five parts of the' trilogy of five' so you can listen to the complete tales of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Zaphod Bebblebrox and Marvin the Paranoid Android! Travel through space, time and parallel universes with the only guide you'll ever need, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Read by Stephen Fry, actor, director, author and popular audiobook reader, and Martin Freeman, who played Arthur Dent in film version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He is well known as Tim in The Office.
The set also includes a bonus DVD Life, the Universe and…
Twelve-year-old identical twins Ellie and Kat accidentally trigger their physicist mom’s unfinished time machine, launching themselves into a high-stakes adventure in 1970 Chicago. If they learn how to join forces and keep time travel out of the wrong hands, they might be able find a way home. Ellie’s gymnastics and…
I started my motherhood journey when I was barely out of my teens. For the next two decades, I only knew myself as a wife and mother. As my brood of five children grew into adults, I found myself poorly equipped to parent independent Gen X and Z’ers. Then, at 46 years of age, when perimenopause hit me like a hurricane, I found myself evolving into another woman altogether. The good news was – I really liked her! I hope you enjoy these books about mid-life women parenting adult children and rediscovering themselves in the never-ever-done-aftermath of motherhood.
A New York Times bestseller | Soon to be a major motion picture from Steven Spielberg at Amblin Entertainment
"Witty, endearing and greatly entertaining." -Wall Street Journal
"Don't trust anyone, including the four septuagenarian sleuths in Osman's own laugh-out-loud whodunit." -Parade
Four septuagenarians with a few tricks up their sleeves A female cop with her first big case A brutal murder Welcome to... THE THURSDAY MURDER CLUB
In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet weekly in the Jigsaw Room to discuss unsolved crimes; together they call themselves the Thursday Murder Club.
I read and write lots and love doing so. So when I need a break, the last thing I want is another book, right? Wrong! I take a break with books, and I love fun books that are an escape from the normal day-to-day, ones that won’t lull you to sleep, ones that end too quickly. It’s a sickness, I know, and I’ll deal with it as soon as I have worked through this pile of books on my desk.
Randall Munroe is the creator of the online comic xkcd. He’s a really funny guy who also happens to be crazy smart and knowledgeable about, well, just about anything science and tech, it seems.
In this book, he tackles critical questions, like how fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live, and if there was a robot apocalypse, how long would humanity last? You see? Really critical questions.
This is more a grab it off the shelf, put your feet up, pick a random page, and have fun type of read rather than a cover-to-cover read (although, confession, I did, more than once), and it’s a whole lot of really smart fun.
From the creator of the wildly popular xkcd.com, hilarious and informative answers to important questions you probably never thought to ask.
Millions visit xkcd.com each week to read Randall Munroe's iconic webcomic. Fans ask him a lot of strange questions: How fast can you hit a speed bump, driving, and live? When (if ever) did the sun go down on the British Empire? When will Facebook contain more profiles of dead people than living? How many humans would a T Rex rampaging through New York need to eat a day?
Twelve-year-old identical twins Ellie and Kat accidentally trigger their physicist mom’s unfinished time machine, launching themselves into a high-stakes adventure in 1970 Chicago. If they learn how to join forces and keep time travel out of the wrong hands, they might be able find a way home. Ellie’s gymnastics and…
I read and write lots and love doing so. So when I need a break, the last thing I want is another book, right? Wrong! I take a break with books, and I love fun books that are an escape from the normal day-to-day, ones that won’t lull you to sleep, ones that end too quickly. It’s a sickness, I know, and I’ll deal with it as soon as I have worked through this pile of books on my desk.
I’m a geek; I’m ok with that, and I fully embrace that reality. I love books that tell the stories of the early pioneers who brought about computing as we know it. And few figures are as important and underappreciated as Lady Ava Lovelace.
She literally created what we now call “computer programming languages” before there were modern computers and electricity was widely available! Oh, and she did this before she died at age 33. This is a feel-good, inspiring tale of a woman well ahead of her time.
“[Ada Lovelace], like Steve Jobs, stands at the intersection of arts and technology."—Walter Isaacson, author of The Innovators
Over 150 years after her death, a widely-used scientific computer program was named “Ada,” after Ada Lovelace, the only legitimate daughter of the eighteenth century’s version of a rock star, Lord Byron. Why?
Because, after computer pioneers such as Alan Turing began to rediscover her, it slowly became apparent that she had been a key but overlooked figure in the invention of the computer.
In Ada Lovelace, James Essinger makes the case that the computer age could have started two centuries ago…
I have always been fascinated by science and everything mysterious. I love to read science fiction and mystery stories. I use art and literature to explore reality. Writing or painting allows me to link seemingly unrelated topics together to create my own explanations for why things are the way they appear to be. The biggest things in the universe are replicated on Earth right down to sub-atomic size. I call that life imitating stars. Life is an endless resource found everywhere in the universe, and it's not restricted to just light or heat to grow; it only needs energy.
This book, the only sequel Michael Crichton wrote, is an action-adventure story that stands fully upright on its own two feet. It's a philosophical, exciting adventure with multiple stories beautifully wound around a central core with harsh flashes of reality when the dinosaurs make their appearances.
I was very impressed with Sarah Harding's story, a practical, intelligent, feet-on-the-ground hero caught up in a world where science has created new, bigger-than-life creatures. She contends with violent dinosaurs and handles smart men who supposedly should know better as she battles her way to surviving another Jurassic World adventure.
'Gripping' Sunday Express 'Action-packed' New York Daily News 'Another monster hit by a giant of a writer' The Daily Express 'The Lost World moves at a spanking pace. . . recommended as first-rate entertainment' The Spectator _____________________
The bestselling sequel to Jurassic Park
Something has survived.
Six years have passed since the secret disaster at Jurassic Park. In the years since the extraordinary dream of science and imagination came to a crashing end, the island has been indefinitely closed to the public, its park dismantled, the dinosaurs themselves destroyed.
Since I was a young boy, I’ve been fascinated with the concept of time. I’ve spent hours studying the physics of time as a hobby, and to this day, as an adult, that fascination continues. Whenever the topic of time arises in conversation, I will be the first to contribute my understanding of this mystery that has baffled humankind since the beginning of...well, time.
I loved this book because the protagonist doesn’t actually time travel from the present to the past or the future. Creighton has dropped a spacecraft from earth’s future into the past and added an alien sphere on board the craft to add extra suspense to the storyline.
The protagonist, Norman Johnson, is a psychologist who must unravel the mystery of the strange sphere and the spacecraft from Earth’s future. This plot is unique in that it has a time travel motif without actual time travel.
“Crichton keeps us guessing at every turn in his best work since The Andromeda Strain.” —Los Angeles Times
“Sphere may be Crichton’s best novel, but even if it ranked only second or third, it would be a must for suspense fans.” —Miami Herald
A classic thriller from #1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Crichton, Sphere is a bravura demonstration of what he does better than anyone: riveting storytelling that combines frighteningly plausible, cutting edge science and technology with pulse-pounding action and serious chills. The gripping story of a group of American scientists sent to the…
I saw my first Godzilla movie when I was seven years old, and I immediately fell in love: what kid doesn’t want to be a giant radioactive monster with attitude? But unlike baseball cards, I never outgrew Godzilla and, over the decades, came to appreciate the cultural significance of one of the world’s most enduring film icons. In my writing on Godzilla, I explore my own fascination with monsters and contemplate why all societies, from the dawn of time to today, have compulsively created imaginary creatures that terrify them. The books on this list have helped me understand the human obsession with monsters, and I hope you will find them equally enlightening and enjoyable.
I am generally not a big fan of hardcore academic theory, but this collection of essays edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen gave me a steady stream of "aha!" moments when I first read it about twenty years ago.
I struggled a bit with some of the jargon here, not to mention the fact that it only deals with monsters in the Western tradition, but I know of no better book for helping readers understand why humans create (and need) monsters, what roles monsters play in affirming (and undermining) social norms, and what the study of monsters can reveal about the anxieties and fault-lines in the cultures that spawn them. “Monsters are our children,” Cohen writes at one point: that still blows my mind after two decades of chewing on it.
Monsters provide a key to understanding the culture that spawned them. So argues the essays in this wide-ranging collection that asks the question, what happens when critical theorists take the study of monsters seriously as a means of examining our culture? In viewing the monstrous body as metaphor for the cultural body, the contributors consider beasts, demons, freaks, and fiends as symbolic expressions of very real fears and desires, signs of cultural unease that pervade society and shape its collective behaviour. Through a sampling of monsters as a conceptual category, these essays argue that our fascination for the monstrous testifies…
As an author of YA science books (as well as being an editor), my goal is to inspire teens to think deeply about our world, but especially about our relationships with animals. To be honest, I knew bubkis about bioengineering until I was writing my previous book, Last of the Giants, about the extinction crisis. My head exploded as I learned how close we are to “de-extincting” lost species. The power that genetic engineering gives us to alter animals is unnerving, and it’s critical that we understand and discuss it. Bioengineering will change our future, and teens today will be the ones deciding how.
It’s nice when scientists talk like regular people, with a sense of humor and simple explanations of how impossibly complex stuff works. That’s paleontologist Jack Horner, who has been the dinosaur consultant on all the Jurassic Park films. He’s currently trying to re-create a real-life dinosaur, which he makes sound like tinkering with the engine of a 1960s Mustang. Who me? Just trying to get a chicken embryo to grow into a dinosaur, to see if I can. And if it works, by the way, there’s your proof about the theory of evolution.
A world-renowned paleontologist reveals groundbreaking science that trumps science fiction: how to grow a living dinosaur.
Over a decade after Jurassic Park, Jack Horner and his colleagues in molecular biology labs are in the process of building the technology to create a real dinosaur.
Based on new research in evolutionary developmental biology on how a few select cells grow to create arms, legs, eyes, and brains that function together, Jack Horner takes the science a step further in a plan to "reverse evolution" and reveals the awesome, even frightening, power being acquired to recreate the prehistoric past. The key is…
I was sick as a child and bedridden for several months. This was before 24/7 TV and computers. I began to read A LOT. I read everything and anything that I could find, but my favorite topics were animals and nature. I also read science fiction and fantasy. It’s not a surprise that those topics merged into my writing and life. I currently live on five acres that I’ve left mostly for the wildlife. My nephew calls me his aunt who lives in the forest with reindeer. That is way cooler than my real life, so I’m good with that. All my books have nature and friendship as main themes.
The concept of this story is amazing, especially at a time when they are “bringing back” different species. I am often amazed at what scientists have been able to accomplish in real life, and it’s even more fun to read about it in fiction.
Another thing that I loved about this story is how it shows that nature cannot be contained. We can manipulate it, but we’d better not make too many assumptions about how things will progress because nature has its own way of doing things.
The characters were also great in both the book and the movie.
'Crichton's most compulsive novel' Sunday Telegraph 'Crichton's dinosaurs are genuinely frightening' Chicago Sun-Times 'Breathtaking adventure. . . a book that is as hard to put down as it is to forget' Time Out
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The international bestseller that inspired the Jurassic Park film franchise.
On a remote jungle island, genetic engineers have created a dinosaur game park.
An astonishing technique for recovering and cloning dinosaur DNA has been discovered. Now one of mankind's most thrilling fantasies has come true and the first dinosaurs that the Earth has seen in the time of man emerge.
I’m an English writer based in Sheffield. I started reading dystopia when I was around 19 and in a very bad place mentally, it became an escape for me and I would read everything in the genre. It got to the point where I was writing in the notes on my phone (not very well, I might add). Somehow dystopia ignited my passion for writing and so I went to university to study it. Almost everything I wrote for both my undergrad degree and my master's was set in a future dystopian UK. It is where my passion still lies and I hope to create more futuristic worlds like those I have listed.
Why am I recommending this book? First of all – Dinosaurs. I don’t know where they came from in the book series and frankly I don’t care. I’ll read anything with dinosaurs. I think this book series is set in a modern UK but it’s never explicitly stated. It’s set in a futuristic world where nature has failed us – because of us – and humans need to find a new way of living. They must learn to live with dinosaurs. Maybe the new Jurassic World film could learn from the characters? Who knows.
The first book in the heart-stopping The Extinction Trials trilogy, for fans of The Hunger Games and Jurassic Park.
Betrayal. Sacrifice. Survival. Welcome to The Extinction Trials...
In Stormchaser and Lincoln's ruined world, the only way to survive is to risk everything. To face a contest more dangerous than anyone can imagine. And they will do anything to win.
But in a land full of monsters - human and reptilian - they can't afford to trust anyone. Perhaps not even each other...
Shortlisted for the 2019 Scottish Teenage Book Prize
