Books like Stealing Fire — picked by fans

I had no special interest in Alexander the Great, but happened on Fire From Heaven in the library. It was set in Ancient Greece. I liked historical novels, so I read it. Became a fan!

This first book takes that world-bestriding conqueror and imagines him as a lonely child in a fraught palace—and as a teenager, his father assassinated, his world breaking up around him. It follows him as time changes him into a brilliant, daring general. In the series’ succeeding books, he becomes a lover and then half-mad with bereavement, and we see his "empire" quickly dissolve after his early death.

Time changes everything; nothing stays the same. But in the pages of these books, Alexander’s world is brilliantly recreated.

Opting to cover just a slice of Alexander’s campaign, Judith Tarr treats the period after the Battle of Issus down to his fateful trip to the Oracle of Ammon in Egypt. Being historical fantasy, magic is present, but Tarr (a trained historian) depicts it as understood by the ancient Egyptians. An Egyptian priestess, Meriamon, has been charged by her gods to bring Alexander to Egypt in order to eject the hated Persians and preserve her people. The novel also contains a love story between Meriamon and the fictional younger brother of Ptolemy—the same Ptolemy who would found a dynasty in Egypt after Alexander’s death. Lord of the Two Lands is a master class in how to utilize magic for historical fantasy in an authentic way.

Melissa Scott has written the best “What would’ve happened if Alexander didn’t die?” alternate history. It’s a popular question among historians, but usually assumes he survived his final illness. Scott takes a different tack, choosing instead to diverge some years before his death. Here, he returns from Asia to put down a revolt in Greece. After that, he goes west, against first Rome, then Carthage. Although the characters aren’t as fleshed out as in some of her later military SF (this was an early work), her grasp of military maneuvers and politics, for which she would later earn attention, is on full display. It’s a viable tale of what might have happened, had Alexander decided to take on Rome, or Carthage, at that point in their histories.

“And now for something completely different,” I offer some satiric whimsy from Indo-Irish author Aubry Menen. He belonged to Renault’s generation, not Tarr’s, Graham’s, or Scott’s. This novel, published in 1965, is historical allegory rather than historical fiction. Menen changes historical events in order to suit his plot and message, which is to poke fun at British presumption. The result is a delightfully wicked parallel between the arrogant and ethnocentric Macedonians and the nineteenth-century imperialistic Brits, set against a far older Indian culture. Yet Menen didn’t spare the self-righteousness of Indian brahmins and rajas, either. Menen spares no one. While usually accused of misogyny, the women here are screamingly funny in their (legitimate) bitchiness, but Hephaistion gets the best lines. This book deserves a wider readership.

The English General Fuller may be said to have taken Alexander’s program and imagined applying it to World War II. Had Hitler cooperated with Stalin’s unhappy subjects, he might have won the war in Russia. The same reasoning applied to Hitler’s opponent, England.

Had England given freedom to India before the war started, the Japanese would have found Asia far harder to conquer. Churchill and Chamberlain agreed that India must remain part of the Empire. Alexander knew better. He made the top Indian kings his allies, not his subjects.

While I didn’t find nearly enough about the Great Egyptian Revolt of 200 BCE or Ankhmakis’s plight in this book, it was an excellent resource for creating the day-to-day life of ancient Egypt.

From house building to boat designs to farming on the river, as well as the rise and fall of the various dynasties and their idiosyncrasies, Wilkinson’s book is a must read for any Egyptophile such as myself. Without it, I don’t think I would have been able to have envisioned Ankhmakis’s world the way I have.

This book has been on steady bedtime rotation in my house for the past four years—an eternity in a child's life. Every time we turn a page, my son or I say, “This is my favorite page!”

The author’s father was a beekeeper, and that level of intimate, insider knowledge is conveyed throughout. The images are exquisite—a combination of scientific accuracy and goofy playfulness. Socha never talks down to his readers, and every page is dense with information—about how bees communicate, build honeycombs, and select a queen; about what foods are dependent on bees for pollination (hint: seemingly every common fruit and vegetable); about what dangers bees face in an era of global warming, and on and on.

There is also a second book by this author called Trees, which is equally wonderful. 

Jan Assmann’s Mind of Egypt surveys the intellectual and philosophical topography of Egypt from earliest times to well past “the ancient” and into the world of “late antiquity.” He can do this because, of course, of his great erudition, but also because it’s the serious intellectual or philosophical strains of Egyptian culture that he attends to.

The original title was Ägypten. Eine Sinngeschichte, not inaccurately translated as “The Mind of Egypt”, but Sinn means a bunch of things, among them, the English word “meaning,” so another way of translating the title would give us Egypt: A History of (its) Meaning, and that would imply not only what Egypt means to us today, but also what “meaning” meant in ancient Egypt itself: how did Egypt think.

A thrilling read that first sparked my lifelong passion for ancient Egypt with its vivid recreation of a distant past.

Sinuhe’s career as a young Egyptian physician takes him to the center of royal power and secrets and into the lives of unforgettable characters. Like the heartless courtesan Nefernefernefer, a beauty whose name ensured that no man would ever hear it spoken without saying it aloud and remembering it. Just as I remember it today. 

This book is similar to mine but instead of focusing on the spread and dissemination of capitalism, it focuses on the dissemination and adaptation of radical, socialist, and anarchist ideas in the Eastern Mediterranean region during the nineteenth century, and argues that the cities of Alexandria, Cairo, and Beirut played a major role in this process.

In particular, dense social and intellectual networks that linked key segments of the population in these cities together were pivotal in facilitating both the spread of these ideas and the ways in which they were reworked, reinterpreted, and adapted to local and regional contexts.

Though focusing on a different time period and on the spread of counter-hegemonic rather than hegemonic ideas, Khoury’s work is similar to the argument that I have been developing in this book, in the sense that it traces the regional networks and spaces of individuals and organizations who played a… show more.