Here are 64 books that Terminal World fans have personally recommended if you like
Terminal World.
Book DNA is a community of 13,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I discovered science fiction at age nine with Rocketship Galileo and Red Planet and have never lost my love for speculative worlds, even after growing up to follow a career teaching and writing about the history of cities and city planning. In recent years, I’ve also begun to write about the field of SF. So it is one-hundred-percent natural for me to combine the two interests and explore science fiction cities. I try to look beyond the geez-whiz technology of some imagined cities to the ideas of human-scale planning and community that might make them fun places to visit or live in if we could somehow manage to get there.
For me, the worst thing about New York is getting stuck in traffic.
In the New York of 2140, that’s not a problem because rising sea levels have drowned much of Manhattan and motorboats zip through the flooded streets like it’s a high-rise Venice. Future New York is also a city whose residents are coping with the planet’s new reality.
In the midst of climate gloom, it is refreshing to imagine a scenario where New Yorkers can come together through cooperative action to take control of their own future.
As the sea level rose, every street became a canal, every skyscraper an island. For the residents of one apartment building in Madison Square, however, New York in the year 2140 is far from a drowned city.
New York Times bestselling author Kim Stanley Robinson delivers a bold and brilliant vision of New York in the next century.
'New York may be underwater but it's better than ever' - New Yorker
An ancient Roman temple terraforming Mars. An android longing for his human wife. Will their epic clash bring Earth to its knees?
Android Y1 is heartbroken. He was once a neuroscientist who uploaded his own brain to study it. Now he hates watching his human self take his wife and…
I love fantasies that dream up totally new worlds! Some people condemn the fantasy genre as formulaic, and sometimes they’re right—but it shouldn’t be so! Fantasies can explore worlds as wide and wild and wonderful as the human imagination itself! Anything’s possible! But I also love a fantasy world that’s as real, coherent, and consistent as our own real world. I think that’s the ultimate challenge for any author: to create it all from the grassroots up. And for any reader, the trip of a lifetime! My personal preference is for worlds a bit on the dark side—just so long as they blow my mind!
It was a toss-up here between this book and The Scar, set in a different part of the same world. One of Miéville’s acknowledged influences is the wonderful Mervyn Peake, and like Peake, he’s never in a hurry to get a story underway.
I’d have probably tossed Perdido Street Station aside after 100-200 pages except for a friend’s fervent recommendation—and I’d have missed out big time if I had! Because the story as it develops is truly grand, truly epic. Like Peake, Miéville has a gift for raising action to a mythical status. I love, love, love a novel that builds up to a long, rolling, thunderous climax!
Winner of the August Derleth award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Perdido Street Station is an imaginative urban fantasy thriller, and the first of China Mieville's novels set in the world of Bas-Lag.
The metropolis of New Crobuzon sprawls at the centre of its own bewildering world. Humans and mutants and arcane races throng the gloom beneath its chimneys, where the rivers are sluggish with unnatural effluent, and factories and foundries pound into the night. For more than a thousand years, the parliament and its brutal militia have ruled over a vast array of workers and artists, spies, magicians,…
I discovered science fiction at age nine with Rocketship Galileo and Red Planet and have never lost my love for speculative worlds, even after growing up to follow a career teaching and writing about the history of cities and city planning. In recent years, I’ve also begun to write about the field of SF. So it is one-hundred-percent natural for me to combine the two interests and explore science fiction cities. I try to look beyond the geez-whiz technology of some imagined cities to the ideas of human-scale planning and community that might make them fun places to visit or live in if we could somehow manage to get there.
I get bored when aliens always seem to land on the National Mall in Washington or hover over Los Angeles, so I was delighted to discover that at least one alien ship prefers to land in the lagoon off Lagos, Nigeria.
It’s a city as big or bigger than New York, after all. There is the challenge of dealing with very enigmatic visitors, but the time is the present and readers get a whirlwind tour of one of the world’s megacities. It’s like having the most highspeed guide you can imagine… who happens to be one of the most compelling SF writers today.
Three strangers, each isolated by his or her own problems: Adaora, the marine biologist. Anthony, the rapper famous throughout Africa. Agu, the troubled soldier. Wandering Bar Beach in Lagos, Nigeria's legendary mega-city, they're more alone than they've ever been before.
But when something like a meteorite plunges into the ocean and a tidal wave overcomes them, these three people will find themselves bound together in ways they could never imagine. Together with Ayodele, a visitor from beyond the stars, they must race through Lagos and against time itself in order to save the city, the world... and themselves.
In this collection of nine stories, J.C. Gemmell takes readers on a quest into the future.
Tion is a dystopian civilisation built on the wreckage of a drowned Earth. Here, technology saves and oppresses, and mankind clings to survival in a place where the privileged live above the clouds, and…
I discovered science fiction at age nine with Rocketship Galileo and Red Planet and have never lost my love for speculative worlds, even after growing up to follow a career teaching and writing about the history of cities and city planning. In recent years, I’ve also begun to write about the field of SF. So it is one-hundred-percent natural for me to combine the two interests and explore science fiction cities. I try to look beyond the geez-whiz technology of some imagined cities to the ideas of human-scale planning and community that might make them fun places to visit or live in if we could somehow manage to get there.
For much of my academic career, I’ve battled the stereotype that cities are dangerous and deadening places, and certainly not where you want to be caught after plague decimates the population.
Pat Murphy is on my side. She imagines a post-plague San Francisco where the few remaining residents are artists, not bunkered survivalists. Her city “not long after” a plague is a place of creative eccentrics who defend themselves against outsiders with performance art.
Without the excitement of cities, there would be few new ideas, and it is great to find a science fiction book that agrees.
Jax and Danny-Boy, scrambling to get by in a near-future San Francisco ravaged by plague, become fellow artists in their united struggle to stop a tyrannical general from taking over
I was one of those kids who wanted to understand everything. Early on, I worked at a research laboratory and majored in biology. When studies in religion and philosophy offered an even deeper level of inquiry, I turned to archeology, anthropology, psychology, and linguistic analysis. Over the years, I was a counselor for people at the end of life, taught college philosophy, and a cultural approach to religion. I have traveled throughout western Kenya, Guyana, New Zealand, Alaska, and Labrador. I also listened for the stories of the people. Additionally, I have sailed for more than forty years. I write about what I know, and about what still puzzles me.
C.S. Lewis is widely known for his children’s book series, The Chronicles of Narnia. His list of publications is, however, much longer. This little volume of essays gives a reader (or a writer) insight into how the form of a story shapes its meaning. For instance, he writes about stories for children and how some authors mistakenly think that children are only interested in childish things. He compares that to people who have the gift of being able to access the child that is still in them and speak with them in a shared experience.
Of science fiction, he shares the difference between an author who is a creator of worlds, and one who rearranges alien props to make a pedestrian story appear clever. The key is a story that makes contact with the reader.
The theme of this collection is the excellence of the Story, especially the kind of story dear to Lewis-fantasy and science fiction, which he fostered in an age dominated by realistic fiction. On Stories is a companion volume to Lewis’s collected shorter fiction, The Dark Tower and Other Stories. Edited and with a Preface by Walter Hooper.
I love people who are totally lost because they are on the brink of their greatest discovery–their true nature. Even as a little boy I remember seeing that everyone has a purpose in life, but that is hidden to them. I have always felt that every step of the way, life seems to be a little off-track. But through authentic stories, I came to an understanding that right now, everyone is doing great things with their lives, even if they can’t see it.
This is the real-life account of a professor who gets caught up in “The Phenomena,” a term used to describe the appearance and interaction with extraterrestrial activity and encounters.
Diana Pasulka is a professor of religious studies who is researching the similarities between encounters with angels and demons, which are very similar in description to encounters with aliens and UFOs. Professor Pasulka is blindfolded and driven by a NASA scientist to a desert in New Mexico, where she is shown a secret “UFO crash site.” She doesn’t believe any of it. She says the ground is covered for miles by deteriorating aluminum cans that the government placed there over fifty years ago to obscure the UFO crash site and hide it. Later, her friend, Dr. Gary Nolan, a Stanford University scientist, verifies the objects from the crash site are not from this “universe.”
More than half of American adults and more than seventy-five percent of young Americans believe in intelligent extraterrestrial life. This level of belief rivals that of belief in God. American Cosmic examines the mechanisms at work behind the thriving belief system in extraterrestrial life, a system that is changing and even supplanting traditional religions.
Over the course of a six-year ethnographic study, D.W. Pasulka interviewed successful and influential scientists, professionals, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who believe in extraterrestrial intelligence, thereby disproving the common misconception that only fringe members of society believe in UFOs. She argues that widespread belief in aliens…
Looking back, I was surprised at the things I'd done and the distance I'd traveled from my lower-middle-class upbringing in an industrial town. Destined for a life on the hot beds at the steel mill, I worked my way through college, found a job as a cub copywriter, learned documentary filmmaking, won an EMMY Award, moved to Hollywood, and started my 'sho biz' career.
What I love most about this story is the fresh new take on ‘the aliens among us.’ The author picks a ‘backwoods country boy’ to confront and eventually be chased by powerful creatures from outer space. Lucky for the country boy, he is given some superpowers to help him survive.
I liked how the story moved along with snappy enthusiasm (this is the first of six volumes).
The adventure begins when JB Tucker, a simple, backwoods country boy–born and raised in the Carolina swamps–accidentally becomes infected with tiny, autonomous alien tech.
The hundreds of millions of sub-molecular robots coursing through his bloodstream have evolved far beyond their original design and capabilities. The freak pairing of the off-world medical protocols and JB’s unique human body chemistry result in immediate and dramatic consequences.
Now, relentlessly hunted by off-worlders intent on both the retrieval of their stolen technology and his utter destruction, JB finds himself thrust into the center of an intergalactic conflict that he can neither comprehend, nor escape.
…
I have prosopagnosia, Face Blindness. I can’t recognize my face, let alone anyone else. Not being able to remember people makes for a lonely existence. Ever since I was little, I created worlds inside my head. These were places where I could control what happened when the real world felt lonely and out of control. Discovering books that created worlds I could immerse myself in was life-changing for me. It was like finding my lost tribe. Science fiction became a comfortable home, becoming a science fiction writer was a natural progression. I still get excited when I find a book that sucks me into its world.
This book made me ask myself how far I would go for someone I loved. Would time, distance, and beliefs change me, too?
I like the classic hardcore science fiction setting of this story mixed with a culture based on a mystical belief—science meets faith. Which would I choose if I were living in that world? Or can I have both? The answer is bittersweet because there is no perfect solution.
This reissue of a modern classic of science fiction, the Hugo and Locus Award-winning and Nebula-nominated The Snow Queen, marks the first time the book has been reprinted in fifteen years.
The imperious Winter colonists have ruled the planet Tiamat for 150 years, deriving wealth from the slaughter of the sea mers. But soon the galactic stargate will close, isolating Tiamat, and the 150-year reign of the Summer primitives will begin. Their only chance at surviving the change is if Arienrhod, the ageless, corrupt Snow Queen, can destroy destiny with an act of genocide. Arienrhod is not without competition as…
I’ve been a science fiction writer since I was old enough to read, and I’ve spent probably way too much of my life reading and writing and researching and thinking about aliens. I’ve worked in the aerospace industry, launching rockets to the moon and Mars and Saturn, and five of the books I’ve published have touched on alien life in one way or another. I’ve worked as a contributing editor for WIRED magazine and the science and technology correspondent for the SyFy channel, and I hold patents in seven countries, including 31 issued U.S. patents.
Sterling burst onto the SF scene with a crash and clatter when I was in high school, and this book, while perhaps not his very best work, is certainly his most creative.
I loved the fact that the aliens were investors rather than conquerors and also the fact that human beings were diverging along so many different vectors that we were rapidly becoming alien to one another.
THE FUTURE OF MANKIND CAN TAKE ONE OF TWO DIRECTIONS...
The Mechanists are ancient aristocrats, their lives prosthetically extended with advanced technology. The Shapers are genetically altered revolutionaries, their skills the result of psychotechnic training and artificial conditioning.
Both factions are fighting to control the Schismatrix of humankind.
The Shapers are losing the battle, but Abelard Lindsay--a failed and exiled Shaper diplomat--isn't giving up. Across the galaxy, Lindsay moves from world to world, building empires, struggling for his cause--but more often fighting for his life.
He is a rebel and a rogue, a pirate and a politician, a soldier and…
I’ve always been drawn to the small-town milieu, which might seem strange given I’m a product of suburbia. But as a professional travel writer, I’ve visited scores (maybe hundreds) of country towns, so I know what makes them tick—and they come prepackaged with all the ingredients needed to create an unnerving horror experience. The author simply dreams up a charming little village with humble and lovable residents, then either peels back the bucolic veneer to expose the corruption beneath or introduces a hostile outside force. Voilà! An effective horror novel. I love reading those sorts of stories, and I love writing them.
This book is the grandfather of the modern small-town horror story–few novels before or since have developed such a sense of creeping dread and paranoia.
Aside from being impressed with Finney’s writing, the masterful way he manages mood, and the gradual deterioration of trust (which underpins the most admirable qualities of small-town life), I can trace my lineage as a horror writer back to this novel.
Welcome to the Best of the Masterworks: a selection of the finest in science fiction
Mill Valley, Marin County, California.
Dr Miles Bennell has lived there all his life. But one day Miles sees a patient who claims her Uncle isn't himself. He's a different person, despite being identical in every way except one: he is only pretending to have emotions. Miles dismisses this as delusions and refers her to a psychiatrist. Then he finds the pods. Giant seed pods, filled with a strange, grey substance. A strange grey substance that can slowly, slowly, become a perfect replica of a…
