Here are 23 books that The Demolished Man fans have personally recommended if you like
The Demolished Man.
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Asimov delivers an adroit mix of intrigue, mystery, and science fiction in a fast-paced story with solid world-building. It should be noted that this tale is set in the same universe as his Foundation series with Trantor as the seat of the Galactic Empire.
High above the planet Florinia, the Squires of Sark live in unimaginable wealth and comfort. Down in the eternal spring of the planet, however, the native Florinians labor ceaselessly to produce the precious kyrt that brings prosperity to their Sarkite masters. Rebellion is unthinkable and impossible. Not only do the Florinians no longer have a concept of freedom, any disruption of the vital kyrt trade would cause other planets to rise in protest, ultimately destabilizing trade and resulting in a galactic war. So the Trantorian Empire, whose grand plan is to unite all humanity in peace, prosperity, and freedom, hasā¦
Forsaking Home is a story about the life of a man who wants a better future for his children. He and his wife decide to join Earth's first off-world colony. This story is about risk takers and courageous settlers and what they would do for more freedom.Ā
āYou have picked a difficult subject for a biography.ā ā Robert Silverberg
Love him or hate him, Harlan Ellison was one of the most prolific and awarded writers of all time and influenced many who came after him, myself included. To quote one of Harlanās closest friends, writer Josh Olson (A History of Violence), āHarlan is the guy who made me want to become a writer.ā Same here, Mr. Olson.
I found A Lit Fuse to be a wonderful companion piece to much of what Iād already known about Harlan from interviews, articles, his Sci-Fi Buzz segments, YouTube videos, and Erik Nelsonās excellent documentary, Dreams with Sharp Teeth.
There were events and experiences in Harlanās life that author Nat Segaloff glosses over and for which details can be found elsewhere (such as in the aforementioned sources). Then there are other aspects that are more thoroughly explored in Harlanās personal andā¦
An unguarded, uncensored, unquiet tour of the life of Harlan Ellison. In late 2011 Harlan Ellisonāthe multi-award-winning writer of speculative fiction and famously litigious personalityādid two uncharacteristic things. First, he asked biographer Nat Segaloff if heād be interested in writing his life story. Second, he gave Segaloff full control. The result is the long-anticipated A Lit Fuse: The Provocative Life of Harlan Ellison. The expansive biography, which is the first such project in which Ellison has permitted large portions of his varied works to appear. Segaloff conducted exhaustive interviews with Ellison over the course of five years and also spokeā¦
Iāve always loved a good mystery that doesnāt give you all the details upfront. My favourite stories growing up were those where I had little epiphanies along the way until I got to the end, where everything finally fell into place. But perhaps why Iām most drawn to these types of stories is because they parallel learning about your surroundings in the real world. After living in several different countries, Iāve come to learn many situations piece by piece, where some ended in danger, while others were more humorous events that I can now laugh about.
This book blew my mind! It changed my life and gave me food poisoning; well, maybe it was some lousy shrimp that did that, but it came around the same time anyhow.
I loved the initial point of revenge, how the main character was abandoned to die in a broken spaceship in the middle of nowhere. I, too, would be pissed if a ship flew by me without stopping to save my butt.
I was happy that the book also played with metaphysical notions and cranked up the ending to a glorious finish that broke from the standard good-guy wins trope.
Gully Foyle, Mechanic's Mate 3rd Class, is the only survivor on his drifting, wrecked spaceship. When another space vessel, the Vorga, ignores his distress flares and sails by, Gully Foyle becomes a man obsessed with revenge. He endures 170 days alone in deep space before finding refuge on the Sargasso Asteroid and then returning to Earth to track down the crew and owners of the Vorga. But, as he works out his murderous grudge, Gully Foyle also uncovers a secret of momentous proportions...
I have always been fascinated by stories where faith, myth, and the human condition collide in unexpected ways. The kinds of books that donāt just tell a story, but make you question God, morality, suffering, and what remains of humanity when everything collapses. These are the kinds of stories that stay in your head long after you finish reading. They mix faith, myth, and the end of the world in ways that feel strangely personal and unsettling. They are not simple fantasy, not traditional horror, and not religious fiction in the usual sense. They sit in a strange space where belief, suffering, and human nature all collide.
I love this book because it explores the end of the world in the most intimate and emotional way possible.
What moved me deeply was not the apocalypse itself, but the quiet relationship between father and son, trying to preserve goodness in a world where goodness no longer seems to matter. I felt a constant weight while reading, as if hope itself was fragile and rare.
It made me reflect on what it truly means to carry faith and humanity when everything else is gone.
NATIONAL BESTSELLERĀ ā¢ WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZEĀ ā¢ A searing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son's fight to survive, thisĀ "tale of survival and the miracle of goodness only adds to McCarthy's stature as a living master. It's gripping, frightening and, ultimately, beautiful" (San Francisco Chronicle).
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, ifā¦
Iāve always been drawn to stories where light trembles on the edge of annihilation. The Deathly Shadow grew from that spaceāwhere broken people must still try, even when hope is an ember. Iām especially interested in how violence shapes childrenātheir choices, their trust, and the way they carry themselves through a collapsing world. I strive to write characters with real emotional weight and a filmic sense of presenceāwhere every gesture, glance, and silence means something. I believe the darkest stories, when told with care, can reveal what we most need to protect. This book explores the cost of survivalāand whether love, memory, and courage are enough to challenge even the worst of endings.
This book is prophecy, power, and paranoia wrapped in a sandstorm.
It was the first book that showed me how deeply philosophy and politics could be embedded in a fantastical world. It taught me that āepicā doesnāt mean loudāit means legacy. I still marvel at Herbertās precisionāhis control of tone, symbolism, and tension.
Itās the rare kind of book that makes you feel like youāre trespassing into something sacred and dangerous. Every time I return to it, I leave with something newāand a little unsettled.
Before The Matrix, before Star Wars, before Ender's Game and Neuromancer, there was Dune: winner of the prestigious Hugo and Nebula awards, and widely considered one of the greatest science fiction novels ever written.
Melange, or 'spice', is the most valuable - and rarest - element in the universe; a drug that does everything from increasing a person's lifespan to making interstellar travel possible. And it can only be found on a single planet: the inhospitable desert world of Arrakis.
Whoever controls Arrakis controls the spice. And whoever controls the spice controls the universe.
Murakami has been on my TBR pile for quite some time, but I bumped his work up the list after having several guests on our podcast (Re-Creative) recommend his work.
Kafka on the Shore (2002) follows a young lad, Kafka Tamura, a strangely bookish 15-year-old boy who runs away from his Oedipal curse as he unearths his life while he works at a private library. It also follows, Satoru Nakata, an old, disabled man with the uncanny ability to talk to cats. The translation came out in 2005; it was on the New York Times best books of the year list, as well as winning a 2006 World Fantasy award.
The novel was weirdly reminiscent of Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler -- not for the way the story was told or even the characterizations -- but for the high-wire act the author is on. I keptā¦
"A stunning work of art that bears no comparisons" the New York Observer wrote of Haruki Murakami's masterpiece, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. In its playful stretching of the limits of the real world, his magnificent new novel, Kafka on the Shore is every bit as bewitching and ambitious. The narrative follows the fortunes of two remarkable characters. Kafka Tamura runs away from home at fifteen, under the shadow of his father's dark prophesy. The aging Nakata, tracker of lost cats, who never recovered from a bizarre childhood affliction, finds his highly simplified life suddenly overturned. Their parallel odysseys - asā¦
Iām fascinated with techno-utopian schemes. Decades ago, I had conversations with a friend who believed that humanity needed to evolve and leave the planet, just as early life once left the oceans. It was an intriguing idea that I have tried to follow up, critically, in Star Settlers. My book is a history not so much of the technology and nuts and bolts of space travel (although I do cover some of that), but of the rationale behind itāthe idea that humanityās ultimate destiny is in the stars. The idea is beguilingābut, likely, wrong-headed. To write the book, I spoke with physicists, science fiction writers, and space enthusiasts of all stripes.
The Biosphere 2 project was the wackiest multimillion-dollar enterprise to emerge from the New Age movement. This book is a nonfiction account of how a New Mexico commune, with a charismatic leader, developed a plan to test the viability of off-planet living by creating a sealed-off biosphere, which would be a self-sustaining and organizing ecosystem in which humans could survive. The goal was to create not a sterile environment but one that supported life that would make off-planet living appealing. The four men and four women sequestered for two years in the 3.14-acre domed-off area outside Tucson grew into two factions that hated one another. All came close to starvation, CO2 poisoning, and madness. For readers that simply must have narrative in fiction form, T. Corraghesson Boyleās The Terranauts isbased on this same early 1990sepisode.Ā
Biosphere rises from southern Arizona's high desert like a bizarre hybrid spaceship and greenhouse. Packed with more than 3,800 carefully selected plant, animal, and insect species, this mega-terrarium is one of the world's most biodiverse, lush, and artificial wildernesses. Only recently transformed from an abandoned ghost dome to a University of Arizona research center, the site was the setting of a grand drama about humans and ecology at the end of the twentieth century.
The seeds of Biosphere 2 sprouted in the 1970s at Synergia, a desert ranch in New Mexico where John Allen and a handful of dreamers unitedā¦
One of the progenitors of the Cyberpunk genre; unlike modern takes on Cyberpunk, this keeps to the core dystopian themes that have been all but forgotten thanks to the over emphases on aesthetics.
The book that defined the cyberpunk movement, inspiring everything from The Matrix to Cyberpunk 2077.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
William Gibson revolutionised science fiction in his 1984 debut Neuromancer. The writer who gave us the matrix and coined the term 'cyberspace' produced a first novel that won the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick Awards, and lit the fuse on the Cyberpunk movement.
More than three decades later, Gibson's text is as stylish as ever, his noir narrative still glitters like chrome in the shadows and his depictions ofā¦
Reading Foundation last year was a reminder of how powerful idea-driven storytelling can be. What struck me most was Asimovās restraint ā tension comes not from spectacle, but from watching civilisations rise and fall through logic, probability, and long-term planning. It felt surprisingly modern, and reaffirmed my interest in narratives where individuals matter, but systems and history shape the outcome.
The first novel in Isaac Asimovās classic science-fiction masterpiece, the Foundation series
THE EPIC SAGA THAT INSPIRED THEĀ APPLE TV+ SERIES FOUNDATION, NOW STREAMINGĀ ā¢Ā Nominated as one of Americaās best-loved novels by PBSās The Great American Read Ā For twelve thousand years the Galactic Empire has ruled supreme. Now it is dying. But only Hari Seldon, creator of the revolutionary science of psychohistory, can see into the futureāto a dark age of ignorance, barbarism, and warfare that will last thirty thousand years. To preserve knowledge and save humankind, Seldon gathers the best minds in the Empireāboth scientists and scholarsāand bringsā¦
