Books like The Futurological Congress — picked by fans

Another pioneer writer and the writer who started the cyberpunk genre. I loved this book because it is different, and if you are a true sci-fi nut, this one is for you. 

I think Adams must have been on another planet when he wrote this. It is sci-fi comedy, and unlike many others who try and fail with comedy in this genre, this is a giant of a series. It is funny and serious with unforgettable characters. I love it. 

The Code of the Woosters might be the best funny novel of them all. The all-knowing valet Jeeves and the hilarious narrator Bertram Wooster helped inspire the relationship in my novels between the coffeebot narrator Arjay and private investigator Frank Harken. Wodehouse’s plotting is superb and beyond clever, but it’s the prose—the playful and inventive sentences and paragraphs—that makes me come back to read this book again and again. A sample sentence: “He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled, so I tactfully changed the subject.”

Dave Barry is most famous as a humor columnist and nonfiction writer. His first novel Big Trouble, with a story that reads like a suspenseful thriller, is full of comedic events and clever twists. It’s worth reading, however, for the prose alone. Sample sentence: “En route to the polling place, the old man picked up seven other voters, all men, some quite aromatic.”

You might know Hugh Laurie as the actor who played Dr. Gregory House in House, though he’s been great in lots of other stuff, including playing Bertie Wooster in Jeeves and Wooster. He’s also a hell of a writer. The Gun Seller has the pacing of a spy novel and the sentences you might expect if P.G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler went into that gene-combining teleportation portal from The Fly and emerged as P.G. Chandlerhouse. Sample sentence: “But Rayner was also three inches taller than me, four stones heavier, and at least eight however-you-measure-violence units more violent.”

Here is a dark comedy for the office worker. Office dysfunction is unique but also ubiquitous and lends itself well to, of course, Kafkaesque and Orwellian absurdity. One day, people just start getting fired, which leads to growing paranoia and more dysfunction. I like stories that don’t explain too much. Thanks to the pandemic, life, especially work life, has become increasingly amorphous and unreal. What is balance anymore? Where is the line? It’s refreshing to be immersed in a world even more bizarre than the one that workaholics now seem to be living in. 

Before I was an author, I was primarily a national magazine copy editor, a job I finally scored after eight years of climbing up the magazine journalism ladder.

I wrote once in a while, but this mostly meant TV recaps by the time I was entrenched in magazines. But one day, an article about a safe-driving activist crossed my desk, and soon I was speaking with him in high schools.

Around the time I checked off “swim the width of a river” from my father’s bucket list, I also read Huckleberry Finn, as the setting seemed only right. I wrote a tribute to it in the second chapter of my book. My dad’s favorite author was Twain, but what I appreciated about him was that he wrote the novel as veiled propaganda. It’s a book that professes Twain’s anti-racism perspective. He just put his cause into a novel.

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I could easily have all five of my picks be novels by Sinclair Lewis. I'll stop at two.

In George Babbitt, Lewis's titular lead, we have a character whose very name became synonymous with conformity. What I absolutely love about this book has a lot to do with the bold plot choices Lewis takes with Babbitt. I write this knowing that many critics did not like the book because, they complained, there really wasn't a plot! (Cripes, what book were they reading?)

These plot turns include his dalliances with socialism (which runs counter to his position as the city of Zenith's most successful realtor) and a socialist woman.

This was one of the first books I read at university. I admired Marie Munkara’s gruff voice and the way she delicately balanced satirical humour and dark truths.

Juxtaposing the voices of colonial guards and officers with 16-year-old Aboriginal mother, Sugar, lends this novel a messy complexity which is always compelling.

At the beginning, I found it easy to mock and deride the white colonial officers: the overtly racist Drew, the well-meaning but exploitative Ralphie, the bumbling, inadequate Hump with his mistaken ambitions of grandeur. I thought I’d figured it all out, that I’d grasped all of Munkara’s meaning. 

But as Sugar’s fate is revealed, and more significantly, she recognises the inevitability of her downfall, I was humbled. Munkara’s book taught me to look beyond the seemingly obvious characters and literary devices to the nuance within. 

In an age of codified and tropey stories with uninspired characters and safe plots designed to satisfy whatever market drivers the Big Five publishers are pushing, Trump Sky Alpha gives me hope. It is not about aesthetics, or one-dimensional coffee shop, shirtless Brads, or conforming political views. It is bonkers, aggressive, and hilarious. 

In the aftermath of a nuclear war initiated by Trump, the “Orange Man”, an American journalist, finds herself in a containment zone, documenting the defunct internet’s wild humorous takes: viral memes and twitter’s heated exchanges. The journalist’s assignment soon uncovers references to an enigmatic figure, only known as Birdcrash, one who might know how to stop Trump from flying in a luxurious zeppelin for "the very best people who look terrific.” Yes, you read that right. 

Laumer’s satirical books about Jame Retief, a functionary in Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne, were inspired by his real-life career in the U.S. Foreign Service. They don’t have to be read in any order and mix short stories (as in this collection) and novels. Much of the humor comes from Retief ignoring the diplomatic niceties in dealing with the problems involving Earth and various alien races.