Books like The Last Star — picked by fans

Drake served in an armor unit in Southeast Asia in the 1970s, so it’s no coincidence that Hammer’s Slammers, a collection of short stories, revolves around a tank unit. So many military SFF stories focus on knuckle-dragging ground-pounders, so it’s refreshing to see war from a tank turret. Drake has been accused of writing gun porn, but I find a lot of nuance in his writing, especially on combat motivation and small-unit leadership. He was one of the first military SFF authors to write an openly gay character, and women fight right alongside men without the misogynistic or objectifying undertones that sometimes afflict the subgenre. To get a sense for Drake’s writing, “But Loyal to His Own” and “Caught in the Crossfire” are two of my favorite stories.

The Road to Hell explores the worse day in the main character’s life.

He loses his job, gets into a car accident, and then dies and goes to hell. From there, the story explores our main character forays into hell and how it changes his life when he comes back.

From someone who really didn’t know about God to a person who now acknowledges that He exists, it’s startling journey. I read this book in a few short hours. It was gripping and that good.

This warm, charming, slightly-odd novel celebrates the Christmas spirit, and makes one realize what’s important in life. Slow, meditative, understated, and engaging, it’s the perfect book to read during the holiday season. It is best read over the course of some nights, so that the chapters can be pondered and savored.

This is a novella that starts off the Drake Sisters series. Each book in the series follows a different sister, giving each their romantic HEA (happily ever after). The sisters are known in their small coastal town for their supernatural powers.

They all have vastly different careers and different supernatural abilities. Each story is a page-turner, and the series' final book is the best of the bunch! I’ve read and reread it countless times.

I turn to this series when I’m in a reading slump, and it always turns it around for me. The romantic suspense with supernatural elements makes it a win for me.

I want more than a simple outline of a life when I’m reading a biography. I don’t want a sketch. I want a truly exhaustive account. I want everything.

I want the school reports, the scrapbooks, the family photo album, the letters and diaries, and the gauche snapshots before the child blossomed into a fully formed creative adult.

Well, that’s what you get here. You get first-hand accounts from those who grew up with Nick and a lot of insight from those who saw his music develop firsthand. And who better to collate the lot than his older sister?

The world of The Sea of Stars is amazingly creative; a modern setting that flawlessly incorporates magicians, scheming courtiers, enchanted animals, and prophetic astronomy in an age of cell phones, animal activists, and labor agencies. The majority of common people are ruled over by nobles and magicians who regularly strip human beings of their souls and lock them away inside animals, thus creating a soulless human workforce as well as intelligent animal servants. As weird as that may sound, the characters are so well written that the book is astoundingly humane and moving.

I sympathized completely with Grand Magician Zachary Drake in his disdain for the ruling class and its dehumanizing practices. Though, I’ll admit, a couple of times I was so fascinated by the unexpected creativity of the world that I almost wanted to see more. And I definitely appreciated Drake’s snark and cynical commentary.  

But the… show more.

This is a delightful read about a subject I’ve been attracted to for many years: gravity. The odd fact is, while we can use Newton’s laws to determine all sorts of things that gravity can do—with sufficient precision even to guide spaceships to orbits around other planets—we still don’t really know what gravity is.

The book is an extended essay about the history of our ideas about gravity’s myths, maths, and mysteries. I especially enjoyed how Panek raises and lightly touches upon so many aspects of the question, juggling it with finesse from every angle. He covers the ground long before, up to, and past Newton’s breakthrough. I particularly liked his discussion of the problem of comets in Newton’s theory. Panek concludes with recent gravity wave detections.

Raft is an amazing hard sci-fi story that one cannot help but binge-read. It's set in a fascinating, intricately-crafted universe that is sci-fi gold. It immerses readers in an alternate reality where the very laws of physics are different; the effects of which manifest in strange, unexpected ways throughout the story. There are dynamic characters, artistic unity, and real-life social parallels despite the story's dystopian society.

This book may well be the next best thing to spending an afternoon with Stephen Hawking.

After all, Belgian theoretical physicist Thomas Hertog has been one of Hawking’s closest collaborators in the years before the wheelchair-bound genius died in 2018. I liked how Hertog alternates difficult theoretical concepts with his personal accounts and experiences of working with an iconic figure like Hawking.

I especially love this book because it is about one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of science: the true nature of time. In what Hertog calls "Hawking’s final theory," the laws of nature do not precede the Big Bang but co-evolve with the early universe itself.

I have to admit that parts of the book were really hard for me to understand, but I was flabbergasted by the suggestion that our observations may have a tangible influence on the evolution and the properties of the universe itself.

I love this book because of the lively exchanges between the authors and because they do not shy away from asking the big questions. I like the way it combines a question-and-answer section, a dialogue, a debate, and original metaphors.

Focused on the odd coincidences in cosmology, such as the uniformity of the cosmic background radiation, the value of the cosmological constant, the horizon problem, and the strange predominance of matter over antimatter, the book takes the reader on a whirlwind tour through the mysteries of the cosmos.

I found the book easy to read because the authors approach the topic with humor and humility, two traits rarely found in a modern-day cosmologist. Lastly, I like this book because one of the authors, Luke Barnes, graciously appeared on my podcast, Conversations Beyond Science and Religion.