96 Books Like The Machineries of Joy

Despite some people’s fears, watching a lot of TV as a kid was a gateway to reading for me, not a deterrent. Seeing reruns of old horror anthology series and TV movies made me curious about who had written the stories on which the shows were based.

I discovered Richard Matheson, whose works were among the most adapted by The Twilight Zone and others. This collection features some of his classic imaginative tales that also became classic TV, including “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” (pre-Star Trek William Shatner saw a demon on an airplane wing on The Twilight Zone), “Duel” (Dennis Weaver was menaced by a killer truck in Steven Spielberg’s famous 1976 TV movie) and “Prey” (Karen Black fought a demon doll in one of the Trilogy of Terror).

I don’t think most Lovecraft fans casual or devoted would single out The Music of Erich Zann, given the staying power of the Cthulhu mythos and everything associated with it. But what causes Lovecraft’s work to resonate so many decades later is his mastery over the disquieting, and this story about music channeled from a horrific place played on a street that doesn’t seem to exist by a violinist terrified and compelled to keep playing has stayed with me more than any of Lovecraft’s other stories in the years since I read it. Maybe it’s the musician in me, or maybe it’s the distortions of reality that tend to crop up in my own writing. Either way it’s striking, and a good introduction to the strangeness of H. P. Lovecraft.

Specifically, I'm recommending the short story "Sea Oak." In the expanse of horror fiction, it has to be said that there are very few stories about a kindly old woman who returns from the dead as a pissed-off, vulgar, rotting corpse demanding her nephew start showing his cock (Saunders’s phrasing, not mine) for extra money so that his family can stop being pushovers and start earning some cash. George Saunders, it should be noted, is not remotely a horror author—rather, one of the more offbeat, distinctive writers of short literary fiction of the last quarter century—and Pastoralia is determinedly not a horror collection. But it’s exactly this that makes “Sea Oak” the strangest, least likely zombie story, if you can call it that, that you’ll ever read.

The Twilight Zone, again? Yes, The Twilight Zone again. There are tons of great stories here, but I'm highlighting Lynn Venable's "Time Enough at Last," which is arguably even more iconic than "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet." While most would regard it as a science-fiction story more than a horror story, I think it’s one of the best examples ever put to paper of the principle that horror is personal. One person’s inconvenience is another’s world-ending nightmare—and vice versa. Lynn Venable’s broader body of work is not especially well known, but with this one story dropped into a genre dominated by men, Venable turned out one of the greatest and most memorable genre stories there would ever be. So check it out—you know, while there’s still time.

While The Directorate follows a fairly typical path for sci-fi thrillers, its characters are what stand out. The Earth and human colonies on the moon and Mars have united after years of war and created one military/police force. Lieutenant Theresa Gannon is a loyal, young officer suddenly thrust into stardom as the person who foiled a terrorist attack. But as a broiling rebellion heats up and Gannon is now rubbing shoulders with generals and politicians, she starts questioning where her loyalties truly lie. 

If you think you have a crazy schedule, imagine what it would be like to go to work every day on Mars, while living and working on Earth.

Mars’ day is thirty-six minutes longer than ours, so your standing daily meeting at 9am will begin tomorrow at 9:36am, the day after at 10:12am…and eventually, at two in the morning. I loved learning about how the Mars Exploration Rover scientists at NASA ate endless ice cream and checked their Mars-time watches in an attempt to turn their own bodily clocks off and stay awake despite constant jetlag.

Reading about how they turned themselves into robots, especially during our own “Zoom-era” of constant meetings and emails, I wonder how much the demands of our contemporary, hustling, always-on workplaces do the same to us.

As a supporter of private space exploration, I liked this novel and particularly enjoyed the atmosphere reminiscent of Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne. A point I liked above all is how the characters succeed in getting along, notwithstanding the stress and the interpersonal problems arising well before the launch.

As often happens, the reality is now going well beyond literature: here, the private mission is made on a meager budget, endangering the astronauts, while in the real world, company spacecraft are even more advanced than those of the space agencies.

I am a huge fan of dreampunk books and this book helped create the genre. Reading it took me into a dreamworld that lead into another dreamworld and then yet another.

As with all Philip K. Dick books I was left wondering if I ever did return to the reality I believe I live in. I also found the character of Palmer Eldritch himself to be one of my all-time favorites.

A time travel novel that transcends the ages and carries a strange environmental message.

The secrets of Mars are open slather in this adventurous escape to the past of the solar system. The fact that it involves the canals of Mars lends a delicious irony to this tale, which was published in 1999, after NASA's first-ever Mars rover, dubbed Sojourner, touched down in Chryse Planitia on July 4, 1997, atop the landing vehicle, Pathfinder. 

But, of course, this novel is placed in the distant past, when Martians actually existed. Is the alien tree an enemy or is it endeavoring to spread a message?

The Lady Astronaut of Mars takes place in a science fictional world, but like all the best sci-fi, it knows to keep its focus on its characters. There are no hour-long passages about future technologies or scientific theory. Instead it uses its setting to tell a human story about the missed opportunities in life and about growing old. Second chances are rare, and sometimes the decision about what to do isn’t so clear, but The Lady Astronaut of Mars reminded me that more often than not, experiences are worth having.