Here are 100 books that The New Breed fans have personally recommended if you like
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When I was young, I used to ask every new person I met if they believed in magic. No caveats, no explanation of what I meant by that. Their response – generally either an unequivocal no, a tentative what does that mean, or a delighted yes, cemented the direction of our relationship.
One of my favorite quotes is Yeats’ statement that “the world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” This conviction fuels my writing and my life. Whatever genre I write is informed first by magic, and there is no higher form of magic than the natural world and the science that explores it.
First of all, how could anyone not love a book with an author’s name like that?
This book was on display mere inches from me while I was signing books at an exceptionally enchanting indie bookstore called Sudden Fiction in Castle Rock, Colorado. I couldn’t wait for the signing to be over so I could get a copy for myself. And it did not disappoint, the contents being as beguiling as the cover.
Sheldrake describes not only the incredible and seemingly irrepressible capacity fungi have for survival and thrival (yep, I made that word up), but also encourages us to practice the same spells. I may have to become a mycologist in my next iteration – it’s good to remake oneself every few months, I think.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “brilliant [and] entrancing” (The Guardian) journey into the hidden lives of fungi—the great connectors of the living world—and their astonishing and intimate roles in human life, with the power to heal our bodies, expand our minds, and help us address our most urgent environmental problems.
“Grand and dizzying in how thoroughly it recalibrates our understanding of the natural world.”—Ed Yong, author of I Contain Multitudes
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—Time, BBC Science Focus, The Daily Mail, Geographical, The Times, The Telegraph, New Statesman, London Evening Standard, Science Friday
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
I find a lot of satisfaction and beauty in the interconnections between people and things and concepts, as these relationships are numberless and varied, and the web they make—that entangling mesh—essentially defines everything and everything we’ll ever know or be capable of knowing. Relationships between people are just as diverse and structural to the shape of humanity and our globe-straddling society as anything else we might build or accomplish.
Much ink has been spilled about the “loneliness epidemic” spreading widely in the modern world, and this book does a good job of illuminating several facets of that epidemic, addressing the distinction between our private and public selves, and questioning the means through which we attempt, with mixed results, to close our social gaps.
From the acclaimed author of Imagine Wanting Only This—a timely and moving meditation on isolation and longing, both as individuals and as a society
There is a silent epidemic in America: loneliness. Shameful to talk about and often misunderstood, loneliness is everywhere, from the most major of metropolises to the smallest of towns.
In Seek You, Kristen Radtke's wide-ranging exploration of our inner lives and public selves, Radtke digs into the ways in which we attempt to feel closer to one another, and the distance that remains. Through the lenses of gender and violence, technology and art, Radtke ushers us…
I've always been fascinated with how people overcome terrible circumstances ever since my childhood when my parents took me through the Tower of London and told me people survived the horrible torture devices on display. I got into reading biographies of war heroes, concentration camp survivors, and athletes who survived torture, betrayal, illness, and cruelty only to become people I admire. I became a clinical psychologist because I love inspiring others to discover their own greatness during life’s worst moments. I’ve had to learn how to find love, hope, and meaning when trauma, disability, death, and broken promises have ground me down to a bloody pulp.
Love People Use Things: Because the Opposite Never Works, by Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus is refreshingly honest account of two men who discover that chasing after the “good life” is a guaranteed soul killer.
They use good humor, witty insight, and compelling personal examples to challenge the culture of consumerism, and social media envy.
This book is a valuable guidebook out of overspending, retail therapy, and cluttering your mind and life with things that get in the way of living according to your values and deepest need for healthy relationships.
"The Minimalists show you how to disconnect from our conditioned material state and reconnect to our true essence: love people and use things. This is not a book about how to live with less, but about how to live more deeply and more fully." ―Jay Shetty, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Like a Monk
AS SEEN ON THE NETFLIX DOCUMENTARIES MINIMALISM & LESS IS NOW
How might your life be better with less?
Imagine a life with less: less stuff, less clutter, less stress and debt and discontent―a life with fewer…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I’ve been a science fiction fan for as long as I can remember. As someone who never quite felt like I fit in, these stories became a kind of refuge and revelation for me. They taught me that being on the outside looking in can be its own kind of superpower—the ability to see the world differently, to question it, and to imagine something better. I’m drawn to characters who are flawed, searching, and human, because they remind me that courage and belonging are choices we make, not gifts we’re given. That’s the heart of every story I love and the kind I try to write.
From the first page, this story felt intimate and infinite all at once.
It’s written like a love letter and a battlefield, all at once. What I loved most was how it turned connection into an act of defiance, how two people trapped by duty and ideology choose to reach across time anyway.
Every line feels deliberate, like poetry disguised as science fiction. I was completely undone by how much humanity could fit into such a small space.
It reminded me that love, friendship, and understanding don’t need to make sense to be real; they just need to be chosen, again and again.
WINNER OF The Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novella, the Reddit Stabby Award for Best Novella AND The British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novella
SHORTLISTED FOR 2020 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award The Ray Bradbury Prize Kitschies Red Tentacle Award Kitschies Inky Tentacle Brave New Words Award
'A fireworks display from two very talented storytellers' Madeline Miller, author of Circe
Co-written by two award-winning writers, This Is How You Lose the Time War is an epic love story spanning time and space.
Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant finds a letter. It…
I’m the Head of Trend and Innovation Scouting for Nokia, and I’ve been with the company since the glory days of Nokia mobile phone world dominance. I know first-hand what happens when a company focuses exclusively on the technology, not the humans that use it, and how quickly that can lead to disaster. One of the lessons that I see repeated continuously in the field of innovation is that a huge amount of attention gets paid to the new technology, and not nearly enough on how the technology will interact with our existing systems, beliefs, attitudes, and culture. Learning from the mistakes is the best way to make sure that the future doesn’t repeat them!
While the term the “Metaverse” usually makes people think of a fully digital, immersive world, my own feeling is that technologies that bring digital information and entertainment into our physical world is a much more powerful and important arena. This leads us to the transformative and still-developing world of Augmented Reality.
David Rose of the MIT Media Lab has been working with Augmented Reality for more than a decade, and Supersight is an overview of what he's seen and what he’s learned in this time.
What I love about Supersight is that while David is clearly as excited about this topic as I am, he’s also a realist, and openly discusses issues and challenges with Augmented Reality. Perhaps most valuable are the 14 Augmented Reality Design Principles that he outlines – super realistic, super useful.
After reading this, you’ll have a very grounded idea of the capabilities and potential of…
For thousands of years, human vision has been largely unchanged by evolution.
We’re about to get a software update.
Today, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Snap, Samsung, and a host of startups are racing to radically change the way we see. The building blocks are already falling into place: cloud computing and 5G networks, AI computer vision algorithms, smart glasses and VR headsets, and mixed reality games like Pokémon GO. But what’s coming next is a fundamental shift in how we experience the world and interact…
I fell in love with the ancient Greeks a half-century ago. Ever since I have tried to learn from the past, by recognizing the ways in which the ancients were at once very like us and shockingly different. I only recently grasped that the Greeks were like us in their self-consciousness about human motivation: They recognized that many (perhaps most) people are driven by self-interest. But only a few of us are skilled at strategic choice-making. They knew that cooperation was necessary for human flourishing, but terribly hard to achieve. Today working together on common projects remains the greatest challenge for business, politics – and your everyday life.
Full disclosure: Adrienne Mayor is my wife. But that is not why I chose this book: It is a mind-blowing account of ancient dreams of technology and ancient scientific wonders. Mayor is a master storyteller. She recreates the ancient myths to reveal the timeless fascination with “artificial life” – with beings that are like us in some ways, except that they are “made, not born.” Long before humans could create real mechanical men and thinking machines, the Greeks dared to imagine what that would mean for humans and our relations with one another. And they imagined the inner lives and torments of the semi-machines themselves. Read this book and shiver to learn that our modernity was dreamed of 2500 years ago.
The fascinating untold story of how the ancients imagined robots and other forms of artificial life-and even invented real automated machines
The first robot to walk the earth was a bronze giant called Talos. This wondrous machine was created not by MIT Robotics Lab, but by Hephaestus, the Greek god of invention. More than 2,500 years ago, long before medieval automata, and centuries before technology made self-moving devices possible, Greek mythology was exploring ideas about creating artificial life-and grappling with still-unresolved ethical concerns about biotechne, "life through craft." In this compelling, richly illustrated book, Adrienne Mayor tells the fascinating story…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I spent over forty years developing complex, software-intensive systems, and the Association of Computing Machinery honored me with the title of distinguished engineer. AI and robotics have been my main technical focus for the last 5 years. For the last couple of years, I have been binge-watching videos on advances in AI and robotics and binge-reading books on the topic. I am also a multi-award-winning author of science fiction novels and short stories. Most of the short stories in my coming book involve AI and robots.
I really liked this book because, besides covering the potential ramifications of AI and robots, it also provides interesting insights explaining why different people hold radically different views on how they will affect the future.
While I don’t agree with all the author’s statements, it nevertheless provides much to consider.
As we approach a great turning point in history when technology is poised to redefine what it means to be human, The Fourth Age offers fascinating insight into AI, robotics, and their extraordinary implications for our species. "If you only read just one book about the AI revolution, make it this one" (John Mackey, cofounder and CEO, Whole Foods Market).
In The Fourth Age, Byron Reese makes the case that technology has reshaped humanity just three times in history: 100,000 years ago, we harnessed fire, which led to language; 10,000 years ago, we developed agriculture, which led to cities and…
My dad and Uncle (who was not my uncle!) were both WWII veterans; I was fortunate to receive an artist’s grant to gather stories from WWII veterans in Minnesota and told several at concerts honoring the anniversary of D-Day. My counseling background unexpectedly came into play as their stories left me understanding their heroism, sacrifice, shell shock, and grief. These vets grew up never leaving a circle about a hundred miles across and were suddenly thrown into a foreign country and war. I was compelled to research and write about the 1930’s, life on the farm, young romance, and trying to heal PTSD after the war.
Every now and then, I discover a book that has imagined a world and/or a character that takes me by surprise, and I can’t stop reading about them. Again, it’s all about character! In this book, I met a human cyborg enslaved by a computer program and built as a security unit rented out to corporate groups exploring planets for profit.
This sentient cyborg frees itself from enslavement, hilariously staves off the boredom of security work by watching its favorite media series, and as it watches characters in these shows, begins to learn about human behavior. I enjoyed the awkward, touching way it developed friendships and emotional connections. The character, which calls itself Murderbot, presents as if it’s on the spectrum.
Its first-person narration is snarky, occasionally hilarious, and endearing as it slowly learns what it means to have friendships. And oh, it finds all this wildly inconvenient, hates eye…
All Systems Red by Martha Wells begins The Murderbot Diaries, a new science fiction action and adventure series that tackles questions of the ethics of sentient robotics. It appeals to fans of Westworld, Ex Machina, Ann Leckie's Imperial Raadch series, or lain M. Banks' Culture novels. The main character is a deadly security droid that has bucked its restrictive programming and is balanced between contemplative self discovery and an idle instinct to kill all humans. In a corporate dominated s pa cef a ring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. Exploratory teams are accompanied by…
I was raised in a large family, and we were taught to be respectful, honest, and polite to everyone. I've never been able to understand the mind of a 'nasty' person or how a person can hurt another. When these people are brought to justice, how can we know they are telling the truth?
Expanding on this, I started thinking about Artificial Intelligence—could this be the creation that gives us the way to see into a person's mind; to find out what crime they have committed? But then I thought, what if the actual creator was a criminal? How would anyone even know? That was the route of my research which led to i4Ni being written.
I bought this book because of the great write-ups about it. The author won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and this was his first book following that award, so for me, it was recommended as soon as the author won the award.
It's a great read and has filled me with a mixture of emotions, so it will be interesting to see how you feel after reading it. For me personally, it's a book to study and learn from, as there is always room for learning in any career you decide to do.
It fascinated me because Klara is an 'Artificial Friend', which ties in with my research and interests in Artificial Intelligence.
*The #1 Sunday Times Bestseller* *Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2021* *A Barack Obama Summer Reading Pick*
'A delicate, haunting story' The Washington Post 'This is a novel for fans of Never Let Me Go . . . tender, touching and true.' The Times
'The Sun always has ways to reach us.'
From her place in the store, Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, watches carefully the behaviour of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
Since first reading dystopian novels as a teenager, I’ve been fascinated by the new worlds that authors create and the fight that the protagonist endures to survive a hostile world. The difference from then to now is that it was previously a mostly male-dominated world. We like to see ourselves reflected in the protagonist, so I’ve been delighted to find so many strong and powerful women at the core of many contemporary dystopian novels. I find that they often include more thoughtful and complex characters with subtle storytelling.
A badass woman whose not quite a woman. I was absorbed in this speculative sci-fi tale. It’s an easy and quick read yet the characters are well enough developed that I became furious on the protagonist’s behalf. I liked that it had me asking many questions on the grey moral landscape that is robotics and artificial intelligence.
I found the protagonist relatable in spite of the fact she wasn’t human. She was programmed to please a man, yet discovered a form of self-actualization through reading. Her growth as a character was refreshing and I was rooting for her the whole way. Under a desert sky as sweat trickled down my back, I couldn’t move, I had to keep reading.
"Provocative...a Frankenstein for the digital age...a rich text about power, autonomy, and what happens when our creations outgrow us." — Esquire
"Unexpected and subtle...delicious and thought-provoking." — New Scientist
For fans of Never Let Me Go and My Dark Vanessa, a powerful, provocative novel about the relationship between a female robot and her human owner, exploring questions of intimacy, power, autonomy, and control.
Annie Bot was created to be the perfect girlfriend for her human owner Doug. Designed to satisfy his emotional and physical needs, she has dinner ready for him every night, wears the pert outfits he orders for…
