Books like The Prophet of Queens — picked by fans

Overstuffed and labyrinthine, Eco’s novel dives into a highly academic rabbit hole of conspiracy theories that toss me head over heels like a strong wave in the ocean. It reads a bit like The DaVinci Code written by Thomas Pynchon (who we’ll get to in a minute), the paranoias stemming from historical entities like the Knights Templar and the Rosicrucians.

I’d be hard-pressed to provide an accurate summary of events, but it all makes for a pleasantly bewildering reading experience.

In my view, a great murder mystery should have a lot of possibilities, and science fiction just adds deeper layers of intrigue, and this is what The City and The City has in spades – literal layers and intrigue.

Here, two cities exist in the same place, yet the citizens of each one must ignore the citizens of the other. It is a crime to notice the citizens of the other city. When a murder occurs and our detective investigates, he only has jurisdiction in one city.

But what really blew my mind about this book was that, though it is science fiction, there is no physical or scientific reason that the cities are separate and occupy the same place. The division is only in the minds of the inhabitants!

I chose this book as an easy leisure read for a holiday in Greece, and I fell in enduring love with it. Umberto Eco is not only the master of the theory of sign systems (semiotics) but also able to escape from the dry plains of scientific conclusions to the rich landscapes of historical narratives.

In this book, he shows us that Europe’s early development has not just been the linearly ascending advance from ancient Greece, via the Roman Empire, to the Renaissance. The narrator he invented for his book lets us return to the many threats from which the Middle Ages in Europe could emerge.

I started reading it as an entertaining storytelling book, but in the middle of this adventure, I realized how deeply into scientific thought Eco, the specialist in medieval studies, had abducted me.

I found this book by accident and was very glad I came across it while pottering around the shelves of my favourite second-hand bookshop.
On first appearances, the book looks like a missing-person-stroke-body-turning-up-many-years-later-in-mysterious-circumstances kind of story, but it goes much further into a world of conspiracy theories, malign medical technologies, and seemingly unfathomable crimes.
I loved the sheer pace of the book – very hard to put down – and how Iain Edward Henn set about weaving the characters, settings, and indeed reader into a possible (probable) new scientific paradigm.

Great stuff.

Price is a philosopher and this book, along with Paul Horwich’s Asymmetries in Time and David Albert’s Time and Chance, are heirs of Reichenbach’s masterpiece. I select Price’s book here because it is more accessible than Horwich’s or Albert’s books. It is packed with fun and deep stuff: criticism of Hawking’s cosmology, exploration of the electromagnetic arrow of time, and serious discussion of wild ideas like causation going backward in time.

Aristotle’s Metaphysics marks the beginning of attempts to articulate the philosophy of metaphysics as a science. Retrospectively applying Kant’s division of metaphysics as transcendental philosophy to Aristotle’s writings: Aristotle’s Metaphysics is an in-depth examination of cosmological and theological metaphysics.

I personally enjoy Aristotle’s Metaphysics because it is mysterious. It is difficult to read, and the fact that it was written with an entirely different alphabet is exciting. Aristotle’s Metaphysics is his attempt to systematically blend his particular preference for empiricism with metaphysical insights learned from Plato’s philosophy.

The history of Aristotle’s Metaphysics – in terms of, for example, its title and organization – is fascinating in itself; however, what always stood out for me was recognizing Aristotle’s own excitement. Book 5 of his Metaphysics is often thought of as a kind of metaphysical dictionary, and shortly after this summary of vocabulary terms, it is as if Aristotle grabs hold of… show more.

This selection of essays focuses on the important concept of “downward causation” (a designation first employed by Donald T. Campbell), that is, the idea that, in addition to the “upward” causal influence of parts on wholes, which is the focus of stereotypical (bottom-up) reductionist views, wholes also exercise top-down emergent causal influences on their parts.

This has been a vital recurring issue and an identifying principle in most theories of emergence. Campbell and Mark H. Bickhard provide the culminating chapter in this book.

Sri Aurobindo is, in my opinion, the greatest writer of them all. His poetic prose hypnotizes while swirling around the most profound ideas of all — What is the divine? How can we know the truth? What is the best way to live? The Life Divine is Aurobindo’s magnum opus, his articulation of the path to self-realization and how to use it to make the world a better place. In other words, it’s everything you need to know.

I’m a physician, so it’s probably not surprising that a book by a physician about an alien physician might hit my list of meaningful space operas.

What is surprising is Star Surgeon’s double-twist—the patients aren’t who we think they are, and the secret to getting Earth into the prestigious Galactic Confederation isn’t what we think it is—both of which actually had huge real-world thematic implications.

On face level, it’s a medical thriller: the protag’s the first alien to graduate from human medical school, and he’s got to prove himself by curing an epidemic on a remote planet without arousing the ire of his human teachers. (I felt like this in residency.) But on a metaphysical level, Star Surgeon is a quiet manifesto dissecting the origins of racism—and the very biology of sentience itself. 

Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, by many accounts, is the most accurate and true portrayal of Hell. It has been long speculated whether or not Dante, by means of dreaming or some other metaphysical affair, was truly able to visit Hell—the ways in which he describes the deadly sins of human life proves to be both very emotional and very comprehendible, in a way that can push one to both care more for the way that they choose to live, care more for the ways that they treat others, as well as understand the burdens of life and thus realize that it could, in some way, be worse off than it presently seems.