78 Books Like The Raft

This book took me to a twisted, hidden world full of very creepy scenes and characters, and since I worked in a mall for over a decade, showed me what true horror in a mall could be like.

The whole book is like being trapped in a strange nightmare, and the authors went to some twisted places to imagine what it would be like in their horror-mall. This book also kicks off the series, so there’s more to read after it.

I was expecting the quintessential and stereotypical forbidden romance, and instead, what I read was one of the best explorations of humanity (in its various forms) I’ve ever encountered.

The novel explores how AI and androids might impact society in terms of art, politics, personal relationships, and much more. The author also has a way of making music important and beautiful – a difficult thing to do when it comes to being restricted to using text.

One of the best Horror novels I’ve read – very unsettling and creepy, and eminently memorable.

This novel won’t be for everyone; it’s brutal, pulls no punches, and is evocative of the risks writers like Clive Barker take in their writing. Shadows is one of the best examples of South African (that is, written by a South African) horror that I’ve read.

I enjoyed the local setting, the intensity of the novel, and its unflinching exploration of South Africa’s violent crime problems and how crime ties into cultural beliefs.

The novel goes to some dark places, in terms of events and character arcs, and the pacing and well-written scenes keep the reader nailed to the story – you’ll see a side of South Africa which is very real, but perhaps largely unknown to the rest of the world.

This fun story from the 1990s revived my youthful joy in reading at a time when the busy-ness of adulthood had stolen it away. Siri has forgotten who she is and is swept into multiple space adventures as she tries to reconstruct her lost memories and regain the power and place she once held with her people. In the process, she finds friendships (the Drapsk!) and romance (Morgan!), and comes to understand herself better.

In reading this book, I realized that the science fiction stories I like best are ones that deal with relationships, mystery, and discovery and not just complicated technologies and their implications for society. I realized that I could have fun reading again if I had some fun science fiction with adventure, romance, and exploration!

In the mid-21st century, an alien craft appears just beyond the orbit of Saturn and approaches the planet quickly before coming to a halt within its rings... and departs as fast as it arrived. The event shocks the world into a space race not unlike the Soviets and Americans fighting to be the first to put a man on the moon. As a hard science fiction novel, Saturn Run was an incredible read—an absolute joy. I personally loved every little detail provided of the space-station-turned-spacecraft, from the methods by which heat was radiated away from the ship to how it was designed for a multi-month excursion. Overall, I really enjoyed the story and would highly recommend it if you are a stickler for the kind of technical details that hard sci-fi novels should have.

Imagine, if you will, a classic pulp sci-fi hero, standing bold on the cover of a dimestore paperback, raygun in one hand, a beautiful woman in the other, and dangerous aliens all around him. Now imagine it's many years later, and that hero is now a deadbeat relic of a bygone era, and the heroism of his glory days has become little more than inspiration for cheap entertainment. The hero of Will Save the Galaxy for Food is confronted with the reality of the world leaving him behind, and has to figure out what he can do about it. Or even if he should do anything.

This was a book that really surprised me. A very no-nonsense macho family member recommended it to me on a holiday, and I remember raising my eyebrows reading the back cover and finding out it heavily featured an interspecies romance.

The minute I started reading, I got so wrapped up in the adrenaline and action that I actually went on to recommend it to my sci-fi-loving dad, who read it in a day and went on to borrow the rest of the series. The heroine, a power armor-wearing mercenary, is incredibly competent and badass but avoids falling into either Mary Sue or Damsel in Distress territory as the plot proceeds.

Additionally, while I kept going for the action-romance, the worldbuilding was surprisingly interesting and in-depth. Whenever I’m reluctantly charmed by something, I find it hard not to gush about it; it’s just such a fun experience as a reader to… show more.

I loved Mary Norton’s book for its narrative hook: size. This is Gulliver’s Lilliput without the satiric political overtones. The main characters are a miniature Edwardian family called the Clocks because they live underneath one. The father, Pod, his wife, Homily, and their daughter, Arietty, are so small they fit under the floorboards of a human-sized house.

All their ingenuity is devoted to adapting their smallness to the world of Big People while preventing them from being “seen” by them. Everything they use must be “borrowed” from the bigger world and adapted to their circumstances. Matchboxes become dressers and chests of drawers; postage stamps serve as wall hangings and pictures; a thimble does duty as a soup tureen, while an actual tureen becomes a bathtub.

The discovery of a fully furnished doll’s house has become an occasion for wholesale redecoration. A crisis comes when Arietty is “seen” by the human… show more.

Here we enter the topic of time travel, a concept very dear to me from both a fictional, moral, and scientific point of view. Many novels have attempted to show how one change in the past could change our future. Elton’s novel struck me for its originality in picking a notorious historical event largely ignored by fiction when it comes to time travel and alternate history. The assassination of the Franz Ferdinand of Austria is used not just as the spark of World War I but as the start of the ideological and warmongering terror that would spread through Europe. The novel is an example of man’s fixation with trying to find one cause for all problems when maybe there are multiple causes going back years and years. The search is as vain as the main character’s attempts to change history.