Here are 66 books that The Simulacrum fans have personally recommended if you like
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I grew up when the space race was starting, and I became fascinated by all things regarding the planets, rockets, and the cosmos. For several years, I lived in the Houston area and spent hours and hours at the Johnson Space Center, where the history and future of space exploration are on display. The books on my list represent a major theme in my writing, which is futuristic in concept and asks the question: what we would do if our planet became uninhabitable. The answer provides the canvas to explore the advantages of technology, but most importantly, the determination of the human spirit.
I love this book because it blends real science with an incredibly human story about survival and connection.
Andy Weir makes complex physics feel accessible, while still keeping the stakes intense and the pacing fast. What really stands out for me is the unexpected friendship at the heart of the story—it turns what could have been a solitary mission into something deeply emotional.
Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish.
Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.
All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.
His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through…
When an unauthorized oil rig appears offshore of Ecuador, a military team is sent to investigate. The deep-water platform has no markings, no drilling rig, and no workers. But it’s surrounded by a curious bank of fog, and when their helicopter closes in, they’re swallowed without a trace.
Of all the intelligent species (both real and fictional), humans fascinate me the most. For me, it’s the creativity and diversity of humans that both divide and unite us. Our eternal struggle to understand one another and overcome our differences fascinates me. I love first-contact science fiction that lets us view the values and behavior of our own species through the lens of true outsiders. I find great value in these parables when they increase self-awareness of our identities and our effect on others.
As a big fan of xenofiction, I appreciated that large parts of the book were written from the perspective of non-humans. I loved the author’s imagination, which, while innovative, never strayed into the implausible.
I was very interested in the timespan of thousands of years and the concept of accelerated evolution, and I found the intelligent, massive spiders to be both creepy and fascinating. For me, Children of Time was a good page-turner and a great read.
Winner of the 30th anniversary Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Novel
Adrian Tchaikovksy's critically acclaimed, stand-alone novel Children of Time, is the epic story of humanity's battle for survival on a terraformed planet.
Who will inherit this new Earth?
The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age - a world terraformed and prepared for human life.
But all is not right in this new Eden. In the long years since the…
Of all the intelligent species (both real and fictional), humans fascinate me the most. For me, it’s the creativity and diversity of humans that both divide and unite us. Our eternal struggle to understand one another and overcome our differences fascinates me. I love first-contact science fiction that lets us view the values and behavior of our own species through the lens of true outsiders. I find great value in these parables when they increase self-awareness of our identities and our effect on others.
I loved this wonderful novel. There was no need for pitched battles in space or even any villains in this story of a scientist marooned on a planet with a hostile environment. I was drawn in by the main character, Juna, and the inhabitants of the planet–the Tendu. To save Juna, the Tendu had to adapt her body while they prepared for the inevitable return of the humans.
I became emotionally invested in the story as Juna faced the poignant decision of whether to return to Earth or remain with her Tendu friends and the young Tendu she adopted. By the end of the story, I felt a whole range of emotions–both sad and uplifting.
The award-winning author of Virtual Girl creates a strange new world of infinite possibilities where honor, sacrifice, and friendship between humans and aliens can mean many different things at once. Reprint.
The aftermath of human first contact, written from the extraterrestrial's perspective.
Kelvoo is overcome with wonder at the arrival of the humans. With flawless memories and innate curiosity, Kelvoo’s community embraces the benevolent humans and their knowledge of the boundless universe beyond the cloud-covered sky. After the departure of the…
Of all the intelligent species (both real and fictional), humans fascinate me the most. For me, it’s the creativity and diversity of humans that both divide and unite us. Our eternal struggle to understand one another and overcome our differences fascinates me. I love first-contact science fiction that lets us view the values and behavior of our own species through the lens of true outsiders. I find great value in these parables when they increase self-awareness of our identities and our effect on others.
I’m including this book in my list since it is the first book I have ever read that tells a story of human-alien interaction from the extraterrestrial’s perspective–A theme that has held my interest to this day. I liked the main character, Ryo, an agricultural engineer of the insectoid thranx species, and I appreciated how the thranx and humans overcame their differences to form an alliance, which became known in later books as the “Humanx Commonwealth”.
Recounts the history of the relationship between humans and the insect-like Thranx, as seen through the eyes of a young agricultural expert--and a Thranx--named Ryo. Originally in paperback.
I’ve been a science fiction writer since I was old enough to read, and I’ve spent probably way too much of my life reading and writing and researching and thinking about aliens. I’ve worked in the aerospace industry, launching rockets to the moon and Mars and Saturn, and five of the books I’ve published have touched on alien life in one way or another. I’ve worked as a contributing editor for WIRED magazine and the science and technology correspondent for the SyFy channel, and I hold patents in seven countries, including 31 issued U.S. patents.
Sterling burst onto the SF scene with a crash and clatter when I was in high school, and this book, while perhaps not his very best work, is certainly his most creative.
I loved the fact that the aliens were investors rather than conquerors and also the fact that human beings were diverging along so many different vectors that we were rapidly becoming alien to one another.
THE FUTURE OF MANKIND CAN TAKE ONE OF TWO DIRECTIONS...
The Mechanists are ancient aristocrats, their lives prosthetically extended with advanced technology. The Shapers are genetically altered revolutionaries, their skills the result of psychotechnic training and artificial conditioning.
Both factions are fighting to control the Schismatrix of humankind.
The Shapers are losing the battle, but Abelard Lindsay--a failed and exiled Shaper diplomat--isn't giving up. Across the galaxy, Lindsay moves from world to world, building empires, struggling for his cause--but more often fighting for his life.
He is a rebel and a rogue, a pirate and a politician, a soldier and…
I’m drawn to science fiction that forces characters to confront the limits of their own understanding, especially when faced with someone labeled as an enemy. These are the stories that taught me how fragile judgment can be, and how costly it is to mistake difference for threat. I return again and again to books where communication across cultures, species, or systems is difficult, incomplete, and often arrives too late. What fascinates me most is not conflict itself, but the moral effort required to truly see the other. These novels shaped how I think about empathy, memory, and responsibility, and they continue to influence the kinds of stories I write.
This was my very first science-fiction read, when I was around ten or twelve years old, and it never left me.
I was deeply shaken by the bond that grew between two sworn enemies who initially wanted nothing more than to kill each other. I was afraid for them, stranded on a hostile, alien planet, and I cried not only when Jerry died, but also when Samis tried to imitate Willis, lifting his three fingers and staring at the human’s five, asking if more would grow.
What stayed with me most was the moment when the human went to the Drac world to bear witness for Jerry and Samis. Since then, I’ve carried one line like a personal mantra: “Go ahead! Go ahead and blow, you kizlode sonofabitch! You haven’t killed me yet!”
This book taught me, very early, that humanity can survive even where ideology insists it shouldn’t.
This version is the original award winning novella that inspired the 20th Century Fox motion picture ENEMY MINE starring Dennis Quaid and Lou Gossett, Jr. It is the story of a human combat pilot, incomplete in himself, taught to be a human by the sworn enemy with which he is stranded, an alien who leaves with the human its most important possession: its future. This version of "Enemy Mine" is the winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards for best novella (1980). Other versions available are expansions of this version.
I am an experiencer who has had a lot of experiences with otherworldly beings for the last several years now, and I am also an inventor in my own right with one patent. I feel I have the ability to pay attention to detail, and I'm very analytical when it comes to making sense of things I can read, see, and hear. In my book, I give detailed explanations of my experiences from my encounters, and I am a very practical person, where I have the tendency to analyze mostly everything I do.
I highly recommend this book because it takes a uniquely scientific yet imaginative approach to the question of extraterrestrial life.
Instead of relying on speculation alone, Pickover blends biology, physics, and astronomy to explore what alien life might realistically look like, how it could evolve, and the environments it might inhabit. He examines possibilities ranging from microbial organisms to advanced civilizations, grounding each scenario in scientific principles while still leaving room for wonder.
This makes the book both intellectually stimulating and accessible, appealing to readers who want more than just UFO anecdotes—they want a thoughtful exploration of life beyond Earth.
If extraterrestrials ever landed on Earth, they would find us extremely strange. Their first intimation of our existence might well be a Super Bowl broadcast or a stray transmission from the Playboy channel. But, of course, they might seem equally strange to us. How strange? Their senses could be entirely different from ours,they might see in the infrared or hear" radio waves.What would aliens look like? An intelligent octopus-like creature is certainly plausible. What about odd numbers of limbs,a three-legged alien with three arms and three eyes? What about an entire planet of immobile, silicon-based trees" that communicate with each…
I discovered science fiction at age nine with Rocketship Galileo and Red Planet and have never lost my love for speculative worlds, even after growing up to follow a career teaching and writing about the history of cities and city planning. In recent years, I’ve also begun to write about the field of SF. So it is one-hundred-percent natural for me to combine the two interests and explore science fiction cities. I try to look beyond the geez-whiz technology of some imagined cities to the ideas of human-scale planning and community that might make them fun places to visit or live in if we could somehow manage to get there.
At the center of the story is Spearpoint, the tallest skyscraping megabuilding that you could imagine. It is so enormous that it is divided into segments from bottom to top with different levels of technology (Horsetown and Steamville at the bottom, cybertowns, and then the fantastic Celestial Levels at the top). But wait, there’s more.
Roaming the rest of the planet is the Swarm, hundreds of giant aircraft that function together as the neighborhoods of a “distributed city” much like the fleet in Battlestar Galactica. The very different cities do not play well together, and you get to choose which one you’d rather live in. I like flying, myself.
Spearpoint, the last human city, is an atmosphere-piercing spire of vast size. Clinging to its skin are the zones, a series of semi-autonomous city-states, each of which enjoys a different - and rigidly enforced - level of technology. Horsetown is pre-industrial; in Neon Heights they have television and electric trains ...Following an infiltration mission that went tragically wrong, Quillon has been living incognito, working as a pathologist in the district morgue. But when a near-dead angel drops onto his dissecting table, Quillon's world is wrenched apart one more time, for the angel is a winged posthuman from Spearpoint's Celestial Levels…
I’ve been writing for publication since I was a student, crudely the writing has been a way of medicating the fact I’m incurably curious about a range of things and I’ve also suffered from an over-production of ideas my whole life. Wrestling this under control into writing and live speaking where the subjects must fit within a title, word limit, or running time for a talk has been helpful, beyond which the whole writing career has been a trade off between things I’ve chosen to do because they matter a lot to me, and the occasional accepting of an offer I thought too good to refuse.
This is hefty, recent, authoritative, and well written (the author’s CV includes a Pulitzer Prize nomination).
Over a lengthy historic account, he spins the twin stories of the search by scientists for extraterrestrial life and the – usually – amateur search by ufologists for evidence to support their claims that aliens are already visiting us. Garrett Graff explores the contradictions.
He is clear and concise on the strength and weakness each side’s efforts, and insightful in those moments when both sides have briefly collaborated. For a beginner to the subject who wants the shortest route to becoming truly knowledgeable, this is the perfect primer.
From Garrett M. Graff, New York Times bestselling author of Raven Rock, The Only Plane in the Sky, and Pulitzer Prize finalist for history Watergate, comes the first comprehensive and eye-opening exploration of our government's decades-long quest to solve one of humanity's greatest mysteries: Are we alone in the universe?
For as long as we have looked to the skies, the question of whether life on Earth is the only life to exist has been at the core of the human experience, driving scientific debate and discovery, shaping spiritual belief, and prompting existential thought across borders and generations. And yet,…
Sci-fi has been part of my life since Sunday afternoons in front of the radio listening to Journey to the Moon and the original Quatermass serial. Then it was Doctor Who and Star Trek. Despite this, I have never written a serious sci-fi book until now, but I can boast of knowing all the characters in both the radio and TV sci-fi shows. I guess I can admit to being a Trekkie.
Another pioneer writer and the writer who started the cyberpunk genre. I loved this book because it is different, and if you are a true sci-fi nut, this one is for you.
I think Adams must have been on another planet when he wrote this. It is sci-fi comedy, and unlike many others who try and fail with comedy in this genre, this is a giant of a series. It is funny and serious with unforgettable characters. I love it.
This box set contains all five parts of the' trilogy of five' so you can listen to the complete tales of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Zaphod Bebblebrox and Marvin the Paranoid Android! Travel through space, time and parallel universes with the only guide you'll ever need, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Read by Stephen Fry, actor, director, author and popular audiobook reader, and Martin Freeman, who played Arthur Dent in film version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He is well known as Tim in The Office.
The set also includes a bonus DVD Life, the Universe and…
