100 Books Like The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 1

Zenna Henderson's entire The People series is worth reading, including the original short stories. These were all published at a time when very few female sci-fi authors were published. There is also a film that is fairly faithful to the books. Her creativity, her understanding the experience of immigrants and those who are “different,” and her depictions of the ways humans and immigrants are likely to re/act are timeless, offering stellar insights into our modern-day experiences. Sci-fi authors would do well to read all her books to learn how to do world-building, draw parallels between non-human species and humans, and analogize modern dilemmas as speculative fiction plots.

Reading this book reminded me that understanding another person is a continuous struggle, and that we lose the most when we mistake appearances for truth. Even for someone like Genly, an emissary whose role is to bridge cultures, truly understanding Estraven proves painfully difficult.

What stayed with me was the tragedy of that gap: how insight often arrives too late.

Estraven’s sacrifice, made so that Genly could reach safety, and Genly’s decision to visit Estraven’s family afterward, left me with a lingering sense that remembrance itself carries moral weight. Sometimes understanding cannot undo loss, but memory—how the living choose to carry it—can still salvage a trace of good from tragedy.

Le Guin’s novel taught me that empathy is not a destination, but an act that must be fought for, again and again.

Doris Lessing is another amazing speculative fiction author with many books and stories to read! This is the third book in a series of five that I highly recommend reading in its entirety and in order. But if you can only read one book, read this one. In this series, Lessing posits an Earth that has been the subject of a millennia-long experiment by beings from the planet Shikasta that includes tipping Earth on its axis to create seasons, which she speculates are the main reason humans have ever-changing moods and are quick to be emotional. A fascinating look into what makes humans the way we are from a unique perspective, along with excellent world-building and an interesting vehicle for storytelling make this a great read.

Wilhelm is credited with having the best writing that inhabits “speculative fiction” (Robert Heinlein's coined term in 1947). I agree with that wholeheartedly, even though many others have contributed. She has dozens of novels, including mystery, suspense, and speculative sci-fi, but start with this book. Each story is unique and they don't actually connect in any way except that she put them all into this book, so I can't summarize them. Please read them all: every single one is a gem and an amazing example of great sci-fi writing.

This book explains what not to do to know the Universe, with examples from non-fiction postmodern nonsense "texts." These texts include discourses detached from experimental verification and scientific terms used completely out of context.

I love this book because I find pseudo- and postmodern science distasteful and harmful. I think it shows clearly how some famous postmodern intellectuals promote antipathy for facts, clear thinking, empirical tests, and, in general, science — our best shot at understanding the Universe. These postmodern intellectuals have huge influence and have helped spread the trend of rejection of reason and science throughout the World.

I adore this book stressing science is not an arbitrary "narration" or a collection of metaphors for postmodern essays. I share the authors’ dreams about a future after postmodernism. 

All scientists are different, and this book brings that home in a very fun way. It's on the shelf with art coffee table books in my house because that's essentially what it is. The book collects photos of science tattoos and descriptions of the science behind the tattoos.

Some are small, simple line drawings of molecules; others are colorful sleeves or back tattoos with intricate scenes of plants, animals, or famous textbook images. As a science writer, I meet a lot of scientists and people who love (and live) science, and this book has had me keeping an eye out for DNA molecules and other science tattoos. 

Once I finished reading Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, it wasn’t long before I learned that he had followed it up with a collection of deeper analyses in the realm of the philosophy of science.

His sequel book took me deeper into the minds and conflicts of noted greats of science whose scientific contributions’ acceptance is now taken for granted by most. Yet, in their own day, they, too, often had to contend with the tension of science’s and scientists’ history of preferring what consensus had ordained as settled knowledge instead of welcoming new insights and discoveries.

Sometimes you don’t want an intensely detailed exploration of a topic, but rather a series of interesting articles—and these 50 ‘wonders that reveal an extraordinary universe’ are an ideal way of dipping into some of the strangest and most wonderful aspects of modern science. Although each topic only lasts a few pages, it’s enough to get you interested and is bound to make you tell someone nearby about it. When you’ve read one, it’s hard not to go on and read a few more.

The amazing results achieved with energy healing raise profound questions concerning the nature of consciousness and the human energy anatomy and how these suggest the existence of a much broader conception of reality than consensual thought allows for, and it is with respect to this broader conception that Rupert Sheldrake proves such an informative guide. His central concept - that of the existence of ‘morphic fields’ connecting all sentient life-forms and the influence that they exert on our emotional and physical lives through the phenomena of ‘morphic resonance’ - provides the ‘missing link’ in our understanding of consciousness and as well as the root causes of much of the mental, emotional and physical ill-health that we encounter as healers. 

Bookshelves groan under the weight of highly skilled science communicators, and through them those of us with no specialist knowledge can learn about evolution, quantum mechanics, neuroscience et al, and then bore people to death with our newfound knowledge. There is, however, a world of difference between the things science discovers and the stories we tell about these discoveries. I love this book because it makes the reader do the hard yards, thinking not just about the breathless new discoveries, but also the very nature of this knowledge, and hence its limits.