100 Books Like Trouble on Triton

I love this book for its poetic, dreamlike quality. Bradbury’s writing pulled me in and didn’t let go, painting a picture of Mars that was both beautiful and tragic. As a pre-teen and a teen, in my imagination, I had red dust stuck to my feet, and I was there with the characters. What captivated me was the way the stories felt timeless—each one was like a snapshot of a moment layered with meaning.

I felt like I wasn’t just reading a book about colonizing Mars; I was exploring humanity’s deepest fears, hopes, and regrets. We have companies only today working on getting to Mars, I feel so upset that I know I will likely never set foot on those dusty red shores, but I am thrilled to know it may still happen for others.

Bradbury’s work made me think about the consequences of exploration—how, in our quest to conquer… show more.

This book, the only sequel Michael Crichton wrote, is an action-adventure story that stands fully upright on its own two feet. It's a philosophical, exciting adventure with multiple stories beautifully wound around a central core with harsh flashes of reality when the dinosaurs make their appearances.

I was very impressed with Sarah Harding's story, a practical, intelligent, feet-on-the-ground hero caught up in a world where science has created new, bigger-than-life creatures. She contends with violent dinosaurs and handles smart men who supposedly should know better as she battles her way to surviving another Jurassic World adventure.

This book was written in the late 60s, when everything was breaking loose from traditional values, including writing styles. Brunner did a very good job of anticipating how technology and changing social norms would change the world in the not-so-distant future.

It's all there: sexual freedom, legal drugs, religion, computers, crazy mass killers called muckers, corporate empires, a 7 billion population, global events, and the personalized internet.

I like the way the story was written, a new wave pop art style intermixed with traditional passages blaring out a series of seemingly unrelated events that are strung together by a group of unrelated characters who carry the complex story through to a surprising ending.

As we continue our journey into the future, things that people thought would change to our advantage have not turned out the way. I like P. K. Dick's stories because he was a master at understanding how the future would upend traditional lifestyles, jobs, and housing.

This book is about a man who makes highly creative weapons for the government designed to keep the country in power. The kicker is that none of the weapons actually work. On the other side, his counterpoint is doing the same thing, making ridiculous super weapons. When real aliens show up, they find themselves trying to work together to make something that works for real while still superstitiously battling each other under the guise of a white flag.

This science fiction and mystery story is about an astronaut from a world without men crashes on Earth and blows all our minds… except we’re also reading a story about a woman living in our 1970s, and a parallel Earth where WWII never happened… it gets a little confusing, in a really fun way.

Russ uses this engaging, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic multiverse story to explore topics of sex essentialism and gender fluidity in a way that still feels bracing and mind-expanding today.

You could say this is as much a philosophical treatise as a novel but that makes it sound like it isn’t any fun, when in fact it’s a blast. If you’re open to a far-out read you will not be disappointed.

The key to understanding our lives is to enlarge our perspectives, and human behavior hasn’t changed much in 2000 years.

Plato gives several suggestions for maintaining stability in organized society, including guarding against the influence of Sophists, who manipulate language to manipulate their listeners, reminding me of our salesmen today.

Especially valuable is his allegory of the cave, where educators present images to an audience chained in place since early childhood. The glare of the sun awaits anyone who manages to leave the cave, and coming back in won’t be easy, but those who leave and find genuine truth need to come back and serve those still in the cave. Make the world a better place.

This book hooked me from the first page, and The Union has all the exciting elements I love in a book—fast-paced, danger, action, and romance.

I didn’t want to put the book down, so I stayed past my bedtime, especially since I wanted to know about the protagonist’s love interests. It was easy to get lost in the book. The author did an amazing job with the details of the characters and the world-building.

I didn’t just love Ecotopia—I wanted to move in, flaws and all.

There’s something very old-timey American about the irreverent, can-do people of Ecotopia—no thick institutional crust, just folks getting things done and cheerfully going about their daily lives. The decentralization, the dirt under the fingernails—all of it breathed like a real place.

They compose music, grow heirloom tomatoes, and debate philosophy in newspapers printed on yesterday’s recycled pulp–or some such. And they carry a fundamental sense of optimism for a bright new day. One can grow used to it. 

I was recommended this book as a teenager by someone I deeply respect and admire. I’ve come back to it a lot, most recently from a hospital bed with an epidural in my spine. I think the book lifted more pain then than the drip.

Resurrection was the last novel Tolstoy wrote and it led to his excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church. It’s a complex quasi-love story about a beautifully flawed protagonist’s struggle to give away all the land he owns out of a tangle of duty, guilt, and a wide-eyed love for his fellow human.

In 19thC Russia, that’s extremely complicated: economically, socially, ethically, spiritually. It’s about why anyone can claim to ‘own’ anything, what fairness looks like to different people, and whether it’s possible to enjoy life while rampantly battling to perfect yourself (short answer: no).

The novel plays out on vast tracts of peasant-farmed land, dank,… show more.

For the vastly impossible feat of presenting a sequel to a thoroughly immersive narrative, this did impress. The lead out of the original gives the feeling of the impossible and so it was delivered. Brokering A.C. Clarke's range of brilliance plus getting into the popular references of my youth, in the cyberpunk, virtual reality, corporate elite defining drama, aren't we all familiar with dystopia by now? Where or when does the apocalypse become inevitable and what are you steering towards there or then? I was awe-inspired by this handling of ethical uses of hyper-tech which is one I left up to my reader's imagination by the end of my own series. Whether imagined VR can ever become a coded reality, or if it's only ever going to be imagination, this is the challenge of the Age of Aquarius.