Here are 68 books that Will Save the Galaxy for Food fans have personally recommended if you like
Will Save the Galaxy for Food.
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I received the Dungeons and Dragons Basic Red Box as a kid, and I have been hooked on all things fantasy fiction since. It has become a part of my life so much that each character takes on a special importance for me. Some characters exist in worlds full of swords and magic, while others live in realms that are dirty, bleak, and on the brink of utter ruin. As a writer, I enjoy seeing the different perspectives these characters bring to fantasy settings. It makes them unique, each in their own way. Some want to right the wrongs of the worlds they reside in, while others don’t care if it all burns down around them.
I never thought I’d cheer for a crippled torturer, but somehow Abercrombie makes me do it.
The characters in The Blade Itself feel raw and jagged, like real people rather than fantasy archetypes. What I loved most was how no one is truly heroic—everyone’s broken, desperate, or scheming, yet still magnetic. The dialogue crackles with wit, and the shifting perspectives kept me hooked.
It’s grimdark, yes, but never bleak for the sake of it. Instead, it reveals how ugly and fascinating people can be when survival and ambition collide.
Inquisitor Glokta, a crippled and increasingly bitter relic of the last war, former fencing champion turned torturer extraordinaire, is trapped in a twisted and broken body - not that he allows it to distract him from his daily routine of torturing smugglers.
Nobleman, dashing officer and would-be fencing champion Captain Jezal dan Luthar is living a life of ease by cheating his friends at cards. Vain, shallow, selfish and self-obsessed, the biggest blot on his horizon is having to get out of bed in the morning to train with obsessive and boring old men.
What if the gods could be FORCED to answer our prayers? Amelia and her friends were once DnD-style fantasy adventurers, who found themselves launched into science fiction when they discovered their medieval world’s “gods” just have access to space-age biomech.
Since ascending to "godhood" herself—that is, earning a place on…
My name is Thomas Tarasios and I'm a fantasy author. I was a huge fan of the Final Fantasy games growing up, particularly I to IX, and as a voracious fantasy reader I've made it my business to find novels that deliver that 'Final Fantasy feeling' (eccentric ensemble cast, adventure, hard magic system, grim yet fun, etc.), scouring the web, message boards and Reddit for recommendations on this topic and reading the suggested books. When it came time to write my own fantasy series, I set out to write as if it were an original Final Fantasy game—a fan novelization of an awesome new Final Fantasy game that doesn't actually exist as a game!
I love this book because it’s basically The Blues Brothers combined with Dungeons and Dragons. How did Nicholas Eames ever come up with that concept, and make it work so well?
In this breakneck madcap quest, retired hero Clay Cooper sets out to get his original adventuring ‘band’ back together one by one in order to go on one last mission to save his daughter. The jokes had me guffawing, the action had me riveted, and the structuring left me open-mouthed.
It reminds me of Final Fantasy because once again we have an eccentric ensemble cast going on an adventure quest with magic and monsters galore…but not only that: Eames is also on record as a Final Fantasy fan and names some of his characters after Final Fantasy characters, along with sticking in some other Easter eggs related to the franchise.
'An outstanding debut which will make you laugh and cry and hold your breath. This is a book that has it all' - K. J. Parker Clay Cooper and his band were once the best of the best - the meanest, dirtiest, most feared and admired crew of mercenaries this side of the Heartwyld. But their glory days are long past; the mercs have grown apart and grown old, fat, drunk - or a combination of the three. Then a former bandmate turns up at Clay's door with a plea for help: his daughter Rose is trapped in a city…
The past is a powerful thing. It’s what we turn to when confronted with the question “how did we get here?” When I began my journey as an author in earnest, that was the question I was facing, and it was the one I wanted my characters to explore. But one book wasn’t enough to satisfy me, and I went searching for other titles that scratched that same itch of examining and confronting our pasts to work out our future. For me, these books were the ones that struck that cord the hardest.
Meddling Kids asks the question, “What would it be like if the Scooby gang retired because they were traumatized by a case where the monsters were real?” And the answer is a story about bravery, overcoming personal demons, and seeing through the rose colored glasses. It gets a little weird in places, but overall it’s a good and uplifting time.
A nostalgic and subversive trip rife with sly nods to H. P. Lovecraft and pop culture, in the vein of It and Stranger Things.
An exuberant and wickedly entertaining celebration of horror, love, friendship, and many-tentacled, interdimensional demon spawn. SUMMER 1977. The Blyton Summer Detective Club (of Blyton Hills, a small mining town in Oregon's Zoinx River Valley) solved their final mystery and unmasked the elusive Sleepy Lake monster-another low-life fortune hunter trying to get his dirty hands on the legendary riches hidden in Deboen Mansion. And he would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those…
What if the gods could be FORCED to answer our prayers? Amelia and her friends were once DnD-style fantasy adventurers, who found themselves launched into science fiction when they discovered their medieval world’s “gods” just have access to space-age biomech.
Since ascending to "godhood" herself—that is, earning a place on…
The past is a powerful thing. It’s what we turn to when confronted with the question “how did we get here?” When I began my journey as an author in earnest, that was the question I was facing, and it was the one I wanted my characters to explore. But one book wasn’t enough to satisfy me, and I went searching for other titles that scratched that same itch of examining and confronting our pasts to work out our future. For me, these books were the ones that struck that cord the hardest.
This is the book that made me want to write fantasy. It is the story of a soldier coming home from war, of a person trying to be better than the worst things they’ve ever done, and of rekindling a sense of purpose when you’ve been lost for too long. I’ve never felt a world more lived-in, prose more decisively punchy, or tiny moments with more perfect poignancy. I re-read this book all the time, and every time, I am as jealous as I am inspired. If you check out nothing else from this list, check out Priest.
For centuries the people of Ollghum Keep relied on the knights of the Green Order to protect them from the horrors of the haunted wood. Now, as before, a monstrous army marches on their small town. But this time, the Green Order is nowhere to be found.
The Bishop sends the priest Heden into the wood, to find out why. Arriving at their secret priory, Heden discovers their commander is dead, the remaining knights paralyzed with despair. They will not act, they will not tell him what happened, and with each hour the monstrous army gets closer to Ollghum Keep.…
I’m a lecturer in medical humanities at the University of Leeds in England and I’m currently writing a book about the portrayal of traumatic pregnancy in fantastic literature (science fiction, horror, fantasy…). ‘Medical humanities’ is a field of study that looks at medical issues using the tools of the humanities, so it encompasses things like history of medicine, bioethics, and (my specialty) literature and medicine. Thinking about literature through the lens of traumatic pregnancy has led me to some fascinating, gory, and philosophical books, some of which I’m including on this list.
This book takes us into a space colony populated solely by females who live in a symbiotic relationship with their organic starship. The ship is their shelter and protector, and in return, the women birth tools and components that the ship needs to function.
I love the gory spectacle of these bloody, mechanical births but also how they allow Hurley to explore ideas about community, duty, and belonging. The book is part of a wider sensibility that can be found throughout Hurley’s work, but for my money, this is the one where her imaginative powers are most successfully harnessed.
Somewhere on the outer rim of the universe, a mass of decaying world-ships known as the Legion is traveling in the seams between the stars. For generations, a war for control of the Legion has been waged, with no clear resolution. As worlds continue to die, a desperate plan is put into motion.
Zan wakes with no memory, prisoner of a people who say they are her family. She is told she is their salvation - the only person capable of boarding the Mokshi, a world-ship with the power to leave the Legion. But Zan's new family is not the…
I first stumbled on the idea of colonizing space when I read Adrian Berry's The Next Ten Thousand Years and T.A. Heppenheimer's Colonies in Space, back in the late 1970s. In those post-Apollo, pre-Space Shuttle years, colonizing outer space seemed inevitable. I was hooked: this stuff was real, and it was going to happen. It might even happen to me. But living in space isn't very exciting to read about. Of course, just a few years after reading those books I was watching Indiana Jones dodge deathtraps in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Combine the two: space colonies full of danger and surprises are much better!
Revenger is a ripping space pirate yarn, but grounded in solid science. Amid all the yo-ho-ho tropes it includes a gripping section in which a rag-tag crew of scavengers penetrate into a sealed asteroid tomb-world. They must survive perils, find what they're looking for, and get out before it seals itself up again. I expect this book will be considered a classic in future decades.
The galaxy has seen great empires rise and fall. Planets have shattered and been remade. Amongst the ruins of alien civilisations, building our own from the rubble, humanity still thrives.
And there are vast fortunes to be made, if you know where to find them . . .
Captain Rackamore and his crew do. It's their business to find the tiny, enigmatic worlds which have been hidden away, booby-trapped, surrounded with layers of protection - and to crack them open for the ancient relics and barely-remembered technologies inside. But while they ply their risky trade with integrity, not everyone is…
My parents always encouraged me to explore the world and express myself. I also grew up in a home where the bookshelves were lined with Stephen King novels, encyclopedias, and VHS tapes containing episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. So it came as little surprise that my interests in astronomy, orbital mechanics, and fantastical technology concepts (who doesn't like the idea of a ringworld?) dominated my life. I also love history and the drive for exploring the endless possibilities behind the question "what if." Science fiction is, at its core, about exploring the human condition—this is where you’ll find my writing and the adventures I bring to you.
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.
“Fans of Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers will eat this up.” --Stephen King
For fans of THE MARTIAN, an extraordinary new thriller of the future from #1 New York Times–bestselling and Pulitzer Prize–winning author John Sandford and internationally known photo-artist and science fiction aficionado Ctein.
Over the course of thirty-seven books, John Sandford has proven time and again his unmatchable talents for electrifying plots, rich characters, sly wit, and razor-sharp dialogue. Now, in collaboration with Ctein, he proves it all once more, in a stunning new thriller, a story as audacious as it is deeply satisfying.
As a planetary scientist and college professor, I love the adventure of finding something new, the wonder of strange worlds, and the magic of mysterious discoveries that behave logically in a way that I can figure out. Unsurprisingly, that is what I like in my fiction too. I also love a story that explores the nature of the interaction between people, particularly in friendship or romance (all proper of course—I’m an old-fashioned guy). The books on this list are all touchstones in my own journey into science and life, and I hope that you can find in them the delight, wonder, insight, and motivation that I have found.
High school student Kip Morgan wins an internship at an oceanographic institute in Hawaii where he, with help of new friend Julie Scott, overcomes multiple personal and engineering challenges to solve an archaeological mystery and raise a sunken ship from the sea floor. This story from the 1970s was key in guiding me toward a life of science, and the portrayal of a realistic, mentored research experience gave me a vision for what I might do in my own journey through college and into science.
I loved the exotic location, scuba diving, and seafloor exploration, mystery, adventure, and romance!
I was a political journalist in London for the BBC and HuffPost for many years, so thinking about our current politics, and where we are headed kind of fixates me! From the day I read 1984 as a twelve-year-old, I’ve been obsessed with how novels set in the near future or an alternate past can be intensely political, and instructive. I enjoy sci-fi, but it’s the extrapolation of our world into a similar yet different one that can tell us so much about our own society.
Not her most famous speculative novel, but one which has a lot to say about where our societies might be headed. Automation and the soaring cost of living have wrecked the economy. The solution seems bizarre at first – people spend half their lives in prison – but as the novel progresses, it starts to seem normal, plausible even. Atwood is asking us how much we really value our freedom, and what conditions might prompt us to surrender it willingly. This has a dotted line to human relationships and love, exploring why people get together and stay together – or not. More than ever Atwood’s dark wit is on display here, though whether we should be laughing about these things is an open question!
From the bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments—in the gated community of Consilience, residents who sign a contract will get a job and a lovely house for six months of the year...if they serve as inmates in the Positron prison system for the alternate months.
“Captivating...thrilling.” —The New York Times Book Review
Stan and Charmaine, a young urban couple, have been hit by job loss and bankruptcy in the midst of nationwide economic collapse. Forced to live in their third-hand Honda, where they are vulnerable to roving gangs, they think the gated community of Consilience may be…
Writing science fiction was the natural result of a lifetime of reading it for pleasure and studying whenever I could as part of my English Lit course at University. When I started writing, it was really important to me as a woman (especially a gay woman) to write female characters that weren’t just strong and likable; I wanted them to be interesting, unpalatable, and tough. Above all, not easy to dismiss. All of the women in the books I’ve listed fulfill at least some of these categories, which is the core of why these novels hold such a special place in my heart.
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…
A promising young mercenary's future gets thrown into jeopardy after a fateful encounter with an alien in the start to a propulsive space opera series perfect for fans of Firefly and Killjoys.
"Devi is hands-down one of the best sci-fi heroines I've read in a long time." RT Book Reviews Devi Morris isn't your average mercenary. She has plans. Big ones. And a ton of ambition. It's a combination that's going to get her killed one day -- but not just yet.
That is, until she just gets a job on a tiny trade ship with a nasty reputation for…
