Books like Micromegas
24 science fiction books to read after Micromegas, by Francois Voltaire, the closest match first.
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1. The Strange Case Of Dr Jeckyll And Mr Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson
- On the same lists
What we learned from Jeckyll and Hyde is that Frankenstein's monster is in all of us. Taking elements from the real-life case of Deacon Brodie, a respectable cabinet maker who...
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2. The Battle Of Dorking
by George Tomkyns Chesney
- On the same lists
In the middle years of the 19th century, Prussia embarked on a series of military adventures against Denmark, Austria and finally France which succeeded in uniting the German states under...
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3. After London Or Wild England
by Richard Jefferies
- On the same lists
One of Mary Shelley's late novels, The Last Man, envisaged a world ravaged by plague in which humanity is wiped out. Although not well received at the time, the romantic...
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4. New Atlantis
by Francis Bacon
- On the same lists
Francis Bacon was a scientist to his fingertips, one of the very first to argue for the primacy of experiment, and so devoted to his own observations that he died...
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5. The Twentieth Century
by Albert Robida
- On the same lists
Robida was an illustrator and caricaturist more than a novelist, which is just as well because it is the many charming illustrations for this book that have survived better than...
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6. The Journey Of Niels Klim To The World Underground
by Ludvig Holberg
- On the same lists
Throughout the 18th century, there was a vogue for stories about other worlds inside our own. In time, these would give rise to Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of...
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7. News From Nowhere
by Morris, William
- On the same lists
At the start of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, a bunch of characters assemble, most of them identified only by their job: the local mayor, the journalist, and so...
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8. Mundus Alter Et Idem
by Joseph Hall
- On the same lists
Usually translated as "Another World and yet the Same", Bishop Hall's book has been claimed as the first anti-utopia. Coming less than a century after Thomas More wrote his seminal...
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9. Comical History Of The States And Empires Of The Moon And Sun
by Cyrano De Bergerac
- On the same lists
First published, in a bowdlerised form, after the death of Cyrano de Bergerac, the two parts of the book are incomplete, probably because they were considered too heretical and too...
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10. The Narrative Of Arthur Gordon Pym
by Edgar Allan Poe
- On the same lists
Hugo Gernsback defined scientifiction as "the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Allen Poe type of story". Poe was a very varied writer, associated with romantic and gothic fiction, one...
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11. Looking Backward 2000-1887
by Edward Bellamy
- On the same lists
If The Time Machine was, in part, a response to News from Nowhere by William Morris, then News from Nowhere was in turn a response to Looking Backward. Morris didn't...
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12. The Coming Race
by Edward Bulwer-lytton
- On the same lists
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the first Baron Lytton, financed his extravagant lifestyle by writing a string of best selling if often pot boiling novels. Titles like The Last Days of Pompeii and...
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13. Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins
by Robert Paltock
- On the same lists
A reviewer at the time described this novel as "the illegitimate offspring" of Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe, which is a reasonable if not exactly precise description of the book,...
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14. Nova Solyma
by Samuel Gott
- On the same lists
The most characteristic aspect of the science fiction we all know is that it is set in the future. Far and away the vast majority of science fiction stories are...
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15. The Icosameron
by Giacomo Casanova
- On the same lists
Finally, one to avoid: Yes, that Casanova. The famous libertine was also an author, who somehow found time between his innumerable conquests to write this 1,700-page novel. It's another hollow...
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16. The Man In The Moone
by Francis Godwin
- On the same lists
Godwin was Bishop of Hereford, and this extraordinary story was discovered among his papers after his death. Read today it is hard to realise what an amazing work it was,...
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17. Utopia
by Thomas More
- On the same lists
Throughout the Middle Ages there had been folk stories about perfect places, whether it was Heaven or the Land of Cockaigne, but when More wrote about a perfect place he...
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18. From The Earth To The Moon
by Verne, Jules
- On the same lists
Of all the works of translated science fiction, there can be few rivals for the mass and continuing popularity of Jules Verne's extraordinary voyages. Between 1863 and his death in...
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19. The Blazing World
by Margaret Cavendish
- On the same lists
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, sometimes known as Mad Madge, was an amazing figure, a friend of major thinkers like Descartes and Hobbes, she was an early exponent of atomism,...
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20. The Xipehuz And The Death Of The Earth
- On the same lists
The Belgian writer, who used the pseudonym J.-H. Rosny aîné, was possibly the leading continental rival to H.G. Wells, producing a string of vivid and inventive short novels. This one,...
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21. The Consolidator Or, Memoirs Of Sundry Transactions From The World In The Moon
by Daniel Defoe
- On the same lists
Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe and Journal of the Plague Year among many others, is not generally recognised for his science fiction, but in fact he wrote one of the...
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22. Somnium
by Johannes Kepler
- On the same lists
Following the Copernican Revolution, Kepler was probably the most important astronomer in the story of our understanding of the Solar System. He worked with Tycho Brahe and became court astronomer...
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23. The Time Ship
by Enrique Gaspar
- On the same lists
Before the end of the 19th century, everyone who travelled in time did so by falling asleep or being transported by magic, devices which gave the traveller no control over...
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24. Frankenstein
by Shelley, Mary
- On the same lists
Arguably the first Sci Fi novel and one that is also very much part of the Gothic tradition.
While not “strictly” a steampunk, this is one of the first science fiction novels, the ultimate science-gone-wrong story, and Victor Frankenstein is the quintessential mad-scientist, harnessing the power of a...
Matches come from series and authors, from the lists the books share, and from the books readers open together. They are rebuilt every night. Back to Micromegas.
The shortlist
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