Books like Solaris
30 science fiction books to read after Solaris, by Lem, Stanislaw, the closest match first.
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1. Bring The Jubilee
by Ward Moore
- On the same lists
Science fiction likes to play with history. Look how fragile our world is, just one small change there, or there, or there, and things would be ever so much worse....
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2. The Martian Chronicles
by Bradbury, Ray
- On the same lists
A chronology of the human colonization of Mars, after fleeing an atomically devastated Earth, including the conflicts between humans and the native Martians.
Ray Bradbury's science fiction is unlike anything else being written at the time, and that is particularly true of The Martian Chronicles. A collection of linked stories that tell of...
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3. The Invincible
by Lem, Stanislaw
- Same author
Almost a pre-cursor to Nanopunk, this is one of the first Sci Fi stories to deal with micro-robots and artificial swarm intelligence.
Almost a pre-cursor to Nanopunk, this is one of the first Sci Fi stories to deal with micro-robots and artificial swarm intelligence.
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4. Falling Free (1989)
by Bujold, Lois Mcmaster
- On the same lists
A long running and award winning series that mixes politics, romance, medical ethics, personal identity, and hierarchies.
The quaddies are a generation of people engineered by the corporation GalacTech to work in zero gravity, with four arms and no legs, and they are treated as company property....
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Ready Player One book 1 Start here
5. Ready Player One: A Novel
by Cline, Ernest
- On the same lists
Not 'strictly' a LitRPG novel, but Ready Player One has a lot of elements that make up an LITRPG book, those being the in-game sequences. This is not only a...
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6. Thus Were Their Faces
by Silvina Ocampo
- On the same lists
Silvina Ocampo was the wife of Adolfo Bioy Casares and friend of Jorge Luis Borges, so it is easy to anticipate what sort of fiction she wrote. But as this...
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Hyperion Cantos book 1 Start here
7. Hyperion
by Simmons, Dan
- On the same lists
So most of this series is in fact, not Dying Earth but it is a pinnacle of science fiction. The Poet's Tale: Hyperion Cantos in the first novel of Hyperion is a part of the Dying Earth sub-genre and it is the connection the readers have from Earth to the strange new universe of Hyperion.
A grand intelligent space opera tale that also tells a series of very personal tales. This juxtaposition between epic and the personal gives real life to the story. The whole...
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8. The Female Man
by Joanna Russ
- On the same lists
The book intertwines the lives of four women who live in parallel worlds—when they meet it is their views on gender roles that startle one another.
It is the 1970s. Joanna lives in a world much like our own, where the feminist movement is just beginning. In Jeannine's world, however, there was no Second World War...
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Culture book 3
9. Use Of Weapons
by Iain M. Banks
- On the same lists
Features a Utopian society (culture) that's post scarcity, controlled by benevolent A. I.'s who act for the good of the society. When Culture encounters less enlightened societies, the fun begins.
Iain Banks burst onto the literary scene with his controversial first novel, The Wasp Factory, the violent story of a girl who had been brought up as an emasculated boy....
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10. The Martian
by Weir, Andy
- On the same lists
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Brilliant . . . a celebration of human ingenuity [and] the purest example of real-science sci-fi for many years . . . utterly compelling.”—The...
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Hainish Cycle book 4
11. The Left Hand Of Darkness (1970)
by Guin, Ursula K. Le
- On the same lists
Pacifism and a anarchy—both have merits.
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin won the 1970 Nebula Award for Best Novel.One of the best examples of science fiction in the genre.
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12. The Sfwa European Hall Of Fame
by Morrow, James
- On the same lists
Short stories are often a great way for readers to discover new writers, so they are often a key route by which non-Anglophone writers can reach an English readership. Even...
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13. Labyrinths
by Jorge Luis Borges
- On the same lists
Labyrinths, a collection of ficciones and other short pieces from several of Borges's earlier books, was the first opportunity the mass of English speakers had to encounter the work of...
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14. Troll: A Love Story
by Johanna Sinisalo
- On the same lists
One of the things that should make fiction in translation so appealing to science fiction readers is that the stories are often built around very different cultures, traditions, and assumptions ...
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15. Nest Of Worlds
by Marek S. Huberath
- On the same lists
To illustrate the problems associated with translation, this novel was a major success in its native Poland, but even though there was a very fine translation already in existence by...
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16. Three Science Fiction Novellas: From Prehistory To The End Of Mankind
- On the same lists
Rosny was the pseudonym of the Belgian writer, Joseph-Henri Boëx, who rivals his near contemporary, H.G. Wells, as one of the founding figures of European science fiction. Or at least,...
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17. The Cusanus Game
by Wolfgang Jeschke
- On the same lists
By the middle of this century, Northern Europe is a nuclear wasteland, with economic and political consequences that threaten the whole of human civilisation. In Italy, a young woman is...
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18. Harmony
by Project Itoh
- On the same lists
Like China, Japan has one of the liveliest science fiction scenes in the world, and one of the least known in the West. Very few Japanese science fiction writers have...
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19. The Angel Maker
by Stefan Brijs
- On the same lists
In a small village at the point where the Dutch, Belgian and German borders meet, a strange doctor arrives with three even stranger children. Slowly, as we come to understand...
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20. The End Of Days
by Jenny Erpenbeck
- On the same lists
Over the last few years a distinct strand of alternate history writing has appeared in which a woman lives and relives her life multiple times during the twentieth century. Leading...
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21. Niels Klim's Underground Travels
by Ludvig Holberg
- On the same lists
Ludvig Holberg was a Norwegian philosopher and playwright whose only novel this was. A utopian satire that poked fun at a lot of contemporary issues, it would have created an...
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22. The Invention Of Morel
by Adolfo Bioy Casares
- On the same lists
Adolfo Bioy Casares was the lifelong friend and occasional collaborator of Jorge Luis Borges, but he was also a considerable writer of fantastic literature in his own right, and nothing...
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23. The Year 2440
by Louis Sébastien Mercier
- On the same lists
Mercier was a dramatist and essayist, who was also a member of the Convention at the time of the French Revolution, and on the eve of the Revolution he poured...
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24. Two Planets
by Kurd Lasswitz
- On the same lists
One of the problems with having to rely on translation to the whole other world of science fiction out there, is that it can be terribly hit and miss. For...
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25. The Fourth Circle
by Zoran Živkovic
- On the same lists
Zoran Zivkovic is both writer and translator (he has translated several works of science fiction into Serbian, as well as translating his own fiction into English) so he is far...
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26. The Unit
by Ninni Holmqvist
- On the same lists
The blurb that accompanies this novel compares it to Huxley and Orwell, but the work it most closely resembles is Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. In a clean,...
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27. Worlds Apart
by Alexander Levitsky
- On the same lists
Fantasy and science fiction have at least as long and honourable tradition in Russian fiction as they do throughout Western Europe (and longer than they do in America), and this...
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28. The Method
by Juli Zeh
- On the same lists
There are echoes of both Holmqvist's The Unit and Project Itoh's Harmony in this novel by one of Germany's leading young writers. Derived from an earlier play by Zeh, The...
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Mars Trilogy book 1 Start here
29. Red Mars (1994)
by Robinson, Kim Stanley
- On the same lists
A mission is launched to terraform Mars in this scientific epic.
In 2026, a hundred colonists set off on the first long voyage to Mars. Among them are John Boone, the first man to walk on the planet, and his rival...
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30. The Stars My Destination
by Alfred Bester
- On the same lists
A mechanic is the sole survivor on a ship that is just a wreck.
He was one hundred and seventy days dying and not yet dead. Gully Foyle is a shipwrecked sailor abandoned out in space, and when ships pass him by without stopping...
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 Solaris.
The shortlist
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