Books like Swastika Night
30 science fiction books to read after Swastika Night, by Katharine Burdekin, the closest match first.
-
1. R.u.r.
by Karel Capek
- On the same lists
Czech is hardly a widely spoken language, and in the years immediately after the First World War Czechoslovakia had barely gained its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire which had largely...
-
The Age Of Discovery book 2
2. The New World
by Stackpole, Micheal A.
- On the same lists
A startling look at the role of government, including eugenics.
The three grandchildren of the royal cartographer Qiro Anturasi, a mapmaker whose magic can reshape reality, must save their world from destruction. Nalenyr is besieged on all sides by those...
-
Barsoom book 1 Start here
3. A Princess Of Mars
by Burroughs, Edgar Rice
- On the same lists
In the latter years of the 19th century, astronomers detected lines on the surface of Mars, and before long these were being identified as irrigation canals, suggesting notm only that...
-
4. We
by Yevgeny Zamyatin
- On the same lists
We was written in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution, and though Zamyatin was himself a Bolshevik, the novel expressed his disquiet at the structuring of society that the...
-
5. The Skylark Series
by E. E. Smith
- On the same lists
The great innovation in American science fiction during the 1920s was the invention of the space opera, and that was largely down to E.E. "Doc" Smith. Sometime around 1916 he...
-
The Herland book 1 Start here
6. Herland
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
- On the same lists
Towards the end of the 19th century a big movement for women's suffrage started up on both sides of the Atlantic. Accompanying the political campaign, there were many stories that...
-
7. A Voyage To Arcturus
by David Lindsay
- On the same lists
Science fiction has produced some pretty weird novels in its time, but there aren't many that can match A Voyage to Arcturus. It has had a major influence on writers...
-
8. Metropolis
by Thea Von Harbou
- On the same lists
This is the novelisation of the film that Thea von Harbou wrote with her husband, Fritz Lang. It was the first feature-length science fiction film, the most expensive film made...
-
9. Deluge
by S. Fowler Wright
- On the same lists
The idea of a drowned England had been a commonplace in British scientific romances since at least After London by Richard Jeffries, but it received its finest expression in Fowler...
-
10. The Color Out Of Space
by Lovecraft, H. P.
- On the same lists
Throughout the 1920s and 30s, the science fiction and weird fiction that appeared in American genre magazines was often hard to tell apart. Weird fiction writers often used science fiction...
-
When Worlds Collide book 1 Start here
11. When Worlds Collide
by Philip Wylie
- On the same lists
Not many science fiction writers have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but Kipling was the first member of this exclusive club. His finest science fiction is a pair of...
-
12. With The Night Mail
by Rudyard Kipling
- On the same lists
Not many science fiction writers have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but Kipling was the first member of this exclusive club. His finest science fiction is a pair of...
-
13. It Can’t Happen Here
by Sinclair Lewis
- On the same lists
And here we have another Nobel Prize winning author of science fiction, though in this case Lewis flirted with genre in only one novel. But that novel is a classic....
-
14. The Purple Cloud
by M. P. Shiel
- On the same lists
A so called last-man novel. A single man has survived and most of the novel are his meditations on humanity and the universe.
M.P. Shiel was a prolific author of excitable stories for the popular magazines of the day: he was, among other things, the person who gave us The Yellow Peril. But...
-
15. The Hampdenshire Wonder
by J D Beresford
- On the same lists
This was the first novel to fully explore the consequences of the birth of homo superior. Victor Stott is born weak and awkward, with an enlarged head, and at first,...
-
16. Station Eleven
by Emily St. John Mandel
- On the same lists
Is there anything new to be done with a post-apocalypse scenario? Well, read Station Eleven and find out.In a performance of King Lear, one snowy night in Toronto, the leading...
-
17. A Martian Odyssey
by Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
- On the same lists
A Martian Odyssey was Weinbaums first science fiction story; but within eighteen months he was dead, having written barely enough to make a collection. But with that first story he...
-
18. The War Of The Worlds
by Wells, H. G.
- On the same lists
An example of the first contact between humanity and an alien race on the violent end of spectrum and crossing genres with Alien Invasion.
This is the only book on this list that doesn't actually set foot on Mars, so in a sense it's not a Martian novel at all. But it was the...
-
19. The Iron Heel
by Jack London
- On the same lists
London succeeds in doing what many men have tried to do over the course of history, and almost every man has failed in doing: understanding how women think. Unlike most...
-
20. The Best Of
by Moore, C. L.
- On the same lists
We often tend to slip into the notion that before the advent of writers like Ursula Le Guin and Joanna Russ, science fiction was an exclusively masculine domain. But that...
-
Mesklin book 1 Start here
21. Mission Of Gravity
by Hal Clement
- On the same lists
This story is a discovery of the oceans on planet Mesklin--a planet with an iron core, a rapid rotation, and a sentient species that resemble yard-long centipedes.
Hard science fiction in its purest form didn't have villains; the implacable laws of the universe were enemy enough for anyone. After all, who needs enemies when you're faced with...
-
22. Life After Life: A Novel
by Kate Atkinson
- On the same lists
Search the sf award shortlists for 2013 and you will look in vain for this novel. It wasn't even submitted for any of the juried awards. Yet it is arguably...
-
23. 1984
by George Orwell
- On the same lists
A classic novel that is definitively a dystopia.
The words have become so commonplace we hardly realise we are using them: Big Brother is watching you, the Ministry of Truth, Room 101, Newspeak, thoughtcrime. George Orwell gave us...
-
24. Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang: A Novel
by Kate Wilhelm
- On the same lists
There was a time when stories of isolated communities surviving after the apocalypse were all over the place. There was also a time when stories of clones were everywhere, driven...
-
25. Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
by James Tiptree Jr.
- On the same lists
In the late 1960s stories suddenly started to appear from a writer no-one had heard of before, and no-one had met. But the stories were just too good, too quirky,...
-
26. Earth Abides
by George R. Stewart
- On the same lists
A classic Sci Fi novel where an unexpected pandemic turns into an extinction level event.
Earth Abides is something of a rarity among the work of George R. Stewart. He wrote mostly biographies and studies of American history, and when he did write fiction, as...
-
27. Cloud Atlas: A Novel
by Mitchell, David
- On the same lists
Inevitably, there is a continuity between past and future. The present is not a cut-off point between one and the other, but simply a sliding scale in the process of...
-
28. 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...
-
29. The Rediscovery Of Man
by Cordwainer Smith
- On the same lists
Practically all of Cordwainer Smithâs fiction belongs within a future history that starts just a few years from now and extends for tens of thousands of years into the future....
-
The Space Merchants book 1 Start here
30. The Space Merchants
by Pohl, Frederik
- On the same lists
In his pioneering study of science fiction, New Maps of Hell, Kingsley Amis argued that The Space Merchants was possibly the best science fiction novel ever written. In the fifty-odd...
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 Swastika Night.
The shortlist
Liked Swastika Night? New releases and the lists readers are opening most, by email.