Books like The Blazing World
30 science fiction books to read after The Blazing World, by Margaret Cavendish, the closest match first.
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1. Among Others (2012)
by Walton, Jo
- On the same lists
An award-winning and break-out novel, that is about good versus evil magic, about books, about self-discovery, about imagination. It is an example of an unfolding and nonlinear plot.
Morwenna Phelps grew up in the Welsh valleys talking to fairies among the ruins of old factories. After a disaster involving her mother, a witch, she is left with a...
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2. 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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3. Micromegas
by Francois Voltaire
- On the same lists
The name means "Little, Big", and like Gulliver's encounters with the Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians, there is a lot of play with issues of scale. But it is a very different...
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4. 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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5. 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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6. 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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7. 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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8. 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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9. 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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10. 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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11. 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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12. 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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13. 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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14. 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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15. 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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16. 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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17. 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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18. The Aleutian Trilogy
by Sue Harrison
- On the same lists
Right from her debut as an adult novelist with Divine Endurance (she has an equally long and successful career as a children's writer), Gwyneth Jones has been a writer to...
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19. The Story Until Now
by Kit Reed
- On the same lists
Science fiction is filled with writers who have a devoted coterie of admirers, yet who seem to have missed out on the awards and honours that normally come with such...
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20. Queen Of The States
by Josephine Saxton
- On the same lists
Josephine Saxton was one of the stars of the British new wave during the 1960s, writing a string of intriguing off-beat short stories and complex, challenging novels. But she has...
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21. Maul
by Tricia Sullivan
- On the same lists
What is the most characteristic thing in our contemporary urban lives. It is not the computer or the mobile phone or any of the other digital devices that surround us,...
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22. 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...
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23. 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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24. Zoo City
by Lauren Beukes
- On the same lists
One of the most exciting things about science fiction in the new century is that the traditional white, male, Anglo-American voice is being displaced. Wonderful new work is starting to...
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25. 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...
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26. 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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27. 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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28. 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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29. 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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30. 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...
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 The Blazing World.
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