Books like The Time Machine
30 science fiction books to read after The Time Machine, by Wells, H. G., the closest match first.
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1. The War Of The Worlds
by Wells, H. G.
- Same author
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...
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2. The First Men In The Moon
by Wells, H. G.
- Same author
First Men in the Moon was the last of the great run of genre-defining scientific romances that Wells wrote in the first years of his career, it is also the...
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3. The Island of Doctor Moreau
by Wells, H. G.
- Same author
Biopunk has its roots in this novel where Dr. Moreau experiments on animals and has themes of pain, cruelty, human identity and moral responsibility
Biopunk has its roots in this novel where Dr. Moreau experiments on animals and has themes of pain, cruelty, human identity and moral responsibility
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4. The Shape of Things to Come
by Wells, H. G.
- Same author
This story is a frame of future events on Earth, which includes the establishment of a world state as a solution to humanity's problems.
This story is a frame of future events on Earth, which includes the establishment of a world state as a solution to humanity's problems.
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Hainish Cycle book 4
5. 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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6. 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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7. Men Like Gods
by Wells, H. G.
- Same author
Possibly the first Alternate History novel that posits cross-time travel in a physical sense.
Possibly the first Alternate History novel that posits cross-time travel in a physical sense.
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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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9. The Children Of Men
by P.d. James
- On the same lists
The ultimate nightmare of the world's males came true in 1994. (In the novel anyway, though there are some suggestions that things are trending that way.) The sperm count of...
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The Sprawl book 1 Start here
10. Neuromancer (1985)
by Gibson, William
- On the same lists
Gibson is the father of Cyberpunk and this novel in particular is significant. In this novel the term cyberspace is coined.
Case was the best hacker in the Sprawl until his employers damaged his nervous system, and now he can no longer reach cyberspace. He drifts through the criminal underworld of...
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11. 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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Maddaddam book 1 Start here
12. Oryx And Crake
by Margaret Atwood
- On the same lists
It's difficult to summarize what this tale is all 'about.' That's maybe the hardest and most challenging aspect of this novel. It starts after the collapse of civilization and focuses...
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13. 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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14. Solaris
by Lem, Stanislaw
- On the same lists
A trek across an alien planet is also a coming of age story.
Psychologist Kris Kelvin arrives at a research station hovering over the ocean-covered planet Solaris and finds it nearly deserted: his mentor is dead, and the two surviving scientists seem to...
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15. Footprints Of Thunder
by James F. David
- On the same lists
This book was made into a movie, and a pretty good one at that, though by necessity not as complex and in-depth as the book. Crichton does have a habit...
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The Age Of Discovery book 2
16. 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...
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17. The Man In The High Castle
by Dick, Philip K.
- On the same lists
A novel where Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan win WWII.
Philip K. Dick was one of the most idiosyncratic and successful writers in science fiction. Okay, he's probably better known these days for all the films that have been based...
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Zones Of Thought book 1 Start here
18. A Fire Upon The Deep
by Vernor Vinge
- On the same lists
The first book in the Zones of Thought series and tells the tale of a galactic war. In the story the mind's potential is determined by its location in space.
Set thousands of years into the future, the universe is inhabited by various races, including super-intelligent entities in the Transcend and the simple creatures and technology of the Unthinking Depths....
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The Book Of The New Sun book 1 Start here
19. 1981: The Shadow Of The Torturer
by Wolfe, Gene
- On the same lists
The sun has dimmed, the Earth is cooler and has been transformed in wondrous ways.
'The Shadow of the Torturer' is the first book in Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun tetralogy. Narrated by Severian, a member of the Guild of Torturers, the...
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20. Fahrenheit 451
by Bradbury, Ray
- On the same lists
A classic "What if?" story about book banning, happiness, and knowledge.
Everyone loves the idea of the thinking man's fireman (particularly middle aged women who read Fifty Shades of Grey), but that's not why Fahrenheit 451 made it to second on...
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The Forever War book 1 Start here
21. The Forever War (1976)
by Haldeman, Joe
- On the same lists
In this novel, time travel is a kind of side effect of space travel at near light speeds.
William Mandella is a physics student drafted into an elite force to fight an alien enemy on the far side of the galaxy. Travel between the front lines takes a...
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22. A Canticle For Leibowitz
by Jr., Walter M. Miller
- On the same lists
After a nuclear war monks preserve civilization.
A Canticle for Leibowitz follows the rejuvenation of "civilization" after a devastating nuclear holocaust. It has three distinctive chapters, each one disconnected by centuries, focusing on life at a desert...
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23. The Langoliers
by King, Stephen
- On the same lists
This novella was published in a collection of stories called 'Four Past Midnight'. Ten people awake on a red-eye flight, only to find that the other passengers and crew are...
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24. Natural History
by Justina Robson
- On the same lists
In the far future, humanity has split into the Unevolved and the Augmented. The latter have been forged by biotechnology into forms that allow them to live anywhere, including acting...
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25. Galapagos
by Kurt Vonnegut
- On the same lists
This is the story of a band of people shipwrecked on an island in the Galapagos after a crippling global financial crisis and a bacterium that spreads and makes women infertile—except on the shipwrecked island. The book covers the evolution of humanity over the next million years.
It was in the isolated environment of the Galapagos Islands that Charles Darwin made the observations that were crucial to the development of his ideas of natural selection, and it...
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Brainship book 1 Start here
26. The Ship Who Sang
by Mccaffrey, Anne
- On the same lists
Like both Blood Music and Man Plus, The Ship Who Sang deals with the transformation of one person’s body in a way that comes close to horror. But this novel,...
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27. Evolution
by Stephen Baxter
- On the same lists
This novel chronicles human evolution by telling a story where each character represents a different evolutionary stage.
If Last and First Men is the most spectacular, panoramic view of the future of life in our Solar System, Evolution runs it a close second. It begins 65 million...
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Hyperion Cantos book 1 Start here
28. 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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Ready Player One book 1 Start here
29. 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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Culture book 3
30. 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....
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 Time Machine.
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