This is a list of all the fiction books and stories that have influenced me, as well as the stuff I haven’t read yet but might one day become an influence!
Really Want to Read
- The Fifth Season, N. K. Jemisin
- Kindred, Octavia E. Butler
- The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
- Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel (kishōtenketsu)
- This is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
- Ishmael, Barbara Hambly
- Record of a Spaceborn Few, Becky Chambers (#3 in Wayfarer series)
- The Paper Menagerie, Ken Liu (short story collection)
- A Blink of the Screen, Terry Pratchet
- Spear, Nicola Griffith – “A glorious queer retelling of Arthurian legend”
Should Read
- The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss
- We are Legion (We are Bob), Dennis E. Taylor
- Invisible Planets, Chinese sci-fi story collection translated by Ken Liu
- Field Guide to the End of the World, Jeanine Hall Gailey
- The Light at the Bottom of the World, London Shah
- How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse, K. Eason
- Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
- Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
- Exhalation, Ted Chiang
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Philip K. Dick
- The Three Body Problem, Cixin Liu
- The Employees, Olga Ravn
- How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, Charles Yu
- The Complete Robot, Isaac Asimov
- Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
- The Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut
- Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer
- An Unkindness of Ghosts, Rivers Solomon
- Shikasta, Doris Lessing
- The Resisters, Gish Jen
- Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood
- Ammonite, Nicola Griffith
- Future Home of the Living God, Louise Erdich
- 1Q84, Haruki Murakami
- Zone One, Colson Whitehead
- The Body Scout, Lincoln Michel
- Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
- Hyperion, Dan Simmons
- The City & The City, China Miéville
- Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson
- Radiance, Catherynne M. Valente
- The Children of Men, PD James
- The Stand, Stephen King
- Rosewater, by Tade Thompson
- The Time Machine, H.G. Wells
- The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein
- A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
- The Book of Phoenix, Nnedi Okorafor
- Solaris, Stanislaw Lem
- Contact, Carl Sagan
- The Echo Wife, Sarah Gailey
- Mahabharata – A Modern Retelling, Carole Satyamurti
feminist retellings of classic stories
- Julia, Sandra Newman’s feminist retelling of Nineteen Eighty-Four
- A Thousand Ships, Natalie Haynes’s reimagining of the Trojan war
- The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker’s version of the Iliad from the perspective of Briseis
- Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell’s novel that centres on the life of Shakespeare’s wife
- Names of the Women, Jeet Thayil’s story that tells the stories of 15 women whose lives overlapped with Jesus
- The Mere Wife, Maria Dahvana Headley’s modern take on Beowulf
Favorites
- The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, Becky Chambers
- A Closed and Common Orbit, Becky Chambers
- The Murderbot Diaries, Martha Wells
- Beowulf, translated by Maria Dahvana Headley
- The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson
- The Hitchiker’s Guide Series, Douglas Adams
- Black Sun, Rebecca Roanhorse
Already Read (But Might Reread!)
- Kaiju Preservation Society, John Scalzi
- Redshirts, John Scalzi
- The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- The Sentence, Louise Erdrich
- Matrix, Lauren Groff
- Light from Uncommon Stars, Ryka Aoki
- Elder Race, Adrian Tchaikovsky
- The Company novels and stories by Kage Baker
- The Invisible Library series, Genevieve Cogman
- Dune, Frank Herbert
- The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury
- 1984, George Orwell
- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
- A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle
- Neuromancer, William Gibson
- A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller Jr.
- Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
- Dune, Frank Herbert
- The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury
- 1984, George Orwell
- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
- A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle
- Neuromancer, William Gibson
- A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller Jr.
- Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
