More like Ausable Alligators
anchored on:contemporarymiddle gradenorth america
but
- Footfall
Larry Niven & Jerry Pournellestandalone novel1985
similar bysurvivalnorth americacontemporary+1 more
When aliens travel to Earth from Alpha Centauri, differences between alien and human psychology result in an unprovoked invasion, and the resulting resistance results in the aliens' use of a devastating weapon.
- Rats of NIMH
series3 books1971
similar bysurvivaladventurouscontemporarymiddle grade+1 more
Robert C. O'Brien's Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH follows a widowed mouse seeking help to save her sick son and her home from a farmer's plow, turning to a colony of rats who escaped laboratory experiments at the National Institute of Mental Health with enhanced intelligence and a literate, technological society of their own. After O'Brien's death, his daughter Jane Leslie Conly continued the story in Racso and the Rats of NIMH, in which a city rat joins the colony ahead of a flood, and R-T, Margaret, and the Rats of NIMH, in which the rats rescue and are helped by lost human children. All three carry forward the original's interest in community, responsibility, and the costs of intelligence.
- The Morganville Vampires
series40 books2006
completed
similar bynorth americacontemporary+1 more
The Morganville Vampires is a series of young adult urban fantasy/vampire novels written by Rachel Caine. The novels feature Claire Danvers, a student at Texas Prairie University, and her housemates in the vampire-controlled city of Morganville, Texas. While the mayor of Morganville is human, the population co-exist with a group of vampires. Morganville is also home to an unusually large number of second-hand thrift stores.
- My Teacher Is an Alien
series4 books1989
similar byadventurouscontemporarymiddle grade+1 more
My Teacher Is an Alien is a four-book science fiction children's book series authored by Bruce Coville. The titles include:My Teacher Is an Alien (1989) My Teacher Fried My Brains (1991) My Teacher Glows in the Dark (1991) My Teacher Flunked the Planet (1992)
- Gale Family
series3 books2009
similar byadventurousnorth americacontemporary
Tanya Huff's urban fantasy trilogy follows Alysha Gale, a member of a Canadian family whose charms can reshape reality, after she inherits her grandmother's junk shop in Calgary and discovers it doubles as a gateway into the fae world. Across The Enchantment Emporium, The Wild Ways, and The Future Falls, different Gale women take the lead as the family is repeatedly called on to contain magical trouble the ordinary world can't handle.
- Ignition
Kevin J. Anderson & Doug Beasonstandalone novel1996
similar bysurvivalnorth americacontemporary+1 more
From the front flap of the Forge first edition: "The launch of the shuttle Atlantis will make history. Another triumph for the space program and a political coup: a Russian cosmonaut is scheduled to perform the first spacewalk from an American unit. The checkout fail-safes are all go. The mission is proceeding like clockwork. The team of American and Russian astronauts are strapped in, the mission specialists in Houston see no hitches. No one knows the real danger... For as millions of viewers tune in to watch the countdown, there's nothing to indicate that what they're seeing is a prerecorded show. Terrorists have take over Launch Control at Cape Canaveral and are threatening to blow up the Atlantis in less than three hours - unless their demands are met. Only Colonel "Iceberg" Friese, the mission's former commander, invalided out with a broken foot, knows about the danger to his crew. Unknown to anyone, he's sneaked into the restricted zone. And now it's up to him to stop the clock before the countdown reaches... Ignition."
- The Puppet Masters
Robert A. Heinleinstandalone novel1951
similar bysurvivalnorth america+1 more
Parasitical aliens attach themselves to human hosts and take over their bodies. Two spies are sent to find out what's happening, but the extent is much farther than they knew. With access to the humans' memories, the aliens quietly invade the government and start taking over.
- Richard Forthrast
series2 books2011
similar bynorth america+2 more
Neal Stephenson's Richard 'Dodge' Forthrast novels open with Reamde, a globe-spanning thriller that starts when ransomware inside an MMORPG economy pulls Richard's extended family into a real-world hostage crisis involving hackers, jihadists and Russian mobsters. The sequel Fall; or, Dodge in Hell shifts registers entirely, following Richard's digitally preserved mind after death into an afterlife simulation built from his scanned brain. The two books share a protagonist and family but differ sharply in genre and scale.
- Watchers
Dean R. Koontzstandalone novel1987
similar bysurvivaladventurousnorth americacontemporary
This probably qualifies as a science-based adventure rather than a science fiction novel. The premise, and only speculative fiction element, is that a U.S. government funded laboratory creates a golden retriever that's as intelligent as a human for use in intelligence gathering and also creates a monkey hybrid that's intended for a military police dog role and as a killing machine on battlefields. The animals escape and the story plays out as a straight adventure novel with a good chunk of romance thrown in.
- Zombie Baseball Beatdown
Paolo Bacigalupistandalone novel2013
similar bysurvivaladventurousnorth americacontemporarymiddle grade
While practicing for their next baseball game, thirteen-year-old friends Rabi, Miguel, and Joe discover that the nefarious activities of the Delbe, Iowa, meatpacking plant have caused cows to turn into zombies.
- Tom Broadbent / Wyman Ford
series6 books2003
similar bycontemporarynorth america+2 more
Douglas Jerome Preston is an American journalist and author. Although he is best known for his thrillers in collaboration with Lincoln Child, he has also written six solo novels, including the Wyman Ford series and a novel titled Jennie, which was made into a movie by Disney called The Jennie Project. Preston has authored a half-dozen nonfiction books on science and exploration and writes occasionally for The New Yorker, Smithsonian, and other magazines.
- Spooksville
series24 books1995
similar bynorth americacontemporary+2 more
Spooksville is a series of 24 children's horror fiction books by American writer Christopher Pike. All 24 books were first published between 1995 and 1998. The series is set in a remote town in the USA and revolves around the lives of five of its young inhabitants. Although intended for a younger audience than his adult and young adult literature, they contain some violence and may be considered unsuitable for younger children. A television series based on the books was commissioned and premiered on October 26, 2013, on the Hub Network.
- Jumper
series6 books1992
similar byadventurouscontemporary+2 more
Jumper follows David Rice, a teenager who discovers he can teleport anywhere he's been and uses the power to escape an abusive home, only to find that ability alone doesn't solve the harder problems of finding his absent mother, building an honest relationship, or staying off the radar of people who'd exploit him. Steven Gould's series continues across Reflex, Impulse, and Exo, later following his and his wife's daughter as a second-generation jumper. A 2008 film loosely adapted the first novel.
- Effective Engineering Solutions
series37 books1995
similar bycontemporarynorth america
The Ice Limit follows a team hired by an eccentric billionaire to recover what looks like the largest meteorite ever found, off a remote island near Cape Horn, only to discover, as they flee across the Antarctic seas aboard a retrofitted tanker, that they've actually excavated something alive. Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child wrote it as a standalone techno-thriller in 2000; it later fed into their separate Gideon Crew series rather than getting a direct sequel of its own.
- Watership Down
series21 books1972
completed
similar bysurvivaladventurouscontemporary+1 more
Watership Down is Richard Adams's 1972 novel following a group of rabbits who flee the destruction of their warren and cross the English countryside of Hampshire in search of a new home, developing over the journey a full rabbit culture of language, proverbs, and mythology. Adams returned to the same world in 1996 with Tales from Watership Down, a collection of nineteen short stories mixing rabbit folklore with further adventures of characters from the novel.
- My Diary from the Edge of the World
Jodi Lynn Andersonstandalone novel2015
similar bysurvivaladventurousnorth americacontemporarymiddle grade
From copyright page; "Spirited, restless Gracie Lockwood, twelve, of Cliffden,Maine, living in a world where sasquatches, dragons, giants and mermaids are common, keeps a diary of her family's journey in a used Winnebago as they seek The Extraordinary World in hopes of keeping her little brother, Sam, safe against all odds."
- Otherworld (Kelley Armstrong)
series100 books1996
similar bycontemporarynorth america
Women of the Otherworld is Kelley Armstrong's long-running urban fantasy series about werewolves, witches, sorcerers, and other supernatural beings trying to pass as ordinary people in the contemporary world, told across thirteen novels plus assorted novellas published between 2001 and 2012. Each book tends to follow a different member of this hidden community while slowly building a shared, continuing world.
- H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds
universe65 books1898
Start hereThe War of the Worlds · Start here
No one would have believed, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched keenly and closely from the timeless worlds of space. And then the cylinders fell. H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds opens in the quiet of the Surrey commons, where a falling star proves to be the first Martian craft — and from the pit rise the towering tripods, the Heat-Ray, the choking Black Smoke and the creeping red weed, wielded by minds that regard mankind much as we regard the creatures we boil for supper. This is invasion rendered as natural disaster: cold, methodical, and vast beyond argument. Wells' 1898 novel is the seed; everything else grows from that Martian soil. The catalogue gathers direct sequels and continuations alongside a wide field of other hands. In War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches the invasion is retold across the whole planet through the eyes of Twain, Verne, Tolstoy, Lowell and Kipling; in the Manly Wade and Wade Wellman crossover, Sherlock Holmes, Watson and Professor Challenger take the field against the machines; and Scott Washburn's Great Martian War stretches the fighting into a decades-long alternate history of steam, artillery and grinding attrition. It is a loose shared world — no single decreed sequence, many voices answering one calamity. What sets this world apart is its refusal of heroics: the invaders fall not to generals but to the smallest things of Earth, humbling and indifferent. Begin, always, with Wells' original novel — it is short, and it is the ground every later book stands upon. From there follow your appetite: Global Dispatches for the panorama, the Holmes campaign for adventure, Washburn for the long war.
