More like Something Real
anchored on:our worldnorth america
but
- The Puppet Masters
Robert A. Heinleinstandalone novel1951
similar bytensemid 20th centuryscience fictionnorth 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.
- The Black Cloud
Fred Hoylestandalone novel1957
similar bytensemid 20th centuryour worldscience fiction+1 more
The Black Cloud is a 1957 science fiction novel by British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle. It details the arrival of an enormous cloud of gas that enters the Solar System and appears about to destroy most of the life on Earth by blocking the Sun's radiation.
- NASA Trilogy
series4 books1996
similar bytensescience fictionalternate history+4 more
The NASA Trilogy consists of three hard science fiction novels written by British science fiction author Stephen Baxter. They were published from 1996 to 1998. These books explore the possibilities of the American space program if the circumstances had been different. They have generally darker tones than his other books and are critical of NASA. They consist of:
- Lord of the Flies
William Goldingstandalone novel1954
similar bytensemid 20th centuryour world+2 more
Lord of the Flies is the 1954 debut novel of British author William Golding. The plot concerns a group of prepubescent British boys who are stranded on an uninhabited island and their disastrous attempts to govern themselves that lead to a descent into savagery. The novel's themes include morality, leadership, and the tension between civility and chaos.
- Beyond This Horizon
Robert A. Heinleinstandalone novel1948
similar byour worldscience fictionnorth america+2 more
From the front flap of a 2001 Baen reprint: "Utopia has been achieved. For centuries, disease, hunger, poverty, and war have been things found only in the history tapes. And applied genetics has given men and women the bodies of athletes and a lifespan of over a century. They should all have been very happy... But Hamilton Felix is bored. And he is the culmination of a star line, each of his last thirty ancestors chosen for superior genes. Hamilton is, as far as genetics can produce one, the ultimate man. And this ultimate man can see no reason why the human race should survive, and has no intention of continuing the pointless comedy. However, Hamilton's life is about to become less boring. A secret cabal of revolutionaries who find utopia not just boring, but desperately in need of leaders who know just What Needs to be Done, are planning to revolt and put themselves in charge. Knowing of Hamilton's disenchantment with the modern world, they have recruited him to join their Glorious Revolution. Big mistake! The revolutionaries are about to find out that recruiting a superman was definitely not a good idea..."
- The Satanist
Dennis Wheatleystandalone novel1960
similar bytensemid 20th centuryour worldspy thriller+1 more
The Satanist is a black magic/horror novel by Dennis Wheatley. Published in 1960, it is characterized by an anti-communist spy theme. The novel was one of the popular novels of the 1960s, popularizing the tabloid notion of a black mass.
- Take Them to the Stars
series3 books2021
similar bytensemid 20th centuryscience fictionalternate historyour world
- Axis of Time
series7 books2004
similar bytensemid 20th centuryscience fictionalternate history+2 more
The Axis of Time trilogy is an alternative history series of novels written by Australian journalist and author John Birmingham, from Macmillan Publishing.
- Foundation Universe
universe123 books1940
Start hereFoundation · Start here
similar byscience fiction+2 more
There is a science that reads the future of quadrillions the way an astronomer reads the orbits of stars. It is called psychohistory, and its equations foresee something the ruling Galactic Empire cannot admit: the throne is rotting, and thirty thousand years of barbarism are coming. One man, Hari Seldon, cannot stop the fall. He can only shorten it — by seeding a Foundation of scholars at the rim of the galaxy, a fragile institution built to carry knowledge across the dark and cut the interregnum to a single millennium. This is a universe told in the register of history itself: the long view, the calm of deep time, empires measured in centuries and men measured against them. The spine is Asimov's original trilogy — Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation — followed decades later by the sequels Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth and the prequels Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation. Late in life Asimov braided this in with his other future histories: the Robot novels of detective Elijah Baley and his humaniform partner R. Daneel Olivaw (The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, The Robots of Dawn, Robots and Empire) and the early Galactic Empire novels (Pebble in the Sky and its kin), until one continuous chronicle ran from the first thinking robots to the Second Empire. Other hands extend it — the Second Foundation Trilogy by Gregory Benford, Greg Bear, and David Brin, and shared-world spinoffs such as Robot City — so the corpus sprawls beyond a single author's tidy shelf. What distinguishes it is that the drama is intellectual: crises resolved by insight, nerve, and dialogue rather than fleets and blades, each turn hinging on the hidden logic of the Seldon Plan. Begin where readers have always begun — with Foundation, and the original trilogy in publication order. The rest opens outward from there.
- Galactic Milieu
series10 books1981
completed
similar bytensescience fiction+2 more
Galactic Milieu is a series of science fiction novels by Julian May. It is linked to her previously published series, the Saga of Pliocene Exile; and through the fantastical device of time-travel, acts as both a prequel and a sequel to this earlier series. The "Galactic Milieu" of the title is an interplanetary federation, and Earth's membership of it is a central plot concern.
- The Spook Who Sat by the Door
Sam Greenleestandalone novel1969
similar bypolitical intriguetensemid 20th centuryspy thrillernorth america
The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1969), by Sam Greenlee, is the fictional story of Dan Freeman, the first black CIA officer, and of the CIA's history of training persons and political groups who later used their specialised training in gathering intelligence, political subversion, and guerrilla warfare against the CIA. The novel has been characterised as "part thriller, part satire and part social commentary". As described by The New Yorker, the title "alludes to the conspicuous deployment of the agency's one black officer to display its phony integration".
- Trouble with Lichen
John Wyndhamstandalone novel1960
similar bymid 20th centuryscience fiction+2 more
Biochemists Diana Brackley and Francis Saxover, working independently, both isolate a compound from a rare lichen that appears to dramatically slow the aging process. Francis quietly doses himself and his family and says nothing; Diana takes the opposite approach, opening exclusive beauty spas as cover to give the drug to well-connected women across Britain, reasoning that if longevity becomes known before women have a foothold, men will simply monopolize it as they have everything else. The secret can only hold so long, and the novel's tension builds toward the moment it gets out. A quietly subversive social science-fiction novel from John Wyndham.
- Crosstime Traffic
series6 books2003
similar byscience fictionalternate history+3 more
Harry Turtledove's Crosstime Traffic novels are set on an Earth that has discovered travel to alternate timelines where history unfolded differently, exploited commercially by the monopoly company that gives the series its name. Aimed at young-adult readers, the loosely connected books -- including Gunpowder Empire, Curious Notions, and The Disunited States of America -- each send a young protagonist into a different divergent world.
- Dr. Palfrey
series28 books1942
completed
similar bymid 20th century+1 more
Dr. Palfrey follows Stanislaus Alexander Palfrey, a doctor turned intelligence chief who leads Z5, a secret international organization formed to counter wartime espionage and escalating global threats. John Creasey's long-running series follows Palfrey and his agents across nearly four decades, moving from Cold War-style thrillers in its early volumes toward science-fictional, near-apocalyptic dangers later on.
- Paratime Police
series33 books1948
similar byscience fictionalternate history+1 more
The Paratime series written by H. Beam Piper and subsequently by John F. Carr consists of several short stories, one novella, and one novel, all but one of which were originally published in Astounding Science Fiction under the editorship of John W. Campbell. The series deals with an advanced civilization that is able to travel between parallel universes with alternate histories, and uses that ability to trade for goods and services that its own, exhausted Earth cannot provide. The protagonists of the stories are the Paratime Police, the organization that protects the secret of paratime travel.
- Small Change
series4 books2006
similar bypolitical intriguetensemid 20th centuryscience fictionalternate history
The Small Change trilogy is a series of alternate history thriller novels by the author Jo Walton that were published from 2006 to 2008. The series are set in a Europe in which the United Kingdom exits World War II in 1941. As the series begins, Britain itself slides toward fascism. The series has three books:Farthing Tor Books August 8, 2006, ISBN 0-7653-1421-5, ISBN 978-0-7653-1421-5 Ha'penny, Tor Books; Reprint edition July 1, 2008, ISBN 0-7653-5808-5, ISBN 978-0-7653-5808-0 Half a Crown, Tor Books; September 30, 2008, ISBN 0-7653-1621-8, ISBN 978-0-7653-1621-9
- Dune Universe
universe78 books1963
Start hereDune · Start here
similar bypolitical intriguescience fiction+1 more
Arrakis. Dune. The desert planet, where empire runs on a single substance: the spice melange, which folds space, prolongs life, and unlocks prescience, and which exists nowhere else in the known universe. Frank Herbert's saga is a meditation dressed as an adventure — feudal houses and a secret sisterhood, engineered messiahs and the patient ecology of a world without water, all turning on the terrible gravity of who commands the spice. It reads like scripture and schemes like a war room, ten thousand years hence, among people who have outlawed the thinking machine and made instruments of themselves instead. At its heart stand Herbert's original six — Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, Chapterhouse: Dune — a single deepening arc across millennia, arguing the whole way between prophecy and free will. Around that spine his son Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson have raised a vast prequel architecture: Prelude to Dune, tracing the great houses a generation before Paul; Legends of Dune, reaching back to the crusade that broke the machines; the Schools of Dune cycle on the founding of Bene Gesserit, Mentat, and Navigator; the Caladan Trilogy and Heroes of Dune filling years the originals left in shadow. Many hands, dozens of volumes, one desert. What sets Dune apart is its refusal of the simple: religion is manufactured, heroes are hazards, and the sand itself — worm, water, ecology — acts as a political power. Begin where the universe did, with Frank Herbert's Dune (1965), and read the original six in order; you need nothing else to feel the full weight. The prequels are a country to explore afterward, taken by era. Beginnings are delicate times.
- Dune
series20 books1963
part of Dune Universe
similar bypolitical intriguescience fiction+1 more
Frank Herbert's Dune Chronicles opens with 1965's Dune, set on the desert planet Arrakis where House Atreides takes control of the only source of the vital spice melange and young Paul Atreides is pulled into a struggle over its politics and religion. Herbert carried the story forward across five further novels — Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, and Chapterhouse: Dune — following Paul's line over the following millennia, before Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson later extended the saga. Many other editions of these six novels are omnibus and box-set repackagings rather than separate stories.
- SS-GB
Len Deightonstandalone novel1978
similar bypolitical intriguetensescience fictionalternate historyspy thriller
It's November 1941 in a Britain that lost the war: Operation Sea Lion succeeded, Churchill was executed, and the King is a prisoner in his own Tower of London. Detective Superintendent Douglas Archer, still working homicide for the Metropolitan Police under German occupation, catches what looks like a routine case, a well-dressed man murdered above an antiques shop, until the body's oddities point toward something far more dangerous than burglary gone wrong. Archer's investigation collides with occupation politics, the British resistance, and rival factions of the SS and the German Army, each wanting the case to go a different way. Len Deighton's alternate-history spy thriller.
