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Science Fiction

05/23/2017 - 10:46am
If you like The Mist by Stephen King

This readalike is in response to a customer's book-match request. If you would like personalized reading recommendations, fill out the book-match form and a librarian will email suggested titles to you. Available for adults, teens, and kids. You can browse the book matches here.

The Mist by Stephen King
The morning after a violent thunderstorm, a thick unnatural mist quickly spreads across the small town of Bridgton, Maine, reducing visibility to near-zero and concealing numerous species of bizarre creatures which viciously attack anyone and anything that ventures out into the open. (catalog summary)

The Mist is being adapted by the American cable network, Spike TV, who has ordered 10 hour-long episodes of the series which will premiere on June 22nd. The cast includes Morgan Spector, Frances Conroy, Alyssa Sutherland, Gus Birney, Dan Butler, and Luke Cosgrove. Magic Rock Productions, founded by Michael Mahoney in 1998, has a successful history of productions including the limited series The Lizzie Borden Chronicles on the Lifetime network, and Bag of Bones, another King adaptation starring Pierce Brosnan.¹

If you're looking for more bizarre titles similar to the novella, The Mist, check these suggestions out.

04/05/2017 - 11:36am
5 Hot New Titles for April

Looking for a new read? Check out these five popular and brand-new adult titles that have hit the shelves this month. To see more fresh titles, check out our recent arrivals page.

03/24/2017 - 11:07am
If you like Ghost in the Shell

This readalike is in response to a customer's book-match request. If you would like personalized reading recommendations, fill out the book-match form and a librarian will email suggested titles to you. Available for adults, teens, and kids. You can browse the book matches here.

Ghost in the Shell [Volume 1] by Masamune Shirow
Deep into the twenty-first century, the line between man and machine has been inexorably blurred as humans rely on the enhancement of mechanical implants and robots are upgraded with human tissue. In this rapidly converging landscape, cyborg superagent Major Motoko Kusanagi is charged to track down the craftiest and most dangerous terrorists and cybercriminals, including "ghost hackers" who are capable of exploiting the human/machine interface and reprogramming humans to become puppets to carry out the hackers' criminal ends. When Major Kusanagi tracks the cybertrail of one such master hacker, the Puppeteer, her quest leads her into a world beyond information and technology where the very nature of consciousness and the human soul are turned upside down. (catalog summary)

Ghost in the Shell is an upcoming American epic science fiction action film based on the Japanese manga of the same name by Masamune Shirow. The film stars Scarlett Johansson, Michael Pitt, Pilou Asbæk, Chin Han and Juliette Binoche. It will be released on March 31, 2017, in 2D, 3D, and IMAX 3D. See the trailer for the movie below the book recommendations.

If you like science fiction titles like Ghost in the Shell, check out these other far-out-there titles.
 

Akira: Book OneAkira: Book One by Katshuiro Ōtomo
Set in Tokyo 38 years after its destruction in World War III (which, according to this story, happened in 1992), Akira eventually evolves into a philosophical investigation of time. But this first volume is all action, nonstop car chases and gun fights strung together with exaggerated speed lines and lots of gigantic machinery. The complicated plot revolves around two teenagers in a motorbike gang that encounters a strange child with an old man's features. When one of the young bikers begins manifesting violent, supernatural powers that threaten to destroy him, both bikers find themselves enmeshed in a massive conflict between two sinister agencies (which both believe they're fighting to save the world) over some unnamed thing so terrifying it's locked away in a vault and frozen to absolute zero. (catalog summary)


03/22/2017 - 8:09am
Dark Matter: A Novel by Blake Crouch

Forty-year-old atomic physicist Jason Dessen is living a normal life in present-day Chicago. Working as a undergrad physics professor, he lives in a brownstone with his wife and teenage son. Every Thursday evening, the family enjoys a home-cooked meal and spends time together. Sometimes, Jason and his wife ponder on what their lives could have been before their son—but Jason believes he has a life that he wouldn't give up for anything.

12/12/2016 - 2:45am
Scythe by Neal Shusterman

Disease has been eliminated. Crime and poverty have been eliminated. Natural disasters have been eliminated.

Overall, death has been eliminated.

This is all thanks to a self-aware digital cloud called The Thunderhead, whose totalitarian rule has turned the future Earth into a Utopia.

Everyone can turn back their ages, to any age above 21. So, a 32-year-old you meet, might be a 105-year-old human. Everyone is now guaranteed immortality. Well, almost everyone.

12/01/2016 - 2:24pm
Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer

This readalike is in response to a customer's book-match request. If you would like personalized reading recommendations, fill out the book-match form and a librarian will email suggested titles to you. Available for adults, teens, and kids. You can browse other book matches here.
 

Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer
Through journal entries sixteen-year-old Miranda describes her family's struggle to survive after a meteor hits the moon, causing worldwide tsunamis, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions. (catalog summary)
 

If you'd like to read a book like Life as We Knew It, check out these other science fiction titles for teens:




The 5th Wave by Richard Yancey
Cassie Sullivan, the survivor of an alien invasion, must rescue her young brother from the enemy with help from a boy who may be one of them. (catalog summary)

 

 

 


After the Red Rain by Barry Lyga
Set in a future world of environmental collapse and mass poverty, where a mysterious boy named Rose discovers he possesses inhuman powers that can irrevocably change the lives of everyone on the planet. (catalog summary)

 


 

12/01/2016 - 10:57am
Red Rising by Pierce Brown

This readalike is in response to a customer's book-match request. If you would like personalized reading recommendations, fill out the book-match form and a librarian will email suggested titles to you. Available for adults, teens, and kids. You can browse other book matches here.

Red Rising by Pierce Brown
Darrow is a Red, a member of the lowest caste in the color-coded society of the future. Like his fellow Reds, he works all day, believing that he and his people are making the surface of Mars livable for future generations. Yet he spends his life willingly, knowing that his blood and sweat will one day result in a better world for his children. But Darrow and his kind have been betrayed. Soon he discovers that humanity reached the surface generations ago. Vast cities and sprawling parks spread across the planet. Darrow and Reds like him, are nothing more than slaves to a decadent ruling class. Inspired by a longing for justice, and driven by the memory of lost love, Darrow sacrifices everything to infiltrate the legendary Institute, a proving ground for the dominant Gold caste, where the next generation of humanity's overlords struggle for power. He will be forced to compete for his life and the very future of civilization against the best and most brutal of Society's ruling class. There, he will stop at nothing to bring down his enemies...even if it means he has to become one of them to do so. (catalog summary)
 

If you like the Red Rising series, check out these other science fiction novels for both teen and adult:
 



The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon
In the mid-21st century major world cities are controlled by a formidable security force and clairvoyant underworld cell member Paige commits acts of psychic treason before being captured by an otherworldly race that would make her a part of their supernatural army. (catalog summary)

 



 


The Fire Sermon
by Francesca Haig
Four hundred years in the future, the Earth has turned primitive following a nuclear fire that has laid waste to civilization and nature. Though the radiation fall-out has ended, for some unknowable reason every person is born with a twin. Of each pair, one is an Alpha—physically perfect in every way--and the other an Omega--burdened with deformity, small or large. With the Council ruling an apartheid-like society, Omegas are branded and ostracized while the Alphas have gathered the world's sparse resources for themselves. Though proclaiming their superiority, for all their effort Alphas cannot escape one harsh fact: whenever one twin dies, so does the other. (provided by publisher)


 

11/25/2016 - 2:33am
If you like the TV series Westworld

This readalike is in response to a customer's book-match request. If you would like personalized reading recommendations, fill out the book-match form and a librarian will email suggested titles to you. Available for adults, teens, and kids. You can browse other book matches here.

Westworld, is a science fiction thriller that premiered on October 2nd, 2016. The series, created by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, is inspired by the 1973 film of the same title written by Michael Crichton about a futuristic theme park populated by artificial beings. Nolan and Joy serve as executive producers along with J. J. Abrams, Jerry Weintraub and Bryan Burk. The first season consists of ten episodes.

The program takes place in fictional Westworld, a technologically advanced, Western-themed amusement park populated completely by synthetic androids dubbed "hosts". Westworld caters to high-paying visitors dubbed "newcomers" (or just "guests"), who can do whatever they wish within the park, without fear of retaliation from the hosts. (Wikipedia)

Once you've finished Westworld on December 2nd, here are a few fiction books involving technology, the Old West, robots, and dangerous adventures.

Anything Goes by Richard S. Wheeler
The cowboys, gold miners, outlaws, gunmen, prostitutes, and marshals who populate the Wild West never see much big-city entertainment. Most towns are too wild and rowdy for entertainers to enter, let alone perform in. All that is about to change. August Beausoleil and his colleague, Charles Pomerantz, have taken the Beausoleil Brothers Follies to the remote mining towns of Montana, far from the powerful impresarios who own the talent and control the theaters on the big vaudeville circuits. Their cast includes a collection of has-beens and second-tier performers: Mary Mabel Markey, the shopworn singer now a little out of breath; Wayne Windsor, "The Profile," who favors his audiences with just one side of his face while needling them with acerbic dialogue; Harry the Juggler, who went from tossing teacups to tossing scimitars; Mrs. McGivers and her capuchin monkey band; and the Wildroot Sisters, born to show business and managed by a stage mother who drives August mad. Though the towns are starved for entertainment, the Follies struggles to fill seats as the show grinds from town to town. Just when the company is desperate for fresh talent, a mysterious young woman astonishes everyone with her exquisite voice. The Wild West will never be the same. They've seen comics, gorgeous singers, and scimitar-tossing jugglers. Now if the troupers can only make it back East . . . alive! (catalog summary)
 

10/31/2016 - 9:05am

Although zombies have a long history of appearances in religion and folklore, interest in them as villains in horror films is largely confined to the second half of the 20th century. The explosion in zombie popularity is based on a characterization established by a single film and the fact that the original characterization of the zombi in African folklore and religion, as well as in earlier films, is dramatically different from that of the popular characterization from the 1960s onward. To understand zombies in both their original context and in the role they have come to take in popular culture requires an understanding of two divergent traditions.

10/31/2016 - 9:04am

The period of time from the late 1930s to the end of the 1950s is commonly known as the "Golden Age" of science fiction.  The Golden Age was noted for the volume of science fiction produced due to the large number of science fiction-oriented pulp magazines and the depth of the creative talent involved.  Many of the writers working in this period established concepts that would have a tremendous cultural impact on their readers. Many ideas integral to modern science fiction frequently originated in this period. Two of the writers responsible for such ideas were A.E. Van Vogt and E.E. "Doc" Smith.

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