If you liked
Books like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Loved The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams? Here are 10 books with a similar appeal — drawn mostly from science fiction, ranked by how confidently we'd recommend them next.
10 books · ranked
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1
Kindred
A Black woman in 1976 is pulled back in time to a slave plantation; time travel used to devastating effect.
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2
Neuromancer
A washed-up hacker pulled into one last job in cyberspace; the book that named and shaped cyberpunk.
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3
The Left Hand of Darkness
Genly Ai, an envoy from a galactic confederation, is sent to the planet Gethen — where all humans are ambisexual, able to be either male or female — to persuade the planet to join the confederation. Le Guin's Hugo and Nebula-winning novel is a sustained thought experiment about gender, society and what we assume to be natural that remains one of the most important works in speculative fiction.
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4
Slaughterhouse-Five
A man comes 'unstuck in time' after surviving the firebombing of Dresden; an anti-war novel like no other.
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5
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
A bounty hunter chases androids in a decayed future and starts to wonder what makes anyone human; the basis for Blade Runner.
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6
The Children of Men
In 2021, no child has been born anywhere on Earth for twenty-five years, and humanity is dying in a fog of despair and authoritarian order under the Warden of England. Theo Faron, a historian, is drawn reluctantly into a resistance group that may have discovered a woman who is pregnant. James's dystopian novel is also a theological meditation on hope, despair and what makes life meaningful.
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7
Dune
Politics, religion and ecology on a desert planet that holds the key to the galaxy; the towering epic of the genre.
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8
Foundation
A mathematician predicts the fall of a galactic empire and plans to shorten the dark age that follows; grand-scale ideas SF.
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9
The Three-Body Problem
First contact tangled up with a doomed alien civilisation and hard physics; ambitious, mind-stretching SF.
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10
The Fifth Season
On a planet racked by catastrophic geological events — the Fifth Seasons that periodically end civilisations — a woman searches for her daughter across a world that fears and enslaves people with the power to control the earth itself. Jemisin's first Broken Earth novel won the Hugo Award and announced the arrival of one of the most important voices in speculative fiction.