BVBook Verdict

If you liked

Books like The food of the gods and how it came to earth

Loved The food of the gods and how it came to earth by H. G. Wells? 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

  1. 1

    We

    Yevgeny Zamyatin · 1924 · Science Fiction

    D-503, a mathematician in a future totalitarian state called the One State where all citizens live in glass apartments with no privacy, falls in love with the revolutionary I-330. Zamyatin's novel — written in 1924 and suppressed in the Soviet Union — was a direct influence on Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

  2. 2

    Foundation

    Isaac Asimov · 1951 · Science Fiction

    A mathematician predicts the fall of a galactic empire and plans to shorten the dark age that follows; grand-scale ideas SF.

  3. 3

    Dune

    Frank Herbert · 1965 · Science Fiction

    Politics, religion and ecology on a desert planet that holds the key to the galaxy; the towering epic of the genre.

  4. 4

    Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

    Philip K. Dick · 1968 · Science Fiction

    A bounty hunter chases androids in a decayed future and starts to wonder what makes anyone human; the basis for Blade Runner.

  5. 5

    The Left Hand of Darkness

    Ursula K. Le Guin · 1969 · Science Fiction

    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.

  6. 6

    Slaughterhouse-Five

    Kurt Vonnegut · 1969 · Science Fiction

    A man comes 'unstuck in time' after surviving the firebombing of Dresden; an anti-war novel like no other.

  7. 7

    The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

    Douglas Adams · 1979 · Science Fiction

    Earth is demolished for a bypass and an ordinary man hitchhikes the cosmos; the funniest book in science fiction.

  8. 8

    Kindred

    Octavia Butler · 1979 · Science Fiction

    A Black woman in 1976 is pulled back in time to a slave plantation; time travel used to devastating effect.

  9. 9

    Neuromancer

    William Gibson · 1984 · Science Fiction

    A washed-up hacker pulled into one last job in cyberspace; the book that named and shaped cyberpunk.

  10. 10

    The Three-Body Problem

    Liu Cixin · 2008 · Science Fiction

    First contact tangled up with a doomed alien civilisation and hard physics; ambitious, mind-stretching SF.

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