BVBook Verdict

If you liked

Books like The Dispossessed

Loved The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin? 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

    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.

  2. 2

    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.

  3. 3

    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.

  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

    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.

  6. 6

    Neuromancer

    William Gibson · 1984 · Science Fiction

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

  7. 7

    The Children of Men

    P.D. James · 1992 · Science Fiction

    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.

  8. 8

    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.

  9. 9

    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.

  10. 10

    The Fifth Season

    N.K. Jemisin · 2015 · Science Fiction

    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.

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