85 books like Dawn

A friend gave me this when I was almost done writing my book.

I couldn’t figure out how to justify footnoting a science fiction novel written from the point of view of a one-thousand-year-old spaceship in my own book, which was mostly about theories of musical evolution, but I still wish I had. The spaceship-protagonist can’t tell genders apart and refers to every single character as “she,” and it loves (I mean loves) to sing.

The book tackles surprisingly relevant questions about the way power, gender, and difference circulate through a post-colonial society. It’s completely different from the kind of work I do as an academic, but I think it has something just as important to say about music, human identity, and modern science.

For me, this was the book that changed everything!

Haraway does an amazing job of showing how the private lives and experiences of primate specialists were an important part of science. There’s even a chapter that shows how one of the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History has a taxidermy gorilla whose painted landscape depicts the gravesite of the guy who shot him (you still see it in person today if you are in New York City). This and other stories in the book transformed my thinking about the lines separating “animals” from other Others.

C’mon, doesn’t everybody need a book by a guy who explains that the Black-Billed Cuckoo is finally, finally a bird “who appreciates measured silence such as that which characterizes the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony”?

This amazing, idiosyncratic, and beautiful book from 1904 has got pages of gorgeous colored illustrations of birds, musical scores that are a weird hybrid of actual birdsong and random additions the author thinks will “make clear” a bird’s connections to human music, and heartfelt statements like the one above extolling the musical abilities of various American birds.

True, this is not the book to address issues of gender, race, and power in the sensitive and thoughtful ways that Butler and Haraway do. But you won’t care, because you will be having so much fun reading about the Hermit Thrush’s deep connection to the Moonlight Sonata.

This book is not for the faint of heart. It’s got a lot of academic jargon, and it can be tough reading.

But it’s well worth the work, because it is also one of the best explanations I’ve ever seen, anywhere, of how and why widely accepted categories like “human” and “animal” come from a bigger story influenced by slavery and its aftermath. Jackson’s book also has lovely and subtle case studies that will introduce you to writers and artists you won’t forget, like the incredible paintings of Wangechi Mutu or the sensitive creativity of writer Nalo Hopkinson.

I couldn’t finish this list without including one of the most famous examples of pregnancy in science fiction.

Humanity comes face-to-face with an alien species, the Oankali, who use gene editing, cloning, and mating to refresh their gene pools. The focus is on Lilith, a black woman taken hostage by the aliens who must learn about their plans for her and strategize her responses.

I really appreciate the way Butler’s work manages to speak to the legacy of slavery, particularly through a scene where the aliens create the circumstances for Lilith to breed with a human man in aid of their experiments. Lilith’s refusal to succumb to this animalistic treatment confronts the legacy of breeding humans during slavery.

I find Lilith (like many of Butler’s other characters) a driven character who deals with outlandish situations and the potential invasion of her own body with a pragmatic determination that invites me,… show more.

Sterling burst onto the SF scene with a crash and clatter when I was in high school, and this book, while perhaps not his very best work, is certainly his most creative.

I loved the fact that the aliens were investors rather than conquerors and also the fact that human beings were diverging along so many different vectors that we were rapidly becoming alien to one another.

A planet in its equivalent of the stone age is passing through a galactic debris field. An alien stargazer realizes that sooner or later some object will strike the planet and destroy it. The only hope of survival his species has is to leave the planet before that happens. But the concept is a mere abstraction to his people, the equivalent of a Neanderthal saying “we need to travel to the moon,” and the task is further complicated by the fact that their technology is biological in nature, focused on the manipulation of living tissue. It is hard to imagine how such technology could ever produce a spaceship. 

The novel--structured as a series of novellas-- follows the development of a fascinating alien species from its primitive roots to an age of high technology, each chapter focusing on a different time period. Always the stargazer’s warning is proclaimed by a few… show more.

An absolute achievement of imagination, Torishima’s collection of novellas and novelettes is set in a future in which humans, machines, and alien life are as intertwined as the stories themselves. Attempting to sum up the various horrifying, chaotic and enigmatic worlds of this book is a fool’s errand; its breadth is staggering and can only be read to be understood. Even then, you will likely be left with more questions than answers. Sisyphean stretches itself to the breaking point and then challenges the reader to keep going, to open one’s mind to a torrid future populated by creatures who retain their humanity, but little else. Thankfully, Torishima offers his own illustrations to help you along.

Somewhat paradoxically, this treatise against genetic enhancement starts with the case of a deaf couple who want to have a deaf child.

This is a case I often discuss in exploring the difference between disease, disability, and diversity. Following on from this case description, Sandel asks, “Is it wrong to make a child deaf by design?” And what if the desired trait was not deafness but height, athletic prowess, health, or intelligence, and the aim was to gain a competitive advantage?

Would your answer be the same? In the pages that follow, Sandel builds a case against “reengineering our nature” grounded in an ethic of giftedness (i.e., a reverence for life as a gift).

He eschews the drive to mastery and insists that “[t]o appreciate children as gifts is to accept them as they come, not as objects of our design, or products of our will, or instruments of our… show more.

British author, broadcaster and zoologist Matthew Cobb has written several books about the history of DNA research.

As Gods (the book’s original UK title is The Genetic Age) is a fast-paced analysis of “the thrilling and terrifying” 50-year history of genetic engineering and the rise of the biotechnology complex. But Cobb also asks tough questions regarding our propensity to meddle with nature, including the 2018 CRISPR babies scandal, reaching the unsettling conclusion that “dreams and nightmares must go hand in hand”.