Escape to Another World
If you're feeling stuck, cramped, or constricted, why not leave this world for another, of only temporarily?
These space- and time-bending tales will transport you to extraordinary worlds unknown.
The entire series is all fun all the time. It's difficult to find a sentence that isn't a joke, a smart joke. The punchlines are almost always you.
— Landon
"It is 2017 and you may well be turning to dystopian fiction in order to better comprehend the present political climate. If so, add Parable of the Sower to your list. The classics of the genre - 1984, Fahrenheit 451, depict life under an authoritarian regime; Parable, two decades old but set roughly two presidential terms from the present, feels eerily predictive of how our communities might respond if society collapses altogether."
— Will
Kindred towers as powerful fiction of great depth, suffused with the intensity of memoir, addressing a panoply of personal, cultural, political, and historical concerns: racism, minimized by the whitewashing of America's slave-owning past; our legacy of racial injustice informing interracial unions, both coercive and consensual, especially the privileging of "light" skin over dark; feminism as continuing quest for personal and social empowerment; challenging the constructs of family and racial inheritance; traditional models of endurance and apparent acquiescence interrogated and superseded by contemporary models of unyielding resistance and transformation.
— Yvonne
In the midst of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, a young scientist sends a message into the cosmos that brings a desperate, far more advanced civilization hurtling toward the Earth, and humanity begins planning for a Doomsday Battle that won't happen for four hundred years. There are a million reasons to love Liu's storytelling in this first book of his Three-Body trilogy, but his ability to keep the pace and tension humming while also keeping the aliens almost entirely off-stage utterly blew my mind.
— Kate
Set in an alternate 1985 England where literature is of the utmost importance, time travel is almost passé, people keep dodos as pets, and cheese is heavily taxed, this is the story of Thursday Next, a literary detective tasked with thwarting the kidnapping of Jane Eyre out the pages of her manuscript. A hilarious and weird book for a very specific type of reader who will be delighted to learn there are six more books in the series.
— Katie Fee
The Moon is a prison whose prisoners revolt. The unlucky exiled who call that dusty satellite home have on their side only rocks, vigor, and a computer who has learned to tell jokes. That same computer continually calculates the odds of a successful revolution. It doesn't look good.
— Landon
"This book deserves every good thing that can be said about it. I have little to add but hope by putting it here, you'll remember that, oh yeah, you totally have wanted to read/re-read Dune. If you need a push, remember there are mile-long, razor-toothed sandworms and desert warriors badass enough to ride them."
— Landon
One of the most unique, funnest novels I read this past year. The world Marlon James builds in this book is unlike anything you've ever read before, and he populates it with the most wonderfully idiosyncratic characters in a gender-bending, myth-making, madcap adventure story set in a fantastical African kingdom of yesteryear. Funny, fascinating, sexy (yes, he writes great sex scenes!), and riveting, I guarantee you'll have a great time with this one-of-a-kind book. And best of all, it's only the first in a series, and there should be at least two more to come!
— Jacob R
The Hugo award-winning Broken Earth series starts with the thrilling and tragic story of Syenite and Alabaster. In a land troubled by constant earthquakes they are gifted and feared for their ability to manipulate the earth's energy. At odds with the limitations of their world, they try to escape it, with apocalyptic consequences.
— Jacob S.
A scientist from an anarchist moon journeys to the capitalist planet his society revolted against in order to share and explore a major breakthrough. Challenging and engaging in terms of ideas and character, The Dispossessed showcases Le Guin's brilliant intellect and style.
— Jacob S.
Read this book and know magic: of wind and waves, of names and patterns, of people, of timeless stories from which other stories spring. Le Guin is a writer possessed of fierce imagination and rare grace.
— Eli
Time to replace your paperbacks with this beautiful single-volume edition of the His Dark Materials trilogy. No big deal, but if you need gift ideas for me, this would be a winner. Also probably for any super-intelligent fantasy reader, young or old, on your gift list.
— Kate
I hope that your overwhelmingly positive leanings towards the idea of time travel (how could you have anything but?) and the promise that this is its greatest sans-Doc Brown story help you overlook this book jacket, which has the distinction of being the worst ever created by mankind.
— Cristin
