Books like Flatland
A Square, a respectable resident of a two-dimensional world ruled by a rigid hierarchy of shapes, describes his society and the night a Sphere visits him from the third dimension.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Flatland
Stories of Your Life and Others
Eight stories spanning alien linguistics, time travel, and the nature of mathematical truth, including the novella that became the film Arrival.
War with the Newts
A sea captain discovers intelligent newts in a lagoon on an island in the Indian Ocean and starts trading them as labour, and the newts multiply.
Exhalation
Nine stories that use science fiction premises to explore free will, time, language, and the nature of consciousness with philosophical precision.
Cat's Cradle
A writer researching what the inventors of the atomic bomb did on the day it fell tracks down the children of one of them, and follows them to a Caribbean island where ice-nine, a substance that freezes all water it touches, is waiting.
The Island of Doctor Moreau
Edward Prendick, shipwrecked and then cast adrift, is put ashore on a remote Pacific island where the exiled vivisectionist Doctor Moreau carries out his experiments on animals.
Solaris
Kris Kelvin, a psychologist, arrives at the research station hovering over the ocean planet Solaris to find one of its three scientists dead, the other two barely holding together, and people walking its corridors who should not be there.
The Lathe of Heaven
A man in a near-future Portland discovers he can reshape reality through his dreams, and a psychiatrist tries to exploit the power to fix the world.
Anathem
Monks in a parallel world devoted to pure mathematics are forced open by an alien threat that demands they engage with the chaotic outside world.
We
In the One State, a city of glass a thousand years from now where every hour is scheduled, D-503, the mathematician building the spaceship Integral, begins a journal in praise of its perfect order, and then he meets I-330.
Permutation City
In 2050, when the rich can have themselves scanned and live on as Copies in virtual worlds, Paul Durham runs experiments on his own Copy and then offers a few wealthy Copies a way to live for ever beyond the reach of the real world's computers.
Galápagos
A million years from now, the last humans have devolved on the Galápagos Islands, and a ghost narrates how the big brains that caused all our problems finally went away.
Foundation
As the Galactic Empire decays, mathematician Hari Seldon plants a colony of scholars on a remote planet to shorten the coming dark age, and his successors survive crisis after crisis his equations foresaw.