Books like 'Native Tongue'
Readers who enjoyed Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
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I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
Rated: 4.23 of 5 stars · 76 ratingsThey mustn't harm a human being, they must obey human orders, and they must protect their own existence...but only so long as that doesn't violate rules one and two. With these Three Laws of Robotics, humanity embarked on a bold new era of evolution that would open up enormous possibilities - and unforeseen risks...Categorized as:
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Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, Thomas Pynchon
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 82 ratingsThe new novel by George Orwell is the major work towards which all his previous writing has pointed. Critics have hailed it as his "most solid, most brilliant" work. Though the story of Nineteen Eighty-Four takes place thirty-five years hence, it is in every sense timely. The scene is London, where there has been no new housing since 1950 and where the city-wide slums are called Victory Mansions... -
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
Rated: 4.18 of 5 stars · 38 ratingsA classic science fiction novel by one of the greatest writers of the genre, set in a future world where one man's dreams control the fate of humanity. In a future world racked by violence and environmental catastrophes, George Orr wakes up one day to discover that his dreams have the ability to alter reality. He seeks help from Dr... -
The Fated Sky by Mary Robinette Kowal
Rated: 4.30 of 5 stars · 35 ratingsThe Fated Sky continued the grand sweep of alternate history begun in The Calculating Stars. It is 1961, and the International Aerospace Coalition has established a colony on the moon. Elma York, the noted Lady Astronaut, is working on rotation, flying shuttles on the moon and returning regularly to Earth.But humanity must get a foothold on Mars...Categorized as:
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The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov
Rated: 4.22 of 5 stars · 47 ratingsOne of Isaac Asimov's SF masterpieces, this stand-alone novel is a monument of the flowering of SF in the 20th century. It is widely regarded as Asimov's single best SF novel and one every SF fan should read.Andrew Harlan is an Eternal, a member of the elite of the future...Categorized as:
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The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, Valerie Martin
Rated: 4.15 of 5 stars · 94 ratings(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)A gripping vision of our society radically overturned by a theocratic revolution, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale has become one of the most powerful and most widely read novels of our time.Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, serving in the household of the enigmatic Commander and his bitter wife...Categorized as:
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The Lathe Of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
Rated: 4.12 of 5 stars · 34 ratingsWith a new introduction by Kelly Link, the Locus Award–winning science fiction novel by legendary author Ursula K. Le Guin, set in a world where one man’s dreams rewrite the future. During a time racked by war and environmental catastrophe, George Orr discovers his dreams alter reality. George is compelled to receive treatment from Dr... -
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 101 ratingsWinston Smith is a low-rung member of the Party, the ruling government of Oceania. He works in the Ministry of Truth, the Party's propoganda arm, where he is in charge of revising history. He is but a small brick in the pyramid that is the Party, at the head of which stands Big Brother. Big Brother the infallible. Big Brother the all-powerful... -
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 28 ratingsConnie Willis' Hugo and Nebula Award-winning Doomsday Book uses time travel for a serious look at how people connect with each other. In this Hugo-winning companion to that novel, she offers a completely different kind of time travel adventure: a delightful romantic comedy that pays hilarious homage to Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat...Categorized as:
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Sherlock Holmes in Orbit by Mike Resnick, Dean Wesley Smith
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsAuthorized by Dame Jean Conan Doyle, this brand-new collection of 26 Sherlock Holmes stories takes place in Holmes' own era, in our present time, and in the future. All the tales contain some science fiction or fantasy element, and all remain true to the spirit and personality of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous and enduring creation...Categorized as:
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The Many-Colored Land by Julian May
Rated: 4.04 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsWhen a one-way time tunnel to Earth's distant past, specifically six million B.C., was discovered by folks on the Galactic Milieu, every misfit for light-years around hurried to pass through it. Each sought his own brand of happiness. But none could have guessed what awaited them. Not even in a million years...Categorized as:
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The Gate to Women's Country by Sheri S. Tepper
Rated: 4.04 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsTepper's finest novel to date is set in a post-holocaust feminist dystopia that offers only two political alternatives: a repressive polygamist sect that is slowly self-destructing through inbreeding and the matriarchal dictatorship called Women's Country...Categorized as:
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Time and Time Again by Ben Elton
Rated: 4.04 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsIt’s the 1st of June 1914 and Hugh Stanton, ex-soldier and celebrated adventurer is quite literally the loneliest man on earth. No one he has ever known or loved has been born yet. Perhaps now they never will be.Stanton knows that a great and terrible war is coming. A collective suicidal madness that will destroy European civilization and bring misery to millions in the century to come...Categorized as:
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Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
Rated: 4.03 of 5 stars · 32 ratingsFor Kivrin, preparing an on-site study of one of the deadliest eras in humanity's history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received...Categorized as:
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Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank
Rated: 4.03 of 5 stars · 46 ratings“An extraordinary real picture of human beings numbed by catastrophe but still driven by the unconquerable determination of living creatures to keep on being alive.” —The New Yorker“Alas, Babylon.” Those fateful words heralded the end...Categorized as:
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China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 19 ratingsWith this groundbreaking novel, Maureen F. McHugh established herself as one of the decade's best science fiction writers. In its pages, we enter a post-revolution America, moving from the hyper-urbanized eastern seaboard to the Arctic bleakness of Baffin Island; from the new Imperial City to an agricultural commune on Mars...Categorized as:
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Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 19 ratingsStar Maker is a science fiction novel by Olaf Stapledon, published in 1937. The book describes a history of life in the universe, dwarfing in scale Stapledon's previous book, Last and First Men (1930), a history of the human species over two billion years...Categorized as:
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The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal
Rated: 3.98 of 5 stars · 38 ratingsOn a cold spring night in 1952, a huge meteorite fell to earth and obliterated much of the east coast of the United States, including Washington D.C. The ensuing climate cataclysm will soon render the earth inhospitable for humanity, as the last such meteorite did for the dinosaurs...Categorized as:
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On the Beach by Nevil Shute
Rated: 3.93 of 5 stars · 28 ratingsAfter the war is over, a radioactive cloud begins to sweep southwards on the winds, gradually poisoning everything in its path. An American submarine captain is among the survivors left sheltering in Australia, preparing with the locals for the inevitable. Despite his memories of his wife, he becomes close to a young woman struggling to accept the harsh realities of their situation...Categorized as:
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A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr., Mary Doria Russell
Rated: 3.91 of 5 stars · 43 ratingsIn a nightmarish ruined world slowly awakening to the light after sleeping in darkness, the infant rediscoveries of science are secretly nourished by cloistered monks dedicated to the study and preservation of the relics and writings of the blessed Saint Isaac Leibowitz...Categorized as:
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Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
Rated: 3.93 of 5 stars · 40 ratingsThe cabin had always been a special retreat for Isherwood Williams, a haven from the demands of society. But one day while hiking, Ish was bitten by a rattlesnake, and the solitude he had so desired took on dire new significance. He was sick for days - although, somehow, he never doubted that he'd live through the ordeal...Categorized as:
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The Only Thing to Fear by Caroline Tung Richmond
Rated: 3.86 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsIn a stunning reimagining of history, debut author Caroline Tung Richmond weaves an incredible story of secrets and honor in a world where Hitler won World War II.It's been nearly 80 years since the Allies lost WWII in a crushing defeat against Hitler's genetically engineered super soldiers...Categorized as:
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Blackout by Connie Willis
Rated: 3.85 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsOxford in 2060 is a chaotic place, with scores of time-traveling historians being sent into the past. Michael Davies is prepping to go to Pearl Harbor. Merope Ward is coping with a bunch of bratty 1940 evacuees and trying to talk her thesis adviser into letting her go to VE-Day. Polly Churchill’s next assignment will be as a shopgirl in the middle of London’s Blitz...Categorized as:
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The Postman by David Brin
Rated: 3.83 of 5 stars · 29 ratingsThis is the story of a lie that became the most powerful kind of truth. A timeless novel as urgently compelling as War Day or Alas, Babylon, David Brin's The Postman is the dramatically moving saga of a man who rekindled the spirit of America through the power of a dream, from a modern master of science fiction...Categorized as:
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Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon
Rated: 3.78 of 5 stars · 18 ratings"No book before or since has ever had such an impact upon my imagination," declared Arthur C. Clarke of Last and First Men. This masterpiece of science fiction by British philosopher and writer Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) is an imaginative, ambitious history of humanity's future that spans billions of years...Categorized as:
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The Wild Shore by Kim Stanley Robinson
Rated: 3.75 of 5 stars · 16 ratings2047: for 60 years America has been quarantined after a devastating nuclear attack. For the small community of San Onofre on the West Coast, life is a matter of survival: living simply on what the sea and land can provide, preserving what knowledge and skills they can in a society without mass communications...Categorized as:
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The Gold Coast by Kim Stanley Robinson
Rated: 3.71 of 5 stars · 14 ratings2027: Southern California is a developer's dream gone mad, an endless sprawl of condos, freeways, and malls. Jim McPherson, the affluent son of a defense contractor, is a young man lost in a world of fast cars, casual sex, and designer drugs. But his descent into the shadowy underground of industrial terrorism brings him into a shattering confrontation with his family, his goals, and his ideals... -
Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon
Rated: 3.79 of 5 stars · 30 ratings"No book before or since has ever had such an impact upon my imagination," declared Arthur C. Clarke of Last and First Men. This masterpiece of science fiction by British philosopher and writer Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) is an imaginative, ambitious history of humanity's future that spans billions of years...Categorized as:
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Planesrunner by Ian McDonald
Rated: 3.68 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsThere is not one you. There are many yous. There is not one world. There are many worlds. Ours is one of billions of parallel earths.When Everett Singh's scientist father is kidnapped from the streets of London, he leaves young Everett a mysterious app on his computer... -
The Iron Heel (Illustrated) by Jack London
Rated: 3.69 of 5 stars · 33 ratingsJack London’s dystopian novel The Iron Heel posits a futuristic world in which the division between the classes has deepened, creating a menacing oligarchy that rules through terror. Anticipating the science fiction novels of the 1960s and '70s, the book stresses future changes in society and politics while paying less attention to technological details...Categorized as:
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Arslan by M.J. Engh
Rated: 3.37 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsArslan is a young Asian general who conquers the world in a week without firing a shot and shortly thereafter sets up his headquarters in a small town in Illinois.A masterpiece of political science fiction and a book to challenge such works as Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed, Arslan is a book that others are now measured against...Categorized as:
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Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach
Rated: 3.61 of 5 stars · 31 ratingsA novel both timely and prophetic, Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia is a hopeful antidote to the environmental concerns of today, set in an ecologically sound future society. Hailed by the Los Angeles Times as the “newest name after Wells, Verne, Huxley, and Orwell,” Callenbach offers a visionary blueprint for the survival of our planet . . . and our future...Categorized as:
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The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
Rated: 3.57 of 5 stars · 69 ratingsIt's America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco, the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some twenty years earlier the United States lost a war — and is now occupied by Nazi Germany and Japan.This harrowing, Hugo Award-winning novel is the work that established Philip K...Categorized as:
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The Folk of the Fringe by Orson Scott Card
Rated: 3.33 of 5 stars · 30 ratingsOnly a few nuclear weapons fell in America-the weapons that destroyed our nation were biological and, ultimately, cultural. But in the chaos, the famine, the plague, there exited a few pockets of order. The strongest of them was the state of Deseret, formed from the vestiges of Utah, Colorado, and Idaho. The climate has changed. The Great Salt Lake has filled up to prehistoric levels...Categorized as:
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