Five books to inspire you to make tomorrow better

At the B & N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog Kameron Hurley tagged five books to inspire you to build a better future, including:

Too Like Lightning, by Ada Palmer

The future, like the past, is a foreign country. Or, at least, it should be. And Palmer – herself an accomplished historian – pulls out all the stops here in this incredibly rich far-future utopia designed to be as strange to us here in the 21st century as it would be to someone in the 1500’s (and it is!). Gender distinctions in this society have no real parallel to our own, and most of the world is aligned into polyamorous families and globe-spanning clans. This is a carefully designed utopia, one that could, however, unravel in the hands of a young boy who seems to have the ability to bring inanimate objects to life. Like The Female Man, this is a dense read that may take you some time to get into, but the reward of discovering what it does to your own thoughts and assumptions is well worth it.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 69 Test: Too Like the Lightning.

--Marshal Zeringue