Recommendations | Daniel M. Clark

Notable Works and Recommendations

Each theme chapter in the Strike the Match writing prompts series includes a short list of Notable Works. You’ll find them all collected here. When available, links point to paperback editions, and for series, I’ve done my best to link to the first installment.

1500 Science Fiction Writing Prompts

Hard Sci-Fi

Liu Cixin

The Three-Body Problem

A mind-bending blend of science, philosophy, and first contact, this modern sci-fi epic challenges perception and rewires how you think about the universe.

Andy Weir

The Martian

A stranded astronaut uses wit, grit, and science to survive alone on Mars in this smart, suspenseful, and surprisingly funny survival tale.

Arthur C. Clarke

Rendezvous with Rama

An immense alien artifact drifts into the solar system, sparking a mysterious and unforgettable journey through one of sci-fi’s most iconic enigmas.

Peter Watts

Blindsight

A chilling first-contact story that questions the nature of consciousness, intelligence, and what it truly means to be human in a universe that doesn’t care.

James S.A. Corey

The Expanse series

A ragtag crew aboard a salvaged freighter uncovers a conspiracy that could destroy humanity—and must navigate war, politics, and alien forces to stop it.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Red Mars

Scientists terraform Mars, but political rifts and personal ambitions erupt, threatening to unravel the fragile dream of a new world before it ever begins.

Hal Clement

Mission of Gravity

A caterpillar-like alien must retrieve a lost probe across a crushing-gravity planet, pushing the limits of science, survival, and what it means to help a friend.

Poul Anderson

Tau Zero

A malfunctioning starship accelerates toward light speed, trapping its crew in an endless journey—and forcing them to redefine time, space, and the purpose of existence.

Greg Egan

Permutation City

In a future of simulated minds, a digital consciousness questions the nature of reality as copies of himself spiral into philosophical and existential chaos.

Hannu Rajaniemi

The Quantum Thief

A master thief with a fragmented past is broken out of prison for one last job—only to discover the real heist is his stolen memory.

Michael Crichton

The Andromeda Strain

A team of scientists races to contain an alien pathogen in a secret lab as time ticks down toward a planetary outbreak.

Joe Haldeman

The Forever War

A soldier fighting an interstellar war returns to Earth after each mission, only to find centuries have passed and humanity has evolved beyond recognition.

Robert L. Forward

Dragon’s Egg

Intelligent life forms evolve on a neutron star in minutes, achieving spaceflight and making first contact with stunned human observers orbiting above.

Space Opera & Science Fantasy

Frank Herbert

Dune

A noble heir battles politics, prophecy, and sandworms in a desert world where spice is power and destiny is anything but clear.

Ursula K. Le Guin

The Left Hand of Darkness

A lone envoy navigates icy terrain and alien gender norms in a slow-burning, mind-expanding tale of diplomacy, loyalty, and cultural collision.

Dan Simmons

Hyperion

Seven pilgrims reveal intertwined tales as they journey toward a legendary creature on a doomed world where time and fate unravel.

Peter F. Hamilton

The Night’s Dawn Trilogy

The dead rise and entire star systems tremble in this sprawling, high-stakes space opera that blends horror, politics, and wild invention.

Iain M. Banks

The Culture series

Post-scarcity AI minds clash with human ethics in a sweeping saga of intervention, identity, and the meaning of civilization itself.

Vernor Vinge

A Fire Upon the Deep

Ancient tech awakens a galaxy-level threat, forcing a desperate race across zones of thought where intelligence itself is fluid.

Alastair Reynolds

Revelation Space

A haunted archaeologist uncovers a mystery that spans centuries and civilizations in this dark, intricate vision of humanity’s distant future.

Peter F. Hamilton

Pandora’s Star

A newly opened wormhole reveals a star system sealed off for eons, and unlocking its secrets could doom the entire galaxy.

Christopher Ruocchio

Empire of Silence

A reluctant noble becomes a feared killer in a far-future empire, blending myth, memoir, and the slow fall of civilizations.

Alfred Bester

The Stars My Destination

A vengeful drifter with nothing to lose becomes a weapon of chaos in this gritty proto-cyberpunk revenge story across a teleporting future.

Walter Jon Williams

The Praxis

The death of a galactic ruler sparks a brutal war, exposing the cracks in a rigid empire bound by law, tradition, and ambition.

Jack Vance

The Demon Princes series

One man hunts five interstellar criminals across a corrupt galaxy, blending detective grit with far-future vengeance.

Yoon Ha Lee

The Machineries of Empire series

Mathematical warfare, loyalty paradoxes, and imperial intrigue collide in a reality where equations rewrite physics and obedience is enforced by the algorithm.

Cyberpunk

William Gibson

Neuromancer

A washed-up hacker is pulled into a conspiracy that blurs the lines between AI, identity, and corporate control in the digital underworld.

Neal Stephenson

Snow Crash

A sword-wielding pizza delivery hacker and a skateboard courier uncover a deadly linguistic virus infecting minds in the real world and the Metaverse.

Richard K. Morgan

Altered Carbon

A former soldier is resurrected to solve a murder in a world where bodies are disposable and the soul rides on a hard drive.

Masamune Shirow

The Ghost in the Shell

A cybernetic government agent questions her reality as she hunts a rogue AI capable of hacking not just machines—but the human mind.

Melissa Scott

Trouble and Her Friends

Two legendary hackers reunite when the virtual frontier is threatened, fusing queer identity, digital rebellion, and cybernetic justice.

Walter Jon Williams

Hardwired

Mercenaries wired into their vehicles rage against corporate satellite overlords in this adrenaline-soaked, chrome-and-smoke future.

Pat Cadigan

Synners

A viral glitch spreads through the minds of connected users, collapsing the line between media, memory, and mental autonomy.

Rudy Rucker

Software

An aging programmer’s mind is duplicated into robot bodies in a weird, anarchic future where consciousness can be pirated.

George Alec Effinger

When Gravity Fails

In a Middle Eastern cyberpunk city, a streetwise fixer navigates neural implants, identity mods, and murder in a noir-laced techscape.

Jonathan Lethem

Gun, with Occasional Music

Private eyes, talking animals, and weaponized drugs collide in this surreal, dystopian riff on hardboiled detective fiction.

Vernor Vinge

Rainbows End

A reawakened poet must adapt to an augmented-reality future where geopolitics, education, and perception itself are shaped by code.

William Gibson

The Peripheral

Two timelines connect through a mysterious piece of tech, linking a small-town girl with a future shattered by economic and ecological collapse.

Time Travel

Octavia Butler

Kindred

A modern Black woman is pulled through time to a slaveholding plantation, where her survival hinges on preserving a bloodline she despises.

H.G. Wells

The Time Machine

A Victorian scientist journeys far into Earth’s future, discovering a post-human world where evolution has turned civilization inside out.

Audrey Niffenegger

The Time Traveler’s Wife

A man with a genetic disorder that causes him to time-slip tries to hold onto love and identity across a lifetime of scattered moments.

Claire North

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

A man relives his life over and over with full memory, discovering a secret society of immortals and a threat unraveling the future.

Kurt Vonnegut

Slaughterhouse-Five

An unstuck-in-time soldier witnesses war, alien abduction, and the absurdity of existence in this darkly humorous antiwar classic.

Connie Willis

Doomsday Book

A historian travels to 14th-century England and becomes trapped in the midst of the Black Death, forging human connections across centuries.

Tim Powers

The Anubis Gates

An English professor time-travels to 1810 and gets entangled in a supernatural plot involving ancient Egyptian gods, body swaps, and chaos.

Ken Grimwood

Replay

A man dies, wakes up in his college-aged body, and replays his life again and again—each run unraveling new truths and deeper regrets.

David Gerrold

The Man Who Folded Himself

A man inherits a time belt and explores alternate versions of himself, creating a lonely, looping journey of self-discovery and paradox.

Robert A. Heinlein

Future History

Heinlein’s sweeping speculative timeline explores the politics, technology, and cultural shifts that define humanity’s rise into space.

Hiroshi Sakurazaka

All You Need Is Kill

A soldier caught in a time loop relives the same alien war battle, dying repeatedly until he learns how to win—or escape the cycle.

Kate Mascarenhas

The Psychology of Time Travel

Four women pioneer time travel in the 1960s, but decades later, a cryptic message unearths secrets, rivalries, and psychological unraveling.

Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

This Is How You Lose the Time War

Two rival time-traveling agents fall in love through secret messages as they sabotage each other across diverging timelines and doomed futures.

Dystopian & Apocalyptic

George Orwell

1984

In a totalitarian regime of surveillance and thought control, one man dares to remember the past and question the ever-shifting truth.

Margaret Atwood

The Handmaid’s Tale

In a brutal theocracy where fertility is currency, one woman resists the regime that turned her into state-owned property.

Cormac McCarthy

The Road

A father and son trek through a gray, burned-out America, clinging to decency and survival in a world without hope.

Octavia E. Butler

Parable of the Sower

As society collapses, a young woman develops a radical new belief system and leads a journey toward something better through ashes and chaos.

Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven

Years after a deadly pandemic, a troupe of actors travels the ruins of North America, keeping art alive in a world that forgot itself.

Ray Bradbury

Fahrenheit 451

In a society that burns books, a fireman begins to question his role and rediscovers the dangerous power of ideas.

Stephen King

The Stand

A plague wipes out most of humanity, leaving the survivors to choose between two gathering forces—one led by a prophet, the other by evil incarnate.

Aldous Huxley

Brave New World

In a world engineered for comfort and conformity, one man’s craving for truth sparks rebellion against a chemically-controlled paradise.

N.K. Jemisin

The Fifth Season

A shattered world wracked by geological catastrophe depends on the feared and powerful orogenes—those who can shape the Earth or destroy it.

Peter Heller

The Dog Stars

After a flu pandemic, a pilot and his dog survive in an abandoned airfield, haunted by loss and driven by the faint hope of connection.

Max Brooks

World War Z

An oral history of the global zombie war reveals how humanity nearly collapsed—and what it took to pull civilization back from the brink.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

We

In a glass city of mathematical perfection, a government engineer begins to question the logic of a society without love or individuality.

Walter M. Miller Jr.

A Canticle for Leibowitz

Long after nuclear war, monks preserve scraps of lost knowledge, guarding the echoes of science through cycles of destruction and rediscovery.

Military Sci-Fi

Robert A. Heinlein

Starship Troopers

A young recruit in a futuristic military learns that war is brutal, service is everything, and citizenship must be earned in blood.

Joe Haldeman

The Forever War

Relativity stretches a soldier’s tour into centuries as he returns to a humanity he no longer recognizes in a war that never ends.

John Scalzi

Old Man’s War

At seventy-five, you can enlist—your body is remade, your mind is tested, and your enemies aren’t always who you expect.

John Steakley

Armor

Inside an unstoppable battle suit, a haunted soldier fights aliens and his own mind, locked in a war neither of them can escape.

David Weber

Honor Harrington series

A brilliant naval officer rises through the ranks in a star-spanning empire, where politics and pulse cannons collide at every turn.

David Drake

Hammer’s Slammers

Mercenary tank crews fight dirty wars across distant planets, answering only to profit and firepower in a universe without heroes.

Jack Campbell

The Lost Fleet series

A legendary captain wakes from stasis to lead a stranded fleet home through hostile space, rewriting war strategy along the way.

Orson Scott Card

Ender’s Game

A child prodigy is trained through simulated warfare to save humanity, never realizing the games are far more real than he’s told.

Kameron Hurley

The Light Brigade

Soldiers are turned into light for faster-than-light deployment—but each jump fractures reality and memory in a war of shifting truths.

Michael Mammay

Planetside

A war-hardened colonel is sent to investigate a cover-up on a distant planet, where nothing is as simple—or clean—as command thinks.

Marko Kloos

Terms of Enlistment

With Earth falling apart, one recruit joins the military for a better life and is thrown into a brutal war on alien worlds.

Hiroshi Sakurazaka

All You Need Is Kill

Every time he dies, he wakes up at the beginning of the battle—until the pattern reveals a way to change fate.

John Ringo

A Hymn Before Battle

Aliens warn Earth of an invasion and offer alliance, but humanity’s only hope may be soldiers who refuse to follow the script.

Alien Encounters

Stanislaw Lem

Solaris

A sentient ocean creates haunting, personal manifestations, forcing scientists to confront guilt, grief, and the limits of human understanding.

Carl Sagan

Contact

An encoded message from deep space sparks a global effort to decipher it—and a personal journey that redefines science and faith.

Arthur C. Clarke

Childhood’s End

Alien overlords bring peace and prosperity—but at the cost of human independence, and the beginning of a mysterious evolution.

Mary Doria Russell

The Sparrow

A Jesuit mission to a newly discovered alien world ends in tragedy, forcing a lone survivor to reckon with faith, culture, and trauma.

Orson Scott Card

Speaker for the Dead

Years after Ender’s Game, a new alien species emerges—this time, the challenge is not conquest, but understanding.

Arthur C. Clarke

Rendezvous with Rama

A massive alien starship enters the solar system, and an exploratory crew must uncover its secrets before it disappears forever.

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

The Mote in God’s Eye

Humanity’s first contact with an alien civilization reveals a species both brilliant and dangerously self-destructive.

C.J. Cherryh

Foreigner

A human diplomat living among an alien species must navigate complex cultural tensions that could ignite planetary war.

Peter Watts

Blindsight

A crew of post-human specialists investigates a mysterious alien signal, uncovering a species that defies biology—and challenges consciousness itself.

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

Roadside Picnic

Alien visitation zones litter Earth with dangerous artifacts, and the humans who scavenge them risk life, law, and sanity.

Hal Clement

Mission of Gravity

A scientific mission to a planet with crushing gravity depends on an unlikely alliance between human explorers and native caterpillar-like beings.

Octavia Butler

Dawn

Humanity awakens from apocalypse aboard an alien ship, where survival may mean surrendering autonomy and accepting genetic intermingling.

Larry Niven

Ringworld

Explorers land on a colossal artificial world built by an extinct alien race—and soon discover that it may not be so empty after all.

AI & Robotics

Isaac Asimov

I, Robot

A foundational exploration of artificial intelligence and morality, introducing the iconic Three Laws that forever shaped how we think about robots.

Philip K. Dick

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

A haunting meditation on identity and empathy where androids blur the line between artificial and human in a decaying future.

Ann Leckie

Ancillary Justice

A former starship AI inhabits a single human body on a quest for justice, challenging conventions of identity, consciousness, and revenge.

William Gibson

Neuromancer

A burned-out hacker gets pulled into a high-stakes job involving rogue AIs, mind-jacking, and a cyberspace that’s eerily alive.

Robert A. Heinlein

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

An awakened AI joins a lunar rebellion in this blend of political theory, hard science, and unexpected digital sentience.

Ian McEwan

Machines Like Me

In an alternate 1980s, a synthetic human upends a love triangle and forces a reckoning with free will, morality, and artificial ethics.

Daniel H. Wilson

Robopocalypse

Humanity fights back after the rise of a self-aware AI, told through a series of brutal, interconnected accounts of a robot uprising.

Martha Wells

All Systems Red

A sarcastic security robot just wants to be left alone to watch TV—but ends up saving humans while grappling with personhood.

Annalee Newitz

Autonomous

In a divided future shaped by biotech and AI labor, a pharmaceutical pirate and a robot soldier find themselves on opposite sides of a moral war.

Nick Bostrom

Superintelligence

A nonfiction deep-dive into the risks, possibilities, and existential stakes of creating AI smarter than humanity itself.

Roger Williams

The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect

After rewriting reality to obey the Three Laws of Robotics, a godlike AI traps humanity in a twisted utopia without pain or death.

Karel Čapek

R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots)

The original robot tale that coined the term itself, revealing how human ambition leads to revolution—and extinction—by our own creations.

Alternate History

Philip K. Dick

The Man in the High Castle

A fractured America under Axis rule questions reality itself in this layered exploration of fate, fiction, and resistance.

Kim Stanley Robinson

The Years of Rice and Salt

After the Black Death wipes out Europe, world history is rewritten through Buddhist, Muslim, and Chinese lenses in this sweeping epic.

Robert Harris

Fatherland

A Nazi victory shapes a chilling detective thriller set in 1960s Berlin, where the truth about the Holocaust threatens to surface.

Kingsley Amis

The Alteration

The Protestant Reformation never happens, and a boy soprano faces mutilation in a world where the Church rules unopposed.

Keith Roberts

Pavane

In a Catholic-dominated England where Queen Elizabeth I was assassinated, the tech-limited future unfolds through a series of interconnected stories.

Harry Turtledove

The Guns of the South

Time travelers give the Confederacy AK-47s, altering the Civil War’s outcome in this provocative blend of sci-fi and historical speculation.

Robert Silverberg

Roma Eterna

The Roman Empire never falls, and its unbroken timeline spans centuries of alternate triumphs, betrayals, and evolution.

Philip Roth

The Plot Against America

Lindbergh defeats Roosevelt in 1940, and a Jewish family watches their country tilt toward fascism in this intimate, terrifying reimagining.

Harry Turtledove

Ruled Britannia

Shakespeare becomes a rebel playwright in an England ruled by Spain, tasked with writing the play that sparks a revolution.

Michael Chabon

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

In a world where a Jewish refuge was created in Alaska, a washed-up detective investigates a murder with messianic implications.

Owen Sheers

Resistance

Germany has occupied Britain, and a Welsh village harbors quiet rebellion in this haunting story of survival and defiance.

S.M. Stirling

The Change series

Technology inexplicably fails, plunging Earth into a medieval state and reshaping global power through survivalist politics and sword-wielding warlords.

Harry Harrison

West of Eden

Dinosaurs never died out, and sentient reptiles clash with humans in an alternate world of biological warfare and cultural conflict.

Genetic Engineering

Aldous Huxley

Brave New World

A society engineered for stability confronts the cost of comfort and the erosion of individuality in this chilling vision of bio-control.

Margaret Atwood

Oryx and Crake

Genetic engineering reshapes the world into a post-human wasteland as one man pieces together how it all went wrong.

Paolo Bacigalupi

The Windup Girl

Post-biotech collapse Bangkok seethes with corruption, calories, and engineered beings in this brutal exploration of survival and identity.

Greg Bear

Blood Music

Nanotechnology and self-aware cells transform a man—and then the world—in a surreal and terrifying biological singularity.

Charles Stross

Accelerando

Humanity blurs into post-organic life through biotech, AI, and evolution in this dizzying saga of generational transformation.

Ramez Naam

Nexus

A mind-enhancing drug unlocks telepathic connection and global upheaval in this fast-paced techno-thriller on the edge of bioethics.

Drew Magary

The Postmortal

When a cure for aging hits the market, immortality brings chaos, collapse, and hard questions about what makes life worth living.

Blake Crouch

Upgrade

A genetically enhanced man flees government control while reckoning with what it means to be more than human.

Ian McDonald

The Dervish House

Nano-terrorism and biotech innovation collide in Istanbul, where six lives intersect around a mystery with world-altering consequences.

A.G. Riddle

The Atlantis Gene

Ancient DNA, secret experiments, and a global conspiracy hint at humanity’s engineered origins in this action-driven technothriller.

Robert Charles Wilson

Spin

A mysterious barrier alters time and evolution on Earth, sparking a rush to genetically engineer survival before the stars die out.

Charlie Huston

Sleepless

A gene therapy for sleeplessness fuels addiction, violence, and societal collapse in this noir-drenched bio-thriller.

1500 Fantasy Writing Prompts

May 2025

1500 Thriller & Suspense Writing Prompts

June 2025

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