What to read after “Soon I Will Be Invincible” by Austin Grossman: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.
In a future Los Angeles split between franchised city-states, a hacker and a teenage skateboard courier chase a drug that works on both computers and human minds. The trail runs from the neon Metaverse to ancient languages and a plan to reshape civilisation.
A millennial office worker in New York keeps showing up to her publishing job as a fever turns people into repetitive, wandering shells. Her account of the collapse moves between satire of work and the quiet end of the world.
When an alien corporation turns Earth into a lethal dungeon for an intergalactic reality show, Carl and his ex-girlfriend's cat, Princess Donut, enter the levels. Carl's only plan is to survive the cameras, the monsters and the audience.
Billy Pilgrim, a chaplain's assistant and prisoner of war in Dresden, becomes unstuck in time, living his life out of order among moments in the war and on another planet. His flat, looping account turns a firebombing and a life's small cruelties into a dark joke about fate.
Alex, a teenager who loves violence and classical music, leads his gang through nights of brutal crime. When the state captures him, it offers to cure his impulses with an experimental treatment, making him the subject of a system that manufactures both good and evil.
Guy Montag is a fireman who burns books in a future where reading is a crime and screens fill every quiet moment. After a young neighbour asks him whether he is happy, curiosity makes him hide a book of his own, and he begins to question everything his job stands for.
In early 1960s California, chemist Elizabeth Zott is pushed out of science by a laboratory that cannot take a woman seriously. She becomes the unlikely host of a cooking show, and quietly teaches its housewife audience something closer to chemistry and self-respect.
Lindsay survived a masked killer and is now her Texas town's celebrated final girl. When the killings start again, she recruits a new homecoming court of misfits and horror veterans, and the story turns into a knowing, blood-soaked riff on slasher rules.
Patrick Bateman is a wealthy Wall Street banker with a taste for designer labels, fine dining and status, and a private life of extreme violence. His narration moves between expensive restaurants and scenes of cruelty, refusing to say how much of either is real.
A scientist named Griffin discovers how to make his body invisible, but he cannot reverse the process. Wrapped in bandages and increasingly desperate, he hides in a country inn, turns to theft and violence, and searches for a former colleague who might help him before the whole countryside turns against him.
Keiko has worked at the same Tokyo convenience store for eighteen years and is content there, until the people around her begin pressuring her to want a normal life. Deadpan and sharp, the novel follows her attempt to perform the life others expect, by staging a relationship she does not want.
After a nuclear war, monks in a desert abbey preserve the few books that survive, including a blueprint signed by a martyred engineer. Across centuries they copy, guard and argue over the relics while civilisation slowly rebuilds and then repeats its old mistakes.
Bombardier Yossarian wants to survive the war and go home, but every attempt to be grounded runs into a rule that answers itself: to be excused he must ask, and asking proves he is sane. Around him, officers profit and comrades die.
A boy fleeing his abusive father and a man escaping slavery travel together down the Mississippi on a raft. Their friendship grows as they meet swindlers and feuds along the way, and Huck must decide what he believes. A comic, humane adventure about freedom and conscience.
In a future where citizens are engineered for contentment and kept calm with a drug called soma, Bernard Marx and the Savage John discover the cost of a stable, pleasure-driven society. John's arrival from a reservation exposes the emptiness behind the World State's comfort.
In 1973 Paul Theroux set out from London to travel through Asia by train. He crosses Europe, the Middle East, India and Southeast Asia, and returns on the Trans-Siberian Railway, recording the trains, stations and people he meets.
Insomniac and alienated, a nameless narrator meets a charismatic soap salesman named Tyler Durden and helps found an underground fight club that grows into something far larger. As the club spreads, the narrator's life and sense of self begin to come apart.
Rachel Chu, an economics professor in New York, travels to Singapore for the summer wedding of her boyfriend's best friend. There she learns that Nick's family is one of the wealthiest in Asia, and that his mother has already judged her unsuitable. A comic look at money, family and the marriage market.
In the glass city of OneState, citizens live by a strict timetable and are known only by numbers. When the mathematician D-503 begins to keep a private journal, a woman named I-330 draws him into a movement that wants to tear down the walls of the ordered world.
Moist von Lipwig is a con man offered a choice: be hanged, or revive Ankh-Morpork's ruined post office. With the city's mail piled up undelivered in the crumbling post office and a rival message company sabotaging him, he sets out to make the letters move and stay ahead of his own past.
A box of poisoned chocolates kills a man at his club, and the police can find no culprit. Six members of the Crimes Circle, an armchair detective society, each offer a different solution to the same murder, until amateur sleuth Roger Sheringham tests their theories against the facts.
After a virus makes all animal meat deadly, Argentina legalises the farming of humans for food. Marcos works the slaughter line and keeps his feelings out of it, until he is given a live woman as a gift and begins to treat her as a person.
A man called Snowman may be the last human left, living in a tree above a ruined city and watching over a gentle new species. Through his memories the reader learns how his brilliant friend Crake and the woman they both loved brought the world to its end.
On the same day in Tudor London a beggar boy and the heir to the English throne meet and find they look identical. They trade clothes as a joke, and the swap turns real, so each must survive a life he was never taught to live. A tale of switched places, misrule and what a crown is really worth.
What should I read after “Soon I Will Be Invincible”?
Start with “Snow Crash”, “Severance”, “Dungeon Crawler Carl”: they are the closest to “Soon I Will Be Invincible” in tropes and mood. Under each book in the list you will see what exactly it has in common.
How are similar books chosen?
We compare tropes (for “Soon I Will Be Invincible” these are Mad Scientist, Villain Protagonist, Satire), genre, plot, era and tone. It is not “readers also bought”; it is similarity in the content itself.
Are there recent books in this list?
Yes. Among the newer ones are “Severance”, “Dungeon Crawler Carl”, “Lessons in Chemistry”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
