Books like “The Time Machine”

What to read after “The Time Machine” by H. G. Wells: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.

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1
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley · 1932
Similar atmosphere: “Dystopia” and “Philosophical”
- Dystopia
- Philosophical
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.
2
We
Yevgeny Zamyatin · 1924
Similar atmosphere: “Dystopia” and “Philosophical”
- Dystopia
- Philosophical
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.
3
Anthem
Ayn Rand · 1938
Similar atmosphere: “Dystopia” and “Philosophical”
- Dystopia
- Philosophical
In a future run by the collective, the word I has no meaning and all work is done for the good of all. Equality 7-2521 breaks the rules by doing forbidden research and falling in love, then flees a society that cannot allow an individual to exist.
4
Earth Abides
George R. Stewart · 1949
Similar atmosphere: “Philosophical” and “Melancholic”
- Philosophical
- Melancholic
A plague kills nearly everyone on Earth. An ecologist emerges from the mountains to find empty cities and a few survivors, and spends the rest of his life watching a new, smaller society take shape without the old world's machinery.
5
The End of Eternity
Isaac Asimov · 1955
Similar atmosphere: “Philosophical”
- Philosophical
- Time Travel
Andrew Harlan works for Eternity, an organization that lives outside time and edits human history for what it believes is the greater good. His work is upended when he falls in love with a woman from his own past.
6
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Philip K. Dick · 1968
Similar atmosphere: “Dystopia” and “Philosophical”
- Dystopia
- Philosophical
In a dust-choked future, a bounty hunter is paid to retire androids that have escaped to Earth and passed as human. As he tracks them down he starts to question what makes a life real, and whether he can trust his own memories.
7
Childhood's End
Arthur C. Clarke · 1953
Similar atmosphere: “Philosophical”
- Philosophical
Giant alien ships appear above Earth's cities and impose a peaceful rule under the Overlords. Decades of calm and progress pass, but humanity's golden age hides a purpose no one can guess until the Overlords finally reveal themselves.
8
Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro · 2005
Similar atmosphere: “Dystopia” and “Melancholic”
- Dystopia
- Melancholic
Kathy, Tommy and Ruth grow up together at an English boarding school where the children are treated as special and kept apart from the world. As adults they learn what they were made for, and try to hold on to love and dignity in a life they cannot choose. A quiet, sad speculative novel.
9
A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess · 1962
Similar atmosphere: “Dystopia” and “Philosophical”
- Dystopia
- Philosophical
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.
10
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut · 1969
Similar atmosphere: “Philosophical”
- Philosophical
- Time Travel
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.
11
Replay
Ken Grimwood · 1986
Similar atmosphere: “Philosophical” and “Melancholic”
Jeff Winston dies in 1988 and wakes in 1963 in his eighteen-year-old body, with every memory of the years ahead intact. He lives that span over and over, each replay starting later, and slowly realises he is not the only one caught in the loop.
12
The Trial
Franz Kafka · 1925
Similar atmosphere: “Dystopia” and “Philosophical”
- Dystopia
- Philosophical
A clerk is arrested one morning and told he is on trial, though no one will say for what. As he tries to navigate a faceless legal system, his ordinary life unravels. A bleak, darkly funny novel about bureaucracy, guilt and power.