Five Books That Are Out Of This World, fun stuff edition

A bonus recommendation, a links roundup, music, a poem, and more

Wanderer Above The Sea Of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich, c. 1817.

Welcome to this month’s Fun Stuff Edition of Five Books For, a newsletter for people who love great stories.

This month we’ve been talking about science fiction at its most engrossing and expansive – stories full of imagination that explore what it means to be human. Over at Global Comment, in this month’s Great Adaptations column I take a look at Ernest Cline’s Easter-egg laden novel Ready Player One and Steven Spielberg’s CGI-extravaganza of a film adaptation. If you love 1980s films, music or video games, or love the idea of a treasure hunt through an imaginative digital world, it’s well worth checking out.

As always for the Fun Stuff Edition, we have a bonus recommendation, a poem, a playlist and some reading links, all in keeping with this month’s theme of sci-fi for sceptics. I hope you find something wonderful to read or listen to.

Exciting news

I’ve just started a new side project called Commonplace Love - think of it as a weekly love note in newsletter form. It’s a mix of quotes, poems, stories and beautiful things, all gathered around the theme of love (in all its messy, marvellous forms). The first post is live now, and you can read it and subscribe for free below.

I hope you’ll find something here to surprise and delight you. If you aren’t already subscribed, then you can sign up here to receive these newsletters directly in your inbox. The newsletter is free but if you would like to support it with a paid subscription that option is also available. If you don’t have the funds for a paid subscription at the moment but would like to leave a tip instead, the button below will allow you to send an amount of your choosing as a one-off payment.

Let’s dive in!

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Bonus recommendation: Ascension by Nicholas Binge

“Sometimes what the soul needs isn’t to give meaning to hollow words: prayers and confessions that you do not really believe. Instead, we need to let it give words to the unspoken meanings inside of us. To do that, you have to give it a voice.”

So what’s it about? A massive, impossibly high mountain has suddenly and impossibly appeared in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Reaching all the way into the stratosphere, far higher than Everest, the mountain seems to defy the laws of physics. Satellite imagery and scientific analysis can’t explain its emergence or composition. A team of scientists and mountaineers is dispatched to investigate, but as they climb, things get stranger and stranger: time begins to stretch and distort, and each level presents new physical, psychological, and existential challenges. Harold Tunmore, a physicist who has retreated from the world after a personal tragedy, joins the expedition, and may hold the key to understanding why the mountain is there - if the team can stay alive long enough to find out.

What’s great about it? Told through letters and journal entries, Ascension takes some classic science fiction motifs such as first contact and multiple dimensions, and fuses them with an eerie, claustrophobic atmosphere of cosmic horror, all the while maintaining the emotional intimacy of an epistolary novel. Harold is a compelling hero, brilliant but damaged, and the emotional heart of the novel. His reflections ground the high-concept plot in something deeply human.

The novel weaves in reflections on memory, grief, and the ethics of science. As the letters unfold, we learn more about Tunmore’s past, his relationships, and the devastating personal losses that shaped him.

This was a novel I couldn’t wait to finish, with all the page-turning excitement of a thriller, but added emotional depth and intellectual heft. I also think it contains the clearest explanation of a tesseract I’ve ever read.

There’s no cynicism here; rather, Ascension is concerned with connection, forgiveness, and the very human desire to understand. It’s a book about the limits of knowledge, and the fragile boundaries of belief and hope.

Give it a try if: you love thrillers that keep you turning the page late into the night; you like eerie, uncanny stories; you love books with intellectual heft; you like science fiction with soul; you’re fascinated by physics and science; you love epistolary novels; you’re fascinated by the limits of human knowledge about the cosmos.

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Honourable mentions

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, often considered to be the first-ever science fiction novel (all the way back in 1818!) was also one of the first-ever recommendations in Five Books For, all the way back in September 2023. You can read more below; please note that although the title says it’s for paid subscribers, it’s now free to access.

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch is another great recommendation which is actually a thriller with a scientific concept at its heart. If you’re not sure about sci-fi in general but love clever thrillers then this is a brilliant read.

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This month’s listens

Did you know that Kazuo Ishiguro also writes song lyrics? He wrote four of the songs on Stacey Kent’s Grammy-nominated album Breakfast On The Morning Tram, which I’ve included in this month’s playlist. You’ll also find interviews with Adrian Tchaikovsky and Nicholas Binge.

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This month’s poem

In Praise Of Mystery: A Poem For Europa

By Ada Limón

US Poet Laureate Ada Limón wrote this poem for NASA’s Europa Clipper mission. The poem was engraved onto the Clipper, which launched in 2024 to explore Jupiter’s moon Europa to explore whether Europa has water and could potentially be habitable, as well as seeking a landing spot for a future mission. It is due to arrive at Europa in 2030.

Arching under the night sky inky
with black expansiveness, we point
to the planets we know, we

pin quick wishes on stars. From earth,
we read the sky as if it is an unerring book
of the universe, expert and evident.

Still, there are mysteries below our sky:
the whale song, the songbird singing
its call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.

We are creatures of constant awe,
curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom,
at grief and pleasure, sun and shadow.

And it is not darkness that unites us,
not the cold distance of space, but
the offering of water, each drop of rain,

each rivulet, each pulse, each vein.
O second moon, we, too, are made
of water, of vast and beckoning seas.

We, too, are made of wonders, of great
and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds,
of a need to call out through the dark.

Source.

You can read more about the Europa Clipper mission here.

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This month’s reading links

A fascinating look at North Korean science fiction. (Arstechnica, free)

Why the Big Bang may never have happened. (Aeon, free)

UFOs or angels? (LitHub, free)

Something to make you laugh. (The Hard Times, free)

On this month’s authors and books:

Two great interviews with Kazuo Ishiguro over at The Guardian (free) and another one over at The Paris Review (paywalled).

Nicholas Binge writes about how teaching Shakespeare informed his writing of Ascension. (Crimereads, free)

Lauren Forry talks about how space becomes the most dangerous locked room of all in The Launch Party. (Crimereads, free)

Adrian Tchaikovsky talks about the science behind Alien Clay. (New Scientist, free)

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Thanks for reading!

As always, I’m grateful to each and every one of you who subscribes, free or paid. I know we all have such crowded inboxes these days and I feel so lucky to be sharing the joys of reading with you like this. I would love to hear from you - what have you been reading recently? Have you listened to or watched any of the books I’ve covered this month? Let me know in the comments. I’ll be back next month with a new theme and more reading joy.

Happy reading!

Kate

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