15 Best Books Like Dark Matter You Need to Read
Dark Matter is a pretty complicated hard sci-fi book, not made for everyone. Still, it has a huge following, and readers are mostly overwhelmed by it. If you are one of those readers who, after reading it has a big hole left in you, we have you covered. In this article, we have made a list of the best books like Dark Matter you can choose for your next read.
Dark Matter is a science fiction thriller novel by American writer Blake Crouch, first published in the United States in July 2016 by the Crown Publishing Group.
The story is about a physicist who is kidnapped and sent to a parallel universe in which another version of his life unfolds because of a different choice he made fifteen years previously. The book draws on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics which posits that every possible outcome of every event creates a new universe or world that runs parallel to our own.
Let’s now check the best books like Dark Matter you need to read next.
Recursion
In 2019, Blake Crouch released another sci-fi novel, titled Recursion, to critical success.
That’s what NYC cop Barry Sutton is learning, as he investigates the devastating phenomenon the media has dubbed False Memory Syndrome—a mysterious affliction that drives its victims mad with memories of a life they never lived.
That’s what neuroscientist Helena Smith believes. It’s why she’s dedicated her life to creating a technology that will let us preserve our most precious memories. If she succeeds, anyone will be able to re-experience a first kiss, the birth of a child, and the final moment with a dying parent.
As Barry searches for the truth, he comes face to face with an opponent more terrifying than any disease—a force that attacks not just our minds, but the very fabric of the past. And as its effects begin to unmake the world as we know it, only he and Helena, working together, will stand a chance at defeating it.
But how can they make a stand when reality itself is shifting and crumbling all around them?
At once a relentless pageturner and an intricate science-fiction puzzle box about time, identity, and memory, Recursion is a thriller as only Blake Crouch could imagine it—and his most ambitious, mind-boggling, irresistible work to date.
Daemon (series)
Daemon and Freedom™ comprise a two-part novel by the author Daniel Suarez about a distributed, persistent computer application, the Daemon, that begins to change the real world after the original programmer’s death.
Upon publication of the obituary for Matthew A. Sobol, a brilliant computer programmer and CTO of Cyberstorm Entertainment, a daemon is activated. Sobol, dying of brain cancer, was fearful for humanity and began to envision a new world order. The Daemon becomes his tool to achieve that vision. The Daemon’s first mission is to kill two programmers Joseph Pavlos & Chopra Singh who worked for CyberStorm Entertainment and unknowingly helped in the creation of the Daemon.
The program secretly takes over hundreds of companies and provides financial and computing resources for recruiting real-world agents and creating AutoM8s (computer-controlled driverless cars, used as transport and occasionally as weapons), Razorbacks (sword-wielding robotic riderless motorcycles, specifically designed as weapons) and other devices.
The Daemon also creates a secondary online web service, hidden from the general public, dubbed the Darknet, which allows Daemon operatives to exchange information freely. Daemon implements a kind of government by an algorithm inside the community of its recruited operatives
Silo (series)
Silo is a series of post-apocalyptic science fiction books by American writer Hugh Howey. The series started in 2011 with the short story “Wool”, which was later published together with four sequel novellas as a novel with the same name. Along with Wool, the series consists of Shift, Dust, three short stories and Wool: The Graphic Novel.
The story of Wool takes place on a post-apocalyptic Earth. Humanity clings to survival in the Silo, a subterranean city extending 144 stories beneath the surface. The series initially follows the character of Holston, the sheriff of the Silo, with subsequent volumes focusing on the characters of Juliette, Jahns, and Marnes. An ongoing storyline of the series is the focus on the mystery behind the Silo and the secrets it holds. Shift, which encompasses books six through eight, comprises a prequel to the series. Book nine, Dust, pulls the storylines together.
Several studies frame the story within the dystopian genre, since Howey includes several of the main features of that type of literature, i.e. a totalitarian rule, the rebellion of the main characters, or a planned separation between human areas and wild natural spaces.
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is a 2012 novel by American writer Robin Sloan. It was chosen as one of the best 100 books of 2012 by the San Francisco Chronicle, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, and was on the New York Times Hardcover Fiction Best Seller list as well as the NPR Hardcover Fiction Bestseller List.
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore combines elements of fantasy, mystery, friendship and adventure as a way of looking at the modern conflict and transition between new technology (electronic) and old (print books). The protagonist is a laid-off Silicon Valley tech worker who begins working at a dusty bookstore with very few customers, only to start discovering one secret after another. The mysterious old books, along with the store’s owner, lead to a 500-year-old secret society.
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August is a novel by Claire North, a pseudonym of British author Catherine Webb, published in April 2014. It won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction Novel and was featured in both the Richard and Judy Book Club and the BBC Radio 2 Book Club.
Harry August is born in the women’s washroom of Berwick-upon-Tweed station in 1919, leads an unremarkable life, and dies in a hospital in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1989. He then finds himself born again back in 1919 in the same circumstances, gaining knowledge of his earlier life at an early age. He learns he is an Ouroboran or Kalachakra and is destined to be reborn again and again. He is not alone and is soon contacted by the Cronus Club, an organization of similarly affected members, who look after him in childhood in subsequent lives.
In later lives, Harry studies biology, chemistry, and physics. With knowledge from previous lives, he easily becomes a professor of physics at the University of Cambridge, where he meets an intelligent undergraduate student named Vincent Rankis. Vincent and Harry become friends as they talk about theoretical physics and the nature of time. Eventually, Harry and Vincent both realize the other is also an Ouroboran. Other members of the Cronus Club later inform Harry that the world is ending and that with each life Harry lives, the ending is becoming closer.
The Adjacent
One of Christopher Priest’s early novels, The Affirmation, concerns a traumatized man who apparently flips into a delusional world in which he experiences a lengthy voyage to an archipelago of exotic islands. This setting is featured in many of Priest’s short stories, which raises the question of whether the Dream Archipelago is actually a fantasy.
The state of mind depicted in this novel is similar to that of the delusional fantasy-prone psychoanalytic patient (“Kirk Allen”) in Robert Lindner’s The Fifty-Minute Hour, or Jack London’s tortured prisoner in The Star Rover.
Tibor Tarent, a freelance photographer, is recalled to Britain from Anatolia where his wife Melanie has been killed by insurgent militia. IRGB is a nation living in the aftermath of a bizarre and terrifying terrorist atrocity – hundreds of thousands were wiped out when a vast triangle of west London was instantly annihilated.
The authorities think the terrorist attack and the death of Tarent’s wife are somehow connected. A century earlier, a stage magician is sent to the Western Front on a secret mission to render British reconnaissance aircraft invisible to the enemy. On his journey to the trenches he meets the visionary who believes that this will be the war to end all wars.
In 1943, a woman pilot from Poland tells a young RAF technician of her escape from the Nazis, and her desperate need to return home. In the present day, a theoretical physicist stands in his English garden and creates the first adjacency. THE ADJACENT is a novel where nothing is quite as it seems. Where fiction and history intersect, where every version of reality is suspect, where truth and falsehood lie closely adjacent to one another. It shows why Christopher Priest is one of our greatest writers. (less)
The Gone World
“I promise you have never read a story like this.” —Blake Crouch, New York Times bestselling author of Dark Matter
The Gone World is a novel written by Tom Sweterlitsch.
Shannon Moss is part of a clandestine division within the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. In western Pennsylvania, 1997, she is assigned to solve the murder of a Navy SEAL’s family–and to locate his vanished teenage daughter. Though she can’t share the information with conventional law enforcement, Moss discovers that the missing SEAL was an astronaut aboard the spaceship U.S.S. Libra—a ship assumed lost to the currents of Deep Time. Moss knows first-hand the mental trauma of time-travel and believes the SEAL’s experience with the future has triggered this violence.
Determined to find the missing girl and driven by a troubling connection from her own past, Moss travels ahead in time to explore possible versions of the future, seeking evidence to crack the present-day case. To her horror, the future reveals that it’s not only the fate of a family that hinges on her work, for what she witnesses rising over time’s horizon and hurtling toward the present is the Terminus: the terrifying and cataclysmic end of humanity itself.
Luminous and unsettling, The Gone World bristles with world-shattering ideas yet remains at its heart an intensely human story.
The Boys of Summer: A Novel
The Boys of Summer is a 1972 non-fiction baseball book by Roger Kahn. After recounting his childhood in Brooklyn and his life as a young reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, the author relates some history of the Brooklyn Dodgers up to their victory in the 1955 World Series.
He then tracks the lives of the players (Clem Labine, George Shuba, Carl Erskine, Andy Pafko, Joe Black, Preacher Roe, Pee Wee Reese, Carl Furillo, Gil Hodges, Roy Campanella, Duke Snider, Jackie Robinson and Billy Cox) over the subsequent years as they age.
The title of the book is taken from a Dylan Thomas poem that describes “the boys of summer in their ruin”.
Threshold (series)
The Threshold Universe is an ongoing book series written by Peter Clines and begins with the novel 14 published in 2012. The other books in the series included The Fold (2015), Dead Moon (2018), and Terminus (2020).
Although 14 and The Fold were published both as paperbacks and audiobooks, Dead Moon began as an Audible exclusive and after its initial run on Audible, it was published as an e-book while Terminus has been published exclusively as an Audible Original. All of the audiobooks for The Threshold Universe have been published through Audible and all are read by Ray Porter.
Here and Now and Then
Here and Now and Then is a novel written by Mike Chen.
Kin Stewart is an everyday family man: working in IT, trying to keep the spark in his marriage, and struggling to connect with his teenage daughter, Miranda. But his current life is a far cry from his previous career…as a time-traveling secret agent from 2142.
Stranded in suburban San Francisco since the 1990s after a botched mission, Kin has kept his past hidden from everyone around him, despite the increasing blackouts and memory loss affecting his time-traveler’s brain. Until one afternoon, his “rescue” team arrives—eighteen years too late.
Their mission: return Kin to 2142, where he’s only been gone weeks, not years, and where another family is waiting for him. A family he can’t remember.
Torn between two lives, Kin is desperate for a way to stay connected to both. But when his best efforts threaten to destroy the agency and even history itself, his daughter’s very existence is at risk. It’ll take one final trip across time to save Miranda—even if it means breaking all the rules of time travel in the process.
A uniquely emotional genre-bending debut, Here and Now and Then captures the perfect balance of heart, playfulness, and imagination, offering an intimate glimpse into the crevices of a father’s heart and its capacity to stretch across both space and time to protect the people that mean the most.
The Breach
The Breach is the first novel in the Travis Chase series written by Patrick Lee.
Thirty years ago, in a facility buried beneath a vast Wyoming emptiness, an experiment gone awry accidentally opened a door. It is the world’s best-kept secret and its most terrifying. Trying to regain his life in the Alaskan wilds, ex-con/ex-cop Travis Chase stumbles upon an impossible scene: a crashed 747-passenger jet filled with the murdered dead, including the wife of the resident of the United States.
Though a nightmare of monumental proportions, it pales before the terror to come, as Chase is dragged into a battle for the future that revolves around an amazing artifact. Allied with a beautiful covert operative whose life he saved, Chase must now play the role he’s been destined for-a pawn of incomprehensible forces or humankind’s final hope-as the race toward Apocalypse begins in earnest. Because something is loose in the world. And doomsday is not only possible…it is inevitable.
Spin (series)
Spin is a science fiction novel by American-Canadian writer Robert Charles Wilson. It was published in 2005 and won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2006. It is the first book in the Spin trilogy, with Axis (the second) published in 2007 and Vortex published in July 2011.
One night in October when he was ten years old, Tyler Dupree stood in his backyard and watched the stars go out. They all flared into brilliance at once, then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big Blackout. It would shape their lives.
Life on Earth is about to get much, much stranger.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
In this exhilarating novel by the best-selling author of The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry, Gabrielle Zevin, two friends–often in love, but never lovers–come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.
On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn’t heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won’t protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.
Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.
The Half-Made World
The Half-Made World is a 2010 steampunk fantasy novel by British writer Felix Gilman. It is set in an alternate version of the American Wild West in which the Far West reaches of the world are untamed and still being created.
It tells the story of Liv Alverhuysen, a female psychologist who sets off on an adventure to heal the mad and John Creedmoor, an Agent of the Gun who is goaded into obedience to his master’s orders, despite his growing disdain for them. The novel pits two rival factions against each other as they each hunt for a way to end the everlasting war between them.
The Line is industrial, with technological weapons and trains that speed by so quickly the countryside is barely seen and take over towns and make their citizens slaves at their whim. The Gun are made up of thieves and murderers and keep hold of the people by fear and violence, but they are losing the war against the Line. The book was nominated for a 2011 Locus Award.
Wayward Pines (series)
The Wayward Pines Trilogy (2012–2014) is a mystery/thriller/science fiction novel series by American author Blake Crouch. It follows U.S. Secret Service agent Ethan Burke as he unravels the mystery surrounding his unanticipated arrival in the small town of Wayward Pines, Idaho, following a devastating car accident. The novels are Pines (2012), Wayward (2013), and The Last Town (2014). In 2015, the novels were adapted into the television series Wayward Pines.
The plot surrounds Secret Service agent Ethan Burke’s introduction to the remote small town of Wayward Pines, his new home from which he cannot escape. The residents of this picturesque town don’t know how they got there and are forbidden to talk about their prior lives. An electric fence surrounds the town, and the residents are under 24-hour surveillance. The mysteries and horrors of the town build until Ethan discovers its secret. Then he must do his part to keep Wayward Pines protected from threats both within and beyond the fence.
The series covers themes of isolation, bucolic Americana, time displacement, man vs nature, human evolution, and cryonics. Crouch has acknowledged that he was inspired by the 1990–91 TV series Twin Peaks.
