Books like Broken Stars by Ken Liu

Rosemary Harper finds refuge and adventure aboard the aging ship Wayfarer, where a diverse crew of aliens and humans navigate friendship, mystery, and a pivotal interplanetary mission.

In the unforgettable Le Cirque des Rêves, two young magicians, Celia and Marco, are locked in a nocturnal duel of wonder and will—an impossible game where love and magic collide on a stage of breathtaking spectacle.

Inspector Tyador Borlú journeys from Besźel to Ul Qoma to investigate the murder of a woman, navigating two distinct cities that both share one physical space yet have separate identities.

The story of two boys and their dark journey through a haunted carnival

All the Birds in the Sky marries science fiction, fantasy, and romance as a witch and a tech wunderkind confront war, love, and the fate of the planet in contemporary San Francisco.

On the starship Dormire, clones of a murdered crew awaken in vats, each fearing the next bloodshed—but a new clone with no memory of her death must uncover the killer before another murder takes place.

Ken Liu’s celebrated short‑story collection, featuring his most honored works—especially the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy‑winning “The Paper Menagerie”—alongside a brand‑new tale, all bound by themes of origami and storytelling.

I have to read it first

In an alternate 1986 where “talking movies” are a revolutionary medium, documentary filmmaker Severin Unck embarks on interplanetary adventures, chasing a vanished colony on Venus and unraveling the mysteries of a universe where every planet is home.

The surprising and controversial thesis of Feminist Fabulation is unflinching: the postmodern canon has systematically excluded a wide range of important women's writing by dismissing it as genre fiction. Marleen Barr issues an urgent call for a corrective, for the recognition of a new meta- or supergenre of contemporary writing - feminist fabulation - which includes both acclaimed mainstream works and works which today's critics consistently denigrate or ignore. In its investigation of the relationship between women writers and postmodern fiction in terms of outer space and canonical space, Feminist Fabulation is a pioneer vehicle built to explore postmodernism in terms of female literary spaces which have something to do with real-world women. Branding the postmodern canon as a masculinist utopia and a nowhere for feminists, Barr offers the stunning argument that feminist science fiction is not science fiction at all but is really metafiction about patriarchal fiction. Barr's concern is directed every bit as much toward contemporary feminist critics as it is toward patriarchy. Rather than trying to reclaim lost feminist writers of the past, she suggests, feminist criticism should concentrate on reclaiming the present's lost fabulative feminist writers, writers steeped in nonpatriarchal definitions of reality who can guide us into another order of world altogether. Barr offers very specific plans for new structures that will benefit women, feminist theory, postmodern theory, and science fiction theory alike. Feminist fabulation calls for a new understanding which enables the canon to accommodate feminist difference and emphasizes that the literature called "feminist SF" is an important site of postmodern feminist difference. Barr forces the reader to rethink the whole country club of postmodernism, not just its membership list - and in so doing provides a discourse of this century worthy of a prominent reading by all scholars, feminists, writers, and literary theorists and critics.

When special investigator Ding Gou'er hears persistent rumors that there is cannibalism in the province called the Republic of Wine, he goes to learn the truth. Beginning at the Mount Luo Coal Mine, he meets Diamond Jin, legendary for his capacity to hold his liquor and fondness for young human flesh. A banquet is served during which the special investigator, by meal's end in an alcohol-induced stupor, loses all sense of reality. Interspersed are stories sent to Mo Yan himself by Li Yidou (aka Doctor of Liquor Studies), each one more mad than the next. Wild and politically explosive, The Republic of Wine proves that no regime can stifle creative imagination.