Book picks similar to
The Rupture by George C. King


first-reads
religion-atheism
sci-fi
fiction

Terminated


Ray Daniel - 2014
    Now, six months later, another software engineer is dead, bringing new clues to light in Carol’s cold case. Shocked by the brutal violence he’s witnessed, Tucker is determined to track down the truth behind the killings—no matter what the cost. Hired as a consultant by his old company, Tucker discovers their most important project is in danger of being corrupted . . . and there are people willing to kill to get their hands on it.

Youngblood


H. Peter Alesso - 2018
    But when he woke a century later, he was gasping for breath in a deserted underground bunker.The post-apocalyptic world he found was divided between the valley settlers who lived a subsistence existence and their mountain dwelling overlords who reaped all the benefits of a 22nd Century lifestyle.Seventeen-year-old orphan, Kira, was a kick-ass huntress who knew how to survive in this environment. So, when Youngblood was attacked by survivalists and left for dead, she saved him and together they raced to unravel humanity's darkest secrets and find a cure.After such global devastation--one thing was certain--only a man from another century could piece together the truth and discover the power to change the future and save the world.A wildly inventive adventure full of hairpin twists. A thrilling tale that weaves together fate, courage, and love.For Fans of The Postman and The Time Machine.

William Shakespeare's The Phantom of Menace


Ian Doescher - 2015
    The entire saga starts here, with a thrilling tale featuring a disguised queen, a young hero, and two fearless knights facing a hidden, vengeful enemy.'Tis a true Shakespearean drama, filled with sword fights, soliloquies, and doomed romance... all in glorious iambic pentameter and coupled with twenty gorgeous Elizabethan illustrations. Hold onto your mini-chlorians: The play's the thing, wherein you'll catch the rise of Anakin!

Sellevision


Augusten Burroughs - 2000
    When Max Andrews, the much-loved and handsome (lonely and gay) host of "Slumber Sunday Sundown" accidentally exposes himself in front of twenty million kids and their parents during a "Toys for Tots" segment, Sellevision faces its first big scandal. As Max fails to find a job in television, another host, the popular and perky Peggy Jean Smythe is receiving sinister emails about her appearance from a stalker. Popping pills and drinking heavily, she fails to notice that her husband is spending a lot of time with the very young babysitter who lives next door. Then there's Leigh, whose affair with Sellevision boss Howard Toast is going nowhere, until she exposes him on air; and Bebe, Sellevision's star host, who finds Mr. Right through the Internet--if she can just stop her shopping addiction from taking over.

The Postmortal


Drew Magary - 2011
    Immortality, however, comes with its own unique problems-including evil green people, government euthanasia programs, a disturbing new religious cult, and other horrors.Witty, eerie, and full of humanity, The Postmortal is an unforgettable thriller that envisions a pre-apocalyptic world so real that it is completely terrifying.

The Army of Light


Stephen A. Fender - 2013
    Then, one by one, subsequent border systems began to fall victim to the unknown attackers.The Kafaran had arrived.The fighting raged on for nearly five years. Tens of thousands of military personnel perished, and millions of innocent beings lost their homes… or their lives. Then, nearly as quickly as the war had started, the Kafaran’s inexplicably retreated to an unexplored region of space. Even with their once expansive foothold in the Milky Way now lying in ruins, it seemed to the once peaceful Unified Collaboration of Systems that victory was finally theirs.Now, with the Galactic War five years in the past, retired fighter pilot Shawn Kestrel wasn’t nearly as content in his peacetime life and he should have been. Not only was his fledgling cargo business steadily losing customers, his interstellar transport was fatally incapacitated, the victim of a now all too common pirate attack.Without warning, the prudish daughter of his former commanding officer appears, informing Shawn that William has mysteriously disappeared—apparently the victim of foul play. And, as if things weren’t difficult enough, a Unified Sector Command carrier quickly arrives to assert the UCS’s own self-guided interests into the disappearance.As Shawn endeavors to put all of the pieces together, one thing becomes terrifyingly clear: the Kafaran's are no longer idle.With the government suspiciously pressing down on him from one side, and the beautiful and enigmatic daughter driving him on from the other, Shawn Kestrel must search deep within himself to decide where his past and present loyalties lie before the universe once again erupts into all-out war.

Paradox


Arya Narrayan - 2020
    No one has any idea how this pandemic happened; even the WHO is stuck for an effective cure. Just as the whole world is growing desperate for resolution and low in hope, unexpectedly, a grey alien visits the earth in December 2025—five years after the initial outbreak—claiming that it has the concrete cure for A-virus.Can humans believe the announcement from the grey alien? Who really is this grey alien? Where did it come from? What could the purpose of its visit to Earth be? Did the grey alien bring the first life to our planet? Does it have any influence on ancient architecture and the many great wonders of the Earth? Did Neil Armstrong meet the alien?If you’re a fan of sci-fi, don’t miss Paradox—an enthralling rendition!

Year Zero


Rob Reid - 2012
    But Frampton and Carly are highly advanced (if bumbling) extraterrestrials. And boy, do they have news. The entire cosmos, they tell him, has been hopelessly hooked on humanity’s music ever since “Year Zero” (1977 to us), when American pop songs first reached alien ears. This addiction has driven a vast intergalactic society to commit the biggest copyright violation since the Big Bang. The resulting fines and penalties have bankrupted the whole universe. We humans suddenly own everything—and the aliens are not amused. Nick now has forty-eight hours to save humanity, while hopefully wowing the hot girl who lives down the hall from him.

Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits


David Wong - 2015
    A world in which at least one cat smells like a seafood shop's dumpster on a hot summer day.This is the world in which Zoey Ashe finds herself, navigating a futuristic city in which one can find elements of the fantastic, nightmarish and ridiculous on any street corner. Her only trusted advisor is the aforementioned cat, but even in the future, cats cannot give advice. At least not any that you'd want to follow.Will Zoey figure it all out in time? Or maybe the better question is, will you? After all, the future is coming sooner than you think.

Mogworld


Yahtzee Croshaw - 2010
    His fireballs fizzle. He's awfully grumpy. Plus, he's been dead for about sixty years. When a renegade necromancer wrenches him from eternal slumber and into a world gone terribly, bizarrely wrong, all Jim wants is to find a way to die properly, once and for all.On his side, he's got a few shambling corpses, an inept thief, and a powerful death wish. But he's up against tough odds: angry mobs of adventurers, a body falling apart at the seams - and a team of programmers racing a deadline to hammer out the last few bugs in their AI.

Mark of Fire


Richard Phillips - 2017
    A young woman’s destiny. Lorness Carol, coming of age in the kingdom of her warlord father, Lord Rafel, aspires to wield magic. But she’s also unknowingly become the obsession of Kragan, an avenging wielder as old as evil itself. He’s waited centuries to find and kill the female prophesied as the only human empowered to destroy him. However, dispatching the king’s assassin, Blade, to Rafel’s Keep, ends in treason. For Blade arrives not with a weapon but rather a warning for the woman he’s known and loved since he was a child. With a price on his head, Blade flees—as Carol and her family are urged away on their own desperate route of escape.Now, traversing the lawless western borderlands, Carol struggles to understand the uncanny magic she possesses and must learn to master. Though separated, Carol and Blade are still united—not only by the darkness pursuing them both but by a quest toward destiny, revenge, and the revelations of an ancient prophecy that signal the ultimate war between good and evil.

The Ferryman Institute


Colin Gigl - 2016
    Having never failed a single assignment, he's acquired a reputation for success that’s as legendary as it is unwanted. It turns out that serving as a Ferryman is causing Charlie to slowly lose his mind. Deemed too valuable by the Ferryman Institute to be let go and too stubborn to just give up in his own right, Charlie’s pretty much abandoned all hope of escaping his grim existence. Or he had, anyway, until he saved Alice Spiegel. To be fair, Charlie never planned on stopping Alice from taking her own life—that sort of thing is strictly forbidden by the Institute—but he never planned on the President secretly giving him the choice to, either. Charlie’s not quite sure what to make of it, but Alice is alive, and it’s the first time he’s felt right in more than two hundred years. When word of the incident reaches Inspector Javrouche, the Ferryman Institute's resident internal affairs liaison, Charlie finds he's in a world of trouble. But Charlie’s not about to lose the only living, breathing person he’s ever saved without a fight. He’s ready to protect her from Javrouche and save Alice from herself, and he’s willing to put the entire continued existence of mankind at risk to do it. Written in the same vein as bestselling modern classics such as The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde and A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore, The Ferryman Institute is a thrilling supernatural adventure packed with wit and humor.

Frosted Blood


Larry Pellitteri - 2014
    What information have you used to base your opinion of life and right and wrong? Everything is not all black or white.

Duplex


Kathryn Davis - 2013
    Like all children, they exist in an eternal present; time is imminent, and the adults of the street live in their assorted houses like numbers on a clock. Meanwhile, ominous rumors circulate, and the increasing agitation of the neighbors points to a future in which all will be lost. Soon a sorcerer's car will speed down Mary's street, and as past and future fold into each other, the resonant parenthesis of her girlhood will close forever. Beyond is adulthood, a world of robots and sorcerers, slaves and masters, bodies without souls. In Duplex, Kathryn Davis, whom the Chicago Tribune has called "one of the most inventive novelists at work today," has created a coming-of-age story like no other. Once you enter the duplex—that magical hinge between past and future, human and robot, space and time—there's no telling where you might come out.

Turing & Burroughs


Rudy Rucker - 2012
    Computer pioneer Alan Turing and the Beat author William Burroughs connect in Tangier and begin a love affair. The novel fuses SF themes with beatnik styles and attitudes, switching between Turing's and Burroughs's points of view.Turing and Burroughs find a way to shapeshift into telepathic slugs, and society's reaction serves as a symbol of the 1950s horror of gays, artists, intellectuals and political outsiders.As our heroes flee the feds, the story becomes a road novel. In traditional 1950s SF style, they head for a nuclear test site in Los Alamos, New Mexico. En route, Turing and Burroughs visit Mexico City and have a heavy encounter with Burroughs's murdered wife.The story comes to a head with a thermonuclear blast and a final transcendence.