If the way the Cambridge volume moves from Mary Shelley through Wells, cyberpunk, and beyond hooked you, you'll love how The Years of Rice and Salt redraws the entire map of world history after the Black Death. You follow recurring souls—B, K, and I—reincarnating across centuries, from Timur’s campaigns to a Chinese-led scientific revolution, watching ideas, empires, and religions evolve. The book delivers that same sweeping perspective you enjoyed, but dramatized through pilgrimages, expeditions, salons, and wars, culminating in a moving, thought-heavy finale about science, progress, and memory.

You appreciated how the Cambridge history foregrounds SF’s social thought—Le Guin’s work likely came up a lot. The Left Hand of Darkness drops you into Gethen with envoy Genly Ai and the exiled Estraven, where gender is fluid and politics are glacial. The epic crossing of the Gobrin Ice isn’t just survival; it’s a study in culture, trust, and language. If you liked the book’s attention to SF as a tool for examining society, this novel gives you that lens with unforgettable, character-rooted stakes.

The Cambridge collection prizes big ideas and clear argument; Ted Chiang turns that same intellectual rigor into fiction. In “Story of Your Life,” linguist Louise Banks learns Heptapod B and begins to perceive time nonlinearly; in “Division by Zero,” mathematical certainty fractures a marriage; and “Seventy-Two Letters” reimagines biology via Victorian nomenclature. Each story delivers the kind of conceptual clarity and philosophical bite you relished in the critical essays—only now with emotional stakes that linger.

If you were drawn to chapters on Octavia Butler, Afrofuturism, and global SF, Parable of the Sower will hit home. You walk with Lauren Olamina through a collapsing California, watching her forge Earthseed, navigate danger with Bankole and her traveling companions, and insist that "God is Change." Butler’s grounded worldbuilding and moral clarity echo the critical threads you enjoyed, but with pulse, pain, and hard-won hope that make those ideas visceral.

The Cambridge volume’s many perspectives showed how different voices map the field; The Dervish House does that inside one story. Across a sweltering week in near-future Istanbul, you hop between Necdet’s terrifying tram attack visions, Can’s toy-robot “bee” surveillance, Adnan’s high-stakes nanotech deal, and Ayşe’s hunt for a mythical Mellified Man. The mosaic narrative pieces together finance, religion, and technology into a single, dazzling portrait—just like the scholarly chorus you enjoyed, but propulsive and intimate.