If the historically grounded, multi-method breadth of The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction drew you in, you’ll relish this Companion’s clear, idea-dense essays. It synthesizes topics you likely enjoyed—cyberpunk’s evolution from Neuromancer and Blade Runner, Golden Age magazine culture, global and media SF—into crisp chapters you can dip into. It’s the same heady mix of history, theory, and case studies, but with tightly curated introductions that make complex debates (from fandom to formalism) immediately usable for your own reading.

You appreciated how the Handbook unpacked mind-bending premises through philosophy and cultural theory; Chiang gives you those ideas as unforgettable stories. From the self-dissection in “Exhalation” that reverses thermodynamics into a meditation on free will, to the braided time-travel confessions of “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” to digital personhood and care work in “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” these tales deliver the same conceptual rigor you saw in discussions of artificial intelligence, temporality, and identity—only now with heart-stopping narrative payoff.

If what hooked you in the Handbook were the sections on gender, anthropology, and how SF reimagines culture, Le Guin’s classic will feel like a case study come to life. Follow envoy Genly Ai and exile Estravan across the ice of Gethen, where ambisexuality and kemmer unsettle every social norm. The painstaking cultural detail—rituals of shifgrethor, the politics of Karhide and Orgoreyn—matches the analytic depth you enjoyed in essays on social SF, but it’s delivered through a bittersweet journey of trust and betrayal.

The Handbook’s panorama of voices and subfields likely appealed to you; McDonald’s Istanbul mosaic offers that same polyphony in fiction. Across six intertwined perspectives—Ayşe’s antiquities hunt, Necdet’s terrifying nanotech visions, young Can Durukan’s spy drone sleuthing—you’ll see economics, faith, history, and cutting-edge biotech collide in one living city. It’s like moving from an essay on global SF and technoculture into a vibrant, street-level narrative that lets each strand illuminate the others.

If you were drawn to the Handbook’s engagement with Afrofuturism and the politics of representation, Butler’s time-travel masterpiece makes those conversations visceral. When Dana is pulled from 1976 California to antebellum Maryland to save the life of Rufus Weylin, every rescue forces her to confront power, complicity, and survival. The intimate, harrowing scenes at the Weylin plantation turn the theoretical lenses you enjoyed—on history, identity, and agency—into a tense, character-driven reckoning you won’t forget.