Recommendations
Books Like The Expanse
Humanity has colonized the solar system and found something in the asteroid belt that will change everything — again
James S.A. Corey's The Expanse begins with two separate investigations into something going wrong: a detective hired to find a missing rich girl in the asteroid belt, and a cargo ship officer whose freighter is destroyed by a vessel that shouldn't exist. What both of them find is the same thing — a biological agent called the protomolecule that has been engineered by someone or something that was not human. The series runs nine books, covering 30 years of human history and multiple first contacts, while keeping the Rocinante crew — James Holden, Naomi Nagata, Alex Kamal, and Amos Burton — at the center. If the realistic political economy of a colonized solar system, the authentic ensemble of characters who argue and trust each other over decades, and the hard science mixed with genuine wonder gripped you, these eight picks go to the same place.
- 1Buy
A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
by Becky Chambers
The warmest ensemble space opera since The Expanse — a crew of a small tunnel-digging spaceship taking a long contract across the galaxy. Chambers' found-family dynamics and her sense of what a diverse, multi-species civilization looks like are the cozy counterpart to Corey's harder-edged realism.
- 2Buy
A Memory Called Empire
by Arkady Martine
An ambassador to an empire navigating a court that considers her station peripheral — Martine has Corey's same interest in the political economy of interstellar civilization, the same attention to what empires actually cost the people they absorb, and the same investment in a single character who is smart enough to understand the system she's in.
- 3Buy
Hyperion
by Dan Simmons
Seven pilgrims on a journey to a world that is about to be destroyed, each telling the story of why they came — Simmons' Hyperion Cantos is the most directly comparable literary SF series to The Expanse in scope, ambition, and the depth of its future history. The first two books are among the greatest science fiction ever written.
- 4Buy
Red Rising
by Pierce Brown
A young man from the lowest caste of a future solar-system civilization embeds himself in the elite institutions that maintain the hierarchy — Brown's series has The Expanse's same sense of solar-system politics as the extension of class conflict, the same investment in military strategy, and the same willingness to let the consequences of choices accumulate over multiple books.
- 5Buy
Old Man's War
by John Scalzi
Retired people can join the army, but only in new bodies — Scalzi's series has The Expanse's same hard-SF attention to what spaceflight and alien biology would actually be like, with a dark humor that makes the military SF premise go down easier than it sounds.
- 6Buy
Dune
by Frank Herbert
The political economy of a universe defined by a single irreplaceable resource — Paul Atreides and the Expanse's Belters both inhabit economies where control of a critical substance determines everything else. Dune is more mythological and more pessimistic than The Expanse, but they are thinking about the same problems.
- 7Buy
Project Hail Mary
by Andy Weir
Hard science fiction that trusts the reader to follow the science — Weir's most recent novel has The Expanse's same commitment to accuracy in physics, biology, and chemistry, and adds a first-contact scenario handled with the same rigor the Corey authors bring to the protomolecule.
- 8Buy
Revelation Space
by Alastair Reynolds
Space opera on the scale of The Expanse, with the same hard-SF physics constraints and the same sense that space is genuinely vast and travel is genuinely slow — Reynolds' Revelation Space universe is darker and stranger than Corey's, but readers who want the same scale and the same refusal to handwave the science will find it here.
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