More like Earthwind
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- Dune
series20 books1963
part of Dune Universe
similar byscience fictionother star systemsfar future
Frank Herbert's Dune Chronicles opens with 1965's Dune, set on the desert planet Arrakis where House Atreides takes control of the only source of the vital spice melange and young Paul Atreides is pulled into a struggle over its politics and religion. Herbert carried the story forward across five further novels — Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, and Chapterhouse: Dune — following Paul's line over the following millennia, before Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson later extended the saga. Many other editions of these six novels are omnibus and box-set repackagings rather than separate stories.
- Dune Universe
universe78 books1963
Start hereDune · Start here
similar byscience fictionother star systemsfar future
Arrakis. Dune. The desert planet, where empire runs on a single substance: the spice melange, which folds space, prolongs life, and unlocks prescience, and which exists nowhere else in the known universe. Frank Herbert's saga is a meditation dressed as an adventure — feudal houses and a secret sisterhood, engineered messiahs and the patient ecology of a world without water, all turning on the terrible gravity of who commands the spice. It reads like scripture and schemes like a war room, ten thousand years hence, among people who have outlawed the thinking machine and made instruments of themselves instead. At its heart stand Herbert's original six — Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, Chapterhouse: Dune — a single deepening arc across millennia, arguing the whole way between prophecy and free will. Around that spine his son Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson have raised a vast prequel architecture: Prelude to Dune, tracing the great houses a generation before Paul; Legends of Dune, reaching back to the crusade that broke the machines; the Schools of Dune cycle on the founding of Bene Gesserit, Mentat, and Navigator; the Caladan Trilogy and Heroes of Dune filling years the originals left in shadow. Many hands, dozens of volumes, one desert. What sets Dune apart is its refusal of the simple: religion is manufactured, heroes are hazards, and the sand itself — worm, water, ecology — acts as a political power. Begin where the universe did, with Frank Herbert's Dune (1965), and read the original six in order; you need nothing else to feel the full weight. The prequels are a country to explore afterward, taken by era. Beginnings are delicate times.
- Forge of God
series2 books1987
completed
similar byscience fiction+2 more
The Forge of God (1987) is Greg Bear's science fiction novel about Earth's discovery that it is the target of an incomprehensible, overwhelming alien attack, following scientists and ordinary people as they try to understand what is destroying the planet. Its 1992 sequel, Anvil of Stars, follows a group of young survivors sent on a mission of interstellar retaliation, continuing directly from the first book's ending.
- 2312
Kim Stanley Robinsonstandalone novel2012
similar byecological collapsescience fictionother star systemsfar future
In the eponymous year, when Earth's ecology is degraded and humanity has settled throughout the solar system by terraforming and genetic engineering, mysterious disasters strike some human communities and an assortment of human types from throughout the system seek to find and eliminate the cause.
- Thousand Worlds
series24 books1971
similar byscience fictionother star systemsfar future
George R.R. Martin's Thousand Worlds is a loose future-history setting he used for several of his 1970s-80s stories and novels, encompassing human interstellar colonization and encounters with older, stranger civilizations. Dying of the Light, A Song for Lya and the novella Nightflyers are among its best-known entries, sharing background rather than continuing characters or plot.
- Last and First Men
series14 books1930
completed
part of Last Men Universe
similar byscience fictionfar future+2 more
Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men (1930) traces two billion years of human evolution through eighteen successive species, framed as a text somehow dictated back to the author by the last of those species; civilizations rise and fall across the span, marked by genetic engineering and interplanetary colonization, before the final humans are wiped out by a supernova. Stapledon followed it with the more obscure Last Men in London (1932), which revisits similar far-future material from a narrower, more personal angle.
- Marjorie Westriding
series3 books1989
completed
similar byscience fictionother star systemsfar future+1 more
Sheri S. Tepper's Arbai Trilogy opens with Grass (1989), in which investigator Marjorie Westriding is sent to the planet Grass to learn why its aristocratic settlers, obsessed with hunting using native and unsettlingly intelligent fauna, appear immune to a plague devastating the rest of human space. Raising the Stones and Sideshow carry the trilogy's ideas forward across roughly a thousand years and more of the same future history, with Marjorie's legacy and the extinct alien Arbai continuing to shape events.
- Jem
Frederik Pohlstandalone novel1979
similar byscience fictionother star systems+1 more
The discovery of another habitable world might spell salvation to the three (Food Bloc, Fuel Bloc & People Bloc) bitterly competing power blocs of the war torn & resource-starved 21st century. But when their representatives arrive on Jem, with its three intelligent species, they discover instead the perfect situation into which to export their rivalries. Subtitled, with savage irony, 'The Making of a Utopia', Jem is one of Frederik Pohl's most powerful novels.
- Nemesis
Isaac Asimovstandalone novel1989
similar byecological collapsescience fictionother star systemsfar future
The expanding population and ensuing ecological degradation of Earth leads to the establishment of orbital habitats which continue to compete with each other as well as with Earth, leading one of them to abandon the Solar System entirely, to establish itself around a neighboring star.
- Time Odyssey
series3 books2003
similar byscience fictionfar future+1 more
A Time Odyssey is a trilogy of science fiction novels co-written by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter. As of 2008, the series consists of:Vol. 1 – Time's Eye Vol. 2 – Sunstorm Vol. 3 – Firstborn
- Saint Leibowitz
series6 books1955
completed
similar byscience fictionfar future
Walter M. Miller Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), assembled from three novellas he had published earlier in the decade, follows the monks of a Catholic monastery in the post-nuclear American Southwest as they preserve fragments of scientific knowledge across centuries, watching civilization slowly rebuild itself and edge back toward the mistakes that destroyed it. Miller's posthumous sequel, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, completed by Terry Bisson from his notes after his death and published in 1997, returns to the same abbey and its world decades later. Together the two novels form a sparse, decades-spanning series about memory, faith, and the cycles of civilization.
- Helliconia
series4 books1982
completed
similar byecological collapsescience fictionother star systemsfar future
The Helliconia trilogy is a series of science fiction books by British writer Brian W. Aldiss, set on the Earth-like planet Helliconia. It is an epic chronicling the rise and fall of a civilisation over thousands of years as the planet progresses through its incredibly long seasons, which last for centuries.
- Schild's Ladder
Greg Eganstandalone novel2002
similar byecological collapsescience fictionfar future+1 more
Schild's Ladder is a 2002 science fiction novel by Australian author Greg Egan. The book derives its name from Schild's ladder, a construction in differential geometry, devised by the mathematician and physicist Alfred Schild.
- Uplift
series5 books1980
part of Uplift Universe
similar byscience fictionother star systemsfar future
David Brin's Uplift trilogy opens with Sundiver, sending human explorers into the Sun itself, then follows a dolphin-crewed starship on the run from hostile aliens in Startide Rising and a fight over the colony world Garth in The Uplift War. The books sit inside Brin's wider Uplift Universe, built on the idea that spacefaring "patron" species genetically engineer younger "client" species into full sapience, with humanity an anomaly that reached the stars without a patron of its own.
- Flood
series6 books2008
similar byecological collapsescience fiction+1 more
In Stephen Baxter's Flood, sudden seismic upheaval releases immense reservoirs of water trapped deep beneath Earth's crust, and sea levels begin climbing far faster than anyone can adapt to, forcing a handful of survivors to watch coastlines and then continents disappear. The 2009 sequel, Ark, follows a parallel thread of people who instead gamble everything on a desperate escape from the drowning planet. Together the two books trace roughly a half-century of civilizational collapse and reinvention as dry land runs out.
- Aurora
Kim Stanley Robinsonstandalone novel2015
similar byscience fictionother star systemsfar future+1 more
Aurora is a 2015 novel by American science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson. The novel concerns a generation ship built in the style of a Stanford torus, traveling to Tau Ceti to start a human colony. The novel's primary narrative voice is that of the starship's artificial intelligence. Aurora was well received by critics.
- Spin / Hypotheticals
series3 books2005
similar byscience fictionother star systems+2 more
One night, the stars vanish behind an opaque membrane that has sealed off the Earth, and inside it time runs so much slower than the universe outside that billions of years pass beyond the barrier for every year lived on the ground. Robert Charles Wilson's Spin follows three friends who grow up in the shadow of this event, as humanity scrambles to understand and survive it through desperate projects like terraforming Mars, while trying to make contact with the ancient machine intelligences responsible, the Hypotheticals. The trilogy continues in Axis and Vortex, widening the mystery across generations.
- Elysium Cycle
series5 books1986
similar byscience fictionother star systemsfar future
On the ocean-covered moon Shora, the Sharers -- an all-female society skilled in genetic engineering and committed to strict nonviolence -- face invasion by the militaristic Patriarchy, which cannot fathom a people who refuse to fight back with force. Joan Slonczewski's A Door into Ocean opens the Elysium Cycle by testing whether a philosophy built on the idea that 'to hurt is to be hurt' can actually survive violent occupation. Later books in the cycle, including Daughter of Elysium, The Children Star, and Brain Plague, carry the same interest in biology, pacifism, and alien societies into new settings.
- Hive
series5 books1969
completed
similar byscience fictionfar future+1 more
T. J. Bass's Hive novels imagine a grim, wildly overpopulated far-future Earth run by a vast hive-mind bureaucracy that treats most of humanity as disposable. Half Past Human, fixed up from two earlier stories, follows outcasts living outside the Hive's control; The Godwhale continues the setting generations later around a resurrected cyborg whale-ship.
- Children of Time
series6 books2015
similar byscience fictionother star systemsfar future
Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time follows two threads: a terraformed planet where an experimental nanovirus meant to accelerate primate evolution instead uplifts a species of spiders into a technological civilization guided by the recorded personality of a human scientist, and the last survivors of Earth aboard a generation ark ship searching for a new home. The two threads collide across mismatched timescales as the ark ship's crew, cycling in and out of cryosleep, finally reach the spiders' world. It's the first of a loosely connected series that applies the same premise to different alien biologies in each subsequent book.
- Existence
series6 books1986
similar byscience fictionother star systems+1 more
David Brin's Existence centers on Gerald Livingstone, an orbital garbage collector who hauls in an object that turns out not to match any known piece of space debris. Within hours, word spreads across Earth's global network that he may have found a genuine alien artifact, one that appears to want to communicate, and the ensuing novel tracks how a fractious, hyperconnected humanity reacts with equal parts fear, hope, and opportunism. It's Brin's near-future take on first contact filtered through a world already drowning in information.
- Bronson Beta
series5 books1933
similar byscience fictionother star systems+1 more
When Worlds Collide (1933) and its sequel After Worlds Collide (1934), written together by Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie, follow a small group of survivors who escape a doomed Earth as the rogue planet Bronson Alpha destroys it, landing on its companion world Bronson Beta to begin again. The two novels form a self-contained disaster-and-survival duology.
