More like Kaspar's Box
but
- Barsoom
series53 books1917
similar byscience fictionadventurous+2 more
Barsoom is a fictional representation of the planet Mars created by American pulp fiction author Edgar Rice Burroughs. The first Barsoom tale was serialized as Under the Moons of Mars in pulp magazine The All-Story from February to July 1912 and published compiled as a novel as A Princess of Mars in 1917. It features John Carter, a late-19th-century American Confederate veteran who is mysteriously transported from Earth to the dying world of Mars where he meets and romances the beautiful Martian princess Dejah Thoris. Ten sequels followed over the next three decades, further extending his vision of Barsoom and adding other characters.
- Starship Troopers
Robert A. Heinleinstandalone novel1959
similar byaliensscience fictionadventurousfar future
Starship Troopers is a military science fiction novel by American writer Robert A. Heinlein. Written in a few weeks in reaction to the US suspending nuclear tests, the story was first published as a two-part serial in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction as Starship Soldier, and published as a book by G. P. Putnam's Sons on November 5, 1959.
- Ringworld
series5 books1970
part of Known Space
similar byaliensscience fictionadventurousfar future
The Ringworld series is a series of science fiction novels written by American author Larry Niven. It is part of his Known Space series of stories. Its backdrop is the Ringworld, a giant artifact 3 million times the surface area of Earth circling a star. The series is composed of four standalone science fiction novels, the original award-winning book and its three sequels:1970: Ringworld 1979: The Ringworld Engineers 1996: The Ringworld Throne 2004: Ringworld's Children
- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
series16 books1979
part of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Universe
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a comedy science fiction franchise created by Douglas Adams. Originally a radio sitcom broadcast over two series on BBC Radio 4 between 1978 and 1980, it was soon adapted to other formats, including both novels and comic books, a 1981 BBC television series, a 1984 text adventure game, stage shows and a 2005 feature film.
- Forever War
series10 books1972
similar byscience fictionfar future
Joe Haldeman's The Forever War (1974) follows a soldier conscripted into a centuries-long interstellar war against the alien Taurans, using relativistic space travel so that months spent in transit correspond to years or decades passing back on Earth. Haldeman later returned to the same conflict in Forever Peace (1997), a thematically connected but separate story, and Forever Free (1999), a direct sequel set years after the original war's end. The first novel won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards and is considered a foundational work of military science fiction.
- Moties
series4 books1974
part of CoDominium
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Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye (1974) depicts humanity's first contact with an alien species, the Moties, set within the far-future interstellar setting of Pournelle's codominium future history. The Gripping Hand continues that first-contact crisis years later, and Outies, written by J. R. Pournelle, carries the story forward into a new generation. Together the three books trace an escalating encounter between human and Motie civilizations within the codominium universe.
- Double Star
Robert A. Heinleinstandalone novel1956
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Lorenzo Smythe, the excellent yet unemployed actor, meets Dak Broadbent in a bar. Broadbent hires Lorenzo for an unspecified role, and hustles him onto a rocket ship. Broadbent turns out to be an assistant to the famous interplanetary politician and leader of the Expansionist party: John J. Bonforte. Bonforte, however, has been kidnapped by the political opposition on Mars, and due to Lorenzo's physical similarity to Bonforte, his staff wants Lorenzo to impersonate the politician for an important Martian ceremony.
- Lord of Light
series5 books1967
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Lord of Light is Roger Zelazny's 1967 science fantasy novel about the surviving crew of a colonizing starship who use salvaged technology and mind-transfer to make themselves effectively immortal, then rule their colony for a thousand years under the guises of Hindu gods. One of their own, called Sam, breaks with the pantheon to return forbidden knowledge to the ordinary people they rule, touching off a war among the self-styled gods. A standalone novel, it won the 1968 Hugo Award for Best Novel.
- Terro-Human Future History
universe48 books1952
Start hereFuzzy Sequence · Start here
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History does not repeat, Piper's chroniclers are fond of saying — it rhymes, and it rhymes in iron. Reckon the years from the first atomic pile, 1942, Year One of the Atomic Era, and follow the ledger forward some six thousand years: out of a nuclear war that nearly ended everything, up through the Terran Federation and its reach into the stars, down again through collapse and a long neobarbaric dark, and back up into the enlightened empires that rise from the ruins. It is one continuous future history — not a plot but a chronicle, worlds and centuries sharing a single unbroken timeline. H. Beam Piper assembled it in pieces through the 1950s and 60s, novels and novellas bound by chronology rather than by recurring heroes. The anchors are Little Fuzzy, a courtroom argument over whether a small golden native of Zarathustra is a person; Space Viking, raid and revenge amid the wreckage of the interregnum; and the Federation-era Four-Day Planet, The Cosmic Computer, and Uller Uprising. The eras sort cleanly — Federation, the System States War, the Space Vikings of the long dark, the Empire. After Piper's death in 1964 other hands took up the ledger: John F. Carr, who arranged the short fiction into the chronological Federation and Empire collections and carried on the Tanith and Space Viking line, plus Wolfgang Diehr's Fuzzy sequels and Dietmar Arthur Wehr's additions. The register is sober and engineer-eyed — competent men solving hard problems, empires ruled by benign despots, the cool conviction that civilizations rise and fall to the same recurring script. It ranges from the sunlit warmth of the Fuzzy books to the cold steel of a Viking raid. Newcomers start with Little Fuzzy, the warmest and most self-contained, or with Space Viking.
- Starman Jones
Robert A. Heinleinstandalone novel1953
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Starman Jones, a 1953 science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein, features a farm boy who wants to go to the stars. Charles Scribner's Sons published the book as part of the Heinlein juveniles series.
- Red Planet
Robert A. Heinleinstandalone novel1949
similar byaliensscience fictionadventurousfar future
A boy colonist on Mars takes his bouncing ball Martian pet with him to boarding school, but the new Headmaster is a controlling tyrant. Things get worse when he discovers a plot that will jeopardize all of the colonists.
- Hainish
series33 books1964
completed
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The Hainish Cycle consists of a number of science fiction novels and stories by Ursula K. Le Guin. The cycle is set in a future history that features civilizations of human beings on planets orbiting a number of nearby stars, including Terra ("Earth"); these humans are contacting each other for the first time and establishing diplomatic relations, as well as setting up a confederacy under the guidance of the oldest of the human worlds, the peaceful planet Hain. In this history, human beings did not evolve on Earth, but they were instead the result of interstellar colonies planted by Hain in the distant past, after which interstellar travel ceased for an extended period. Some of the human races have new genetic traits, a result of ancient Hainish experiments in genetic engineering; this includes people who can dream while awake, and a world of hermaphroditic people who only enter active sexuality once per month, not knowing which sex will manifest in them. In keeping with Le Guin's narrative approach, she uses varied social and environmental settings to explore the anthropological and sociological outcomes of human evolution in those environments. The author often discounted the characterization of a so-called "Hainish Cycle".
- H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds
universe65 books1898
Start hereThe War of the Worlds · Start here
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No one would have believed, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched keenly and closely from the timeless worlds of space. And then the cylinders fell. H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds opens in the quiet of the Surrey commons, where a falling star proves to be the first Martian craft — and from the pit rise the towering tripods, the Heat-Ray, the choking Black Smoke and the creeping red weed, wielded by minds that regard mankind much as we regard the creatures we boil for supper. This is invasion rendered as natural disaster: cold, methodical, and vast beyond argument. Wells' 1898 novel is the seed; everything else grows from that Martian soil. The catalogue gathers direct sequels and continuations alongside a wide field of other hands. In War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches the invasion is retold across the whole planet through the eyes of Twain, Verne, Tolstoy, Lowell and Kipling; in the Manly Wade and Wade Wellman crossover, Sherlock Holmes, Watson and Professor Challenger take the field against the machines; and Scott Washburn's Great Martian War stretches the fighting into a decades-long alternate history of steam, artillery and grinding attrition. It is a loose shared world — no single decreed sequence, many voices answering one calamity. What sets this world apart is its refusal of heroics: the invaders fall not to generals but to the smallest things of Earth, humbling and indifferent. Begin, always, with Wells' original novel — it is short, and it is the ground every later book stands upon. From there follow your appetite: Global Dispatches for the panorama, the Holmes campaign for adventure, Washburn for the long war.
- Foundation Universe
universe123 books1940
Start hereFoundation · Start here
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There is a science that reads the future of quadrillions the way an astronomer reads the orbits of stars. It is called psychohistory, and its equations foresee something the ruling Galactic Empire cannot admit: the throne is rotting, and thirty thousand years of barbarism are coming. One man, Hari Seldon, cannot stop the fall. He can only shorten it — by seeding a Foundation of scholars at the rim of the galaxy, a fragile institution built to carry knowledge across the dark and cut the interregnum to a single millennium. This is a universe told in the register of history itself: the long view, the calm of deep time, empires measured in centuries and men measured against them. The spine is Asimov's original trilogy — Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation — followed decades later by the sequels Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth and the prequels Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation. Late in life Asimov braided this in with his other future histories: the Robot novels of detective Elijah Baley and his humaniform partner R. Daneel Olivaw (The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, The Robots of Dawn, Robots and Empire) and the early Galactic Empire novels (Pebble in the Sky and its kin), until one continuous chronicle ran from the first thinking robots to the Second Empire. Other hands extend it — the Second Foundation Trilogy by Gregory Benford, Greg Bear, and David Brin, and shared-world spinoffs such as Robot City — so the corpus sprawls beyond a single author's tidy shelf. What distinguishes it is that the drama is intellectual: crises resolved by insight, nerve, and dialogue rather than fleets and blades, each turn hinging on the hidden logic of the Seldon Plan. Begin where readers have always begun — with Foundation, and the original trilogy in publication order. The rest opens outward from there.
- Heechee
series19 books1972
completed
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The Heechee Saga, also known as the Gateway series, is a series of science fiction novels and short stories by Frederik Pohl. The Heechee are an advanced alien race that visited the Solar System hundreds of millennia ago and then mysteriously disappeared. They left behind bases containing artifacts, including working starships, which are discovered and exploited by humanity.
- Uplift Universe
universe13 books1980
Start hereUplift · Start here
similar byaliensscience fictionadventurousfar future
No species, the Galactics insist, ever climbs to sapience alone. For a billion years the elder races have "uplifted" their chosen clients — reshaping some promising animal, gene by patient gene, into a thinking being, then binding it through long ages of indenture. Patron lifts client; client one day becomes patron; and every lineage traces back through the vast Galactic Library to the vanished Progenitors who began it all. Then a ragged band of primates arrives at the stars with no patron to claim them — wolflings, self-made, an affront to a hundred thousand years of law — and worse, these humans have already started uplifting neighbors of their own: the neo-dolphins and neo-chimpanzees of Earthclan. David Brin builds this galaxy across two trilogies. The first — Sundiver, the Hugo- and Nebula-winning Startide Rising, and the Hugo-winning The Uplift War — sends an expedition into the Sun, then follows the dolphin-crewed survey ship Streaker as it flees a discovery that sets fanatical star-clans at war, and a chimp-led resistance on an invaded colony world. The second sequence, Uplift Storm — Brightness Reef, Infinity's Shore, Heaven's Reach — descends to Jijo, a forbidden world where six fallen races hide as illegal settlers, and draws every loose thread toward a reckoning. Short fiction fills the margins. This is space opera with an ecologist's conscience: teeming with invented biologies, wry cross-species banter, and real unease about what we owe the minds we make. Begin with Startide Rising — the saga's beating heart, and readable on its own — or take Sundiver first and read straight through in publication order.
- Uplift
series5 books1980
part of Uplift Universe
similar byaliensscience fictionadventurousfar 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.
- Tripods
series4 books1967
completed
similar byaliensscience fiction+2 more
The Tripods is a series of young adult science fiction novels by John Christopher. The series takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where humanity is enslaved by "Tripods"—gigantic three-legged walking machines piloted by an alien race later identified as the "Masters". The first two books were the basis of a science fiction TV series, produced in the United Kingdom in the 1980s.
- Alliance-Union Universe
universe173 books1976
Start hereCompany Wars · The central sequence
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The dark between the stars belongs to no one, and everyone who lives out here knows it: the merchanter Families hauling cargo between stations that cannot feed themselves, the Earth Company clutching at colonies it can no longer supply, the Union breeding its cloned azi to settle worlds faster than birth allows. C. J. Cherryh's Alliance-Union is a future history of humankind's spread across the third and fourth millennia, told from inside the pressure — no clean empires, only stations, ships, treaties, and the people caught in the machinery of who holds the jump-points. The sequence runs from the first laborious pre-FTL stations through the Company Wars, the independence struggle that breaks over Pell in Downbelow Station (Hugo, 1981), to the genetics and cold politics of Union's homeworld in Cyteen (Hugo, 1988) and its sequel Regenesis. Around that spine cluster the merchanter novels of trader Families, the Faded Sun trilogy of human envoys among the martial alien Mri, and the Chanur books, narrated from the hierarchical, whiskered viewpoint of the hani. On the isolated world of Merovin, the Merovingen Nights anthologies open the setting to other hands — Mercedes Lackey, Janet and Chris Morris, Nancy Asire — a shared world braided into the whole. What sets it apart is intimacy at scale. Cherryh drops you without a map into a single skull and lets you assemble the politics from what that person fears and bargains for; the aliens are genuinely alien, loyalty is always provisional, and the real antagonist is usually logistics. Most books stand alone, in her words, "like real history." The surest way in is Downbelow Station — the war seen from one besieged station — then Cyteen, for the mind that shaped the other side.
