Here are 79 books that The Expanse fans have personally recommended once you finish the The Expanse series.
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I’ve always been drawn to stories where light trembles on the edge of annihilation. The Deathly Shadow grew from that space—where broken people must still try, even when hope is an ember. I’m especially interested in how violence shapes children—their choices, their trust, and the way they carry themselves through a collapsing world. I strive to write characters with real emotional weight and a filmic sense of presence—where every gesture, glance, and silence means something. I believe the darkest stories, when told with care, can reveal what we most need to protect. This book explores the cost of survival—and whether love, memory, and courage are enough to challenge even the worst of endings.
This book is prophecy, power, and paranoia wrapped in a sandstorm.
It was the first book that showed me how deeply philosophy and politics could be embedded in a fantastical world. It taught me that “epic” doesn’t mean loud—it means legacy. I still marvel at Herbert’s precision—his control of tone, symbolism, and tension.
It’s the rare kind of book that makes you feel like you’re trespassing into something sacred and dangerous. Every time I return to it, I leave with something new—and a little unsettled.
Before The Matrix, before Star Wars, before Ender's Game and Neuromancer, there was Dune: winner of the prestigious Hugo and Nebula awards, and widely considered one of the greatest science fiction novels ever written.
Melange, or 'spice', is the most valuable - and rarest - element in the universe; a drug that does everything from increasing a person's lifespan to making interstellar travel possible. And it can only be found on a single planet: the inhospitable desert world of Arrakis.
Whoever controls Arrakis controls the spice. And whoever controls the spice controls the universe.
My dad raised me on science fiction and fantasy. At first, it was enough for me to be entertained by stories of spaceflight, of rescuing maidens in distress, and of fighting bug-eyed monsters. But over the years, as I read more, I realized that I wanted stories with a moral or ethical center, stories where murder, mayhem, and war were to be avoided if possible, and where, if they couldn’t be avoided, the protagonists struggled deeply with the moral dimensions of the actions forced upon them. I wanted to see characters growing into their ethical consciousness.
I love this book because although it seems at a casual glance to be written in the mold of 50s and 60s science fiction, with earthmen fighting bug-eyed aliens, it’s, in fact, a profound exploration of the morality of war, of chances, lost and motives misunderstood and of the ruthless use of children as combatants.
The training regimen of the children is gripping, as is the climactic space battle, but it’s the ending of the novel that gives the story its deep spiritual resonance.
Orson Scott Card's science fiction classic Ender's Game is the winner of the 1985 Nebula Award for Best Novel and the 1986 Hugo Award for Best Novel.
In order to develop a secure defense against a hostile alien race's next attack, government agencies breed child geniuses and train them as soldiers. A brilliant young boy, Andrew "Ender" Wiggin lives with his kind but distant parents, his sadistic brother Peter, and the person he loves more than anyone else, his sister Valentine. Peter and Valentine were candidates for the soldier-training program but didn't make the cut―young Ender is the Wiggin drafted…
My dad and Uncle (who was not my uncle!) were both WWII veterans; I was fortunate to receive an artist’s grant to gather stories from WWII veterans in Minnesota and told several at concerts honoring the anniversary of D-Day. My counseling background unexpectedly came into play as their stories left me understanding their heroism, sacrifice, shell shock, and grief. These vets grew up never leaving a circle about a hundred miles across and were suddenly thrown into a foreign country and war. I was compelled to research and write about the 1930’s, life on the farm, young romance, and trying to heal PTSD after the war.
Every now and then, I discover a book that has imagined a world and/or a character that takes me by surprise, and I can’t stop reading about them. Again, it’s all about character! In this book, I met a human cyborg enslaved by a computer program and built as a security unit rented out to corporate groups exploring planets for profit.
This sentient cyborg frees itself from enslavement, hilariously staves off the boredom of security work by watching its favorite media series, and as it watches characters in these shows, begins to learn about human behavior. I enjoyed the awkward, touching way it developed friendships and emotional connections. The character, which calls itself Murderbot, presents as if it’s on the spectrum.
Its first-person narration is snarky, occasionally hilarious, and endearing as it slowly learns what it means to have friendships. And oh, it finds all this wildly inconvenient, hates eye…
All Systems Red by Martha Wells begins The Murderbot Diaries, a new science fiction action and adventure series that tackles questions of the ethics of sentient robotics. It appeals to fans of Westworld, Ex Machina, Ann Leckie's Imperial Raadch series, or lain M. Banks' Culture novels. The main character is a deadly security droid that has bucked its restrictive programming and is balanced between contemplative self discovery and an idle instinct to kill all humans. In a corporate dominated s pa cef a ring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. Exploratory teams are accompanied by…
I have always loved science fiction. I spent years studying to be a scientist before I became a writer (I have a PhD in geophysics), and I love fiction that uses, remixes, and twists our weird and wonderful universe in interesting ways. But stories don't really grab me unless there is a strong emotional core. I need characters--I need people. And that's where my love of mysteries and thrillers comes in, with all the tragedy and trauma they can hold. This is the recipe for my ideal fiction: creepy mystery, human trauma, big ideas, weird science, and a little bit of a murder, as a treat.
Chasm City is part of Reynold's Revelation Space series, but this future-noir mystery is perfectly readable as a standalone. It follows a man on a mission of revenge, one that takes him into the crumbling, plague-ridden remains of a once-great civilization that has descended into chaos and squalor. The world-building is top-notch—this is a dying, decaying city that you can feel in your bones—and full mysteries that explore ideas of identity, memory, and redemption in a twisty mystery that ties together past, present, and future.
Come to Chasm City and embark on a mind-bending ride through the universe of Revelation Space
Tanner Mirabel was a security specialist who never made a mistake - until the day a woman in his care was blown away by Argent Reivich, a vengeful young postmortal. Tanner's pursuit of Reivich takes him across light-years of space to Chasm City, the domed human settlement on the otherwise inhospitable planet of Yellowstone.
But Chasm City is not what it was. The one time high-tech utopia has become a Gothic nightmare: a nanotechnological virus has corrupted the city's inhabitants as thoroughly as it…
Sci-fi has been part of my life since Sunday afternoons in front of the radio listening to Journey to the Moon and the original Quatermass serial. Then it was Doctor Who and Star Trek. Despite this, I have never written a serious sci-fi book until now, but I can boast of knowing all the characters in both the radio and TV sci-fi shows. I guess I can admit to being a Trekkie.
I think this is everybody’s favourite. A classic from the master storyteller.
I love the building tension in the story and the way Wells has the knack of making the story an exciting adventure at the same time. I prefer the book to the movie, which did not convey the mystery and tension build-up as in the book.
The plot is very simple but clever. Nothing seems to stop the Martians, but in the end, they are defeated by our diseases on Earth. A good story to enjoy at any time.
A powerful, delightful new edition. Cylinders land on earth and the invaders, from Mars, with their huge, round bodies and tentacles, start to vaporize the people of Earth. Houses, towns and cities are soon destroyed in a spiral of violence, creating civil panic and mass evacuations before a foul black smoke is released by the aggressive alien force. But the fightback must begin, and it comes from an unexpected quarter. H.G. Wells' classic tale of invasion has stirred our imagination for over a hundred years. Its intense mix of realism and fantasy continues to prick at anyone interested in a…
One of the reasons I love my job as a Space History Curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum is that I am fascinated to learn how people think about space, the cosmos, and their human connection with the universe. I am always eager to get beyond questions of what we know and how we know it and ask: Why do we ask the questions we ask in the first place? The books I’ve listed here all explore our relationship with space and how we engage personally or collectively with space exploration.
When it comes to human spaceflight programs, a lot has been written about the astronauts, administrators, and decision-makers who set policy and defined these programs from the top. The People’s Spaceship presents the four decades of NASA’s Shuttle Program as a mission to engage the public in the excitement of space exploration and make spaceflight relevant to people’s everyday lives.
In a post-Apollo era of declining budgets, NASA’s outreach efforts during the Shuttle era demonstrate the agency’s increasing reliance on public support and the public relations apparatus it built to garner it. Despite the Shuttle’s flaws, NASA managed to create a sense of public ownership of the program, as well as generations of kids who grew up dreaming of their own Shuttle flights.
When the Apollo 11 astronauts returned from humanity's first voyage to the moon in 1969, NASA officials advocated for more ambitious missions. But with the civil rights movement, environmental concerns, the Vietnam War, and other social crises taking up much of the public's attention, they lacked the support to make those ambitions a reality. Instead, the space agency had to think more modestly and pragmatically, crafting a program that could leverage the excitement of Apollo while promising relevance for average Americans. The resulting initiative, the space shuttle, would become the centerpiece of NASA human space flight activity for forty years,…
One of the reasons I love my job as a Space History Curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum is that I am fascinated to learn how people think about space, the cosmos, and their human connection with the universe. I am always eager to get beyond questions of what we know and how we know it and ask: Why do we ask the questions we ask in the first place? The books I’ve listed here all explore our relationship with space and how we engage personally or collectively with space exploration.
The rise of spaceflight in the Soviet Union came amidst a very different social and cultural context than it did in the United States. While the Soviet program operated mostly in secret, with accomplishments often reported only after their successful completion, their public reception had little to do with their importance to state officials.
This book reveals an older Russian cosmism (or cosmic mysticism) practiced by some of the founders of pre-Soviet Russian rocketry, such as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, whose work tapped into an early wave of interest in space travel beginning around World War I. Public support and enthusiasm for spaceflight were genuine, rooted not in state-sanctioned interpretations of spaceflight but in a broadly shared utopian imagination and belief that the Russian future was in the stars.
The Red Rockets' Glare is the first academic study on the birth of the Soviet space program and one of the first social histories of Soviet science. Based on many years of archival research, the book situates the birth of cosmic enthusiasm within the social and cultural upheavals of Russian and Soviet history. Asif A. Siddiqi frames the origins of Sputnik by bridging imagination with engineering - seeing them not as dialectic, discrete, and sequential but as mutable, intertwined, and concurrent. Imagination and engineering not only fed each other but were also co-produced by key actors who maintained a delicate…
One of the reasons I love my job as a Space History Curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum is that I am fascinated to learn how people think about space, the cosmos, and their human connection with the universe. I am always eager to get beyond questions of what we know and how we know it and ask: Why do we ask the questions we ask in the first place? The books I’ve listed here all explore our relationship with space and how we engage personally or collectively with space exploration.
The early years of spaceflight coincided with the heyday of American advertising and eye-catching mid-century graphic design. The visual aesthetic of the Space Age, as expressed in the aerospace advertisements that populated magazines and trade journals of the day, reflected this intersection of futuristic technology and innovative design.
Collected together in a critical mass in this book, these advertisements evoke an era in which tomorrow was the product, aerospace was the currency, and American industry was set to reshape the cosmos.
The late 1950s and early '60s were the golden age of science fiction, an era when the farthest reaches of imagination were fed by the technological breakthroughs of the postwar years. While science fiction writers expressed the dreams and nightmares of the era in pulp print, real-life rocket engineers worked on making space travel reality. The imaginations of many Cold War scientists were fed by science fiction literature, and companies often promoted their future capabilities with fantastical, colorful visions aimed at luring young engineers into their booming workforce. In between the dry articles of trade journals, a new visual vernacular…
One of the reasons I love my job as a Space History Curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum is that I am fascinated to learn how people think about space, the cosmos, and their human connection with the universe. I am always eager to get beyond questions of what we know and how we know it and ask: Why do we ask the questions we ask in the first place? The books I’ve listed here all explore our relationship with space and how we engage personally or collectively with space exploration.
In the 20th and 21st centuries, science fiction has been a major force in defining our collective imagination of what spaceflight is and why it is significant. This book puts the history of space science fiction in the context of the American space program, charting the reality of spaceflight against expectations set in popular culture.
Telling these parallel stories of real space accomplishments and fictional space exploits allows Weitekamp to reveal stories of spaceflight as inseparable from broad cultural concerns such as American identity, the frontier, race, gender, and sexuality. Weitekamp has spent her career curating the social and cultural history of spaceflight collection at the National Air and Space Museum, and her argument is built upon her expert analysis of popular culture objects from the collection.
A space historian's tour through astounding spaceflight history and the Smithsonian's collection of space and science fiction memorabilia
Winner of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics' 2024 Gardner-Lasser Aerospace History Literature Award
Spanning from the 1929 debut of the futuristic Buck Rogers to present-day privatization of spaceflight, Space Craze celebrates America's endless enthusiasm for space exploration. Author Margaret Weitekamp, curator at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, writes with warmth and personal experience to guide readers through extraordinary spaceflight history while highlighting objects from the Smithsonian's spaceflight collection.
Featuring historical milestones in space exploration, films and TV shows,…
I became an author because I loved books and wanted to craft my own. Here are five books I consumed first as a reader and then as a writer, methodically noting what made these books brilliant in style, depth, and plot. If you enjoy thrillers or science fiction and are looking for books to hone your craft as a writer, here are my choices.
When I first began writing, the most common critique I got was, “You haven’t found your voice yet.” My editor said my style reminded her of Dean Koontz and gave me this book.
I was hooked from the first rain-soaked scene, where protagonist Spencer Grant checks on a missing friend and stumbles into a rogue government hit squad. Fortunately, Spencer Grant has a robust skill set of his own, along with a very dark secret in his past, his personal “dark river of the heart.”
The book goes a bit wild near the end, but by then, the lap bar is firmly down, and there is no getting off the ride. When I finished it, I declared, “I want to write just like that!”
From bestselling phenomenon Dean Koontz, this is a gripping, heart-pounding thriller perfect for fans of THE EYES OF DARKNESS and Stephen King.
Spencer Grant had no idea what drew him to the bar with the red door. He thought he would just sit down, have a beer or two, talk to a stranger. He couldn't know that it would lead to a narrow escape from a bungalow targeted by a SWAT team. Or that it would leave him a wanted man.
But now Spencer is on the run from mysterious and ruthless…
