55 Books Like Demon in White

Fergus Ferguson is an ordinary man who just happens to be good at one thing – finding stuff. So he becomes an intergalactic repo man, and when the book starts he’s been tasked with finding a stolen starship, as one does. 

He’s also found himself wrapped up in a civil war and a possible alien invasion.

This book is a little darker than the others on the list, in that Fergus has a lot of personal baggage to deal with, the people behind the civil war aren’t nice, and it’s really hard to figure out what the aliens want. But the darkness is leavened by Fergus’s humor and strong moral code. 

It’s also book one of a (very nicely tied-up) trilogy.

Okay, it’s the second book in the tremendously popular series The Expanse (perhaps you’ve heard of this little series turned TV show), but it’s also my favorite. That’s because Corey ramps up the intrigue as Mars, Earth, and the Belt find themselves enmeshed in an open war that has some decidedly murky underpinnings. This volume also introduces two of the series' best and most memorable characters: Martian marine Bobbie Draper and savvy Earth politician Chrisjen Avasarala. The book kicks off with a bang, and doesn’t let up, concluding with perhaps one of the most page-turning action sequences I’ve ever read.

After reading Ender’s Game, I didn’t expect Speaker for the Dead to change register so completely. New characters, new worlds, new species… almost nothing feels the same.

And yet, when you look closer, the core questions remain: how we communicate across difference, how quickly we judge, how often we interpret others through our own narrow lens. Suddenly, Lusitania doesn’t feel so alien after all.

This book was a very different reading experience for me. Deeper, more mature, and far more demanding. Beneath its often gray imagery, something universal emerges. I would call it “human,” but that would miss the point.

What Speaker teaches is precisely that love, friendship, life, death, and memory are not human concepts—they are fundamental to life itself.

I loved Jadzia Dax in Deep Space Nine, and I was always fascinated by the Trill, a species in which some lucky few are selected to join as hosts with a symbiont creature that lives for several lifetimes and imbues the actual host with the talents and memories of all the previous hosts.

The TV show only scratched the surface of what that means psychologically and culturally, so I was really looking forward to reading this book. White did a lot of research on the Trill and then took the creepy premise of some kind of zombie Trill to really explore what it means to be Trill, to be joined or to be denied the joining by the almighty Symbiosis Commission.

A thrilling (and also empowering) Jadzia adventure.

Did you ever hear about the Tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise? If you’re a Star Wars fan, this is the book that really humanizes the evil side of the galaxy far, far away. While it has the typical sorcery, lightsaber fights, and sweeping space opera, this book, at its core, is the story of a dark father-son relationship. Even the overarching villain of the Star Wars saga, Palpatine, is given a lot of backstory, depth, and humanity in this story. I read this book in college, and it’s what spurred my writing journey.

This book takes us into a space colony populated solely by females who live in a symbiotic relationship with their organic starship. The ship is their shelter and protector, and in return, the women birth tools and components that the ship needs to function.

I love the gory spectacle of these bloody, mechanical births but also how they allow Hurley to explore ideas about community, duty, and belonging. The book is part of a wider sensibility that can be found throughout Hurley’s work, but for my money, this is the one where her imaginative powers are most successfully harnessed. 

So many times with tie-in novels, you have the issue of trying to predict what a fanbase wants while still trying to keep a story original. I’ve read a lot of tie-in novels that fail in this, and as a result, their stories fall flat and become hollow narratives. The Warhammer 40k universe has a long, rich, and storied history of lore. Sometimes, that lore boils down to “Space Marines are cool,” and that is as far as the depth of the worldbuilding goes. 

This book succeeds where many others do not. In this story, I got to see the effects of a universe that is dominated by war played out in the lives of these characters. Rather than a string of events between one fight to the next, I saw the toll that such an existence would have on the people who live it. It does this in a… show more.

The biggest challenge to setting out a worldview within a universe is describing the detail about entities that imbues the feelings associated with living as those entities within it. Banks manages the sensation of living beings masterfully, where they are so alien and so abstract your pure imagination is put to the test. What would life be like for you as a jelly blob that flies around a gas giant? Pretty damn good thanks to Iain, and it's something I tackled in my book too with not nearly as much success it seems, at least yet.

I couldn't put this gripping book down! I loved the plot twists, the complexity and ingenuity of its structure, the clever observations about human nature, the flawed protagonist and their character arc, the criticism of the real-world issues, and how original it was. The story is exciting and well-written, but its brilliant, non-linear narrative made it stand out the most.

It cleverly and mind-bendingly explores the meaninglessness and cruelty of war, inequality, class system, capitalism, exploitation, manipulation, and brainwashing. Even though it's gory, which is suitable for a story about war, human connection and taking care of each other play a crucial role. I really enjoyed the author's style and unique voice.

I love Star Wars, and I’ve been a Star Wars nerd forever. This book jumps into an Imperial conspiracy to restore the Empire using the ghost of its old leader, Grand Admiral Thrawn, who was long thought dead. 

I read this one thinking that the “conspiracy” was upfront and required no special thought. Still, two of the key players—Borsk Fey’lya and Major Grodin Tierce—are playing their own games within games, creating an interwoven conspiracy I confess I didn’t see coming until I read it. When I re-read the book, I looked hard to find their clues, and I had to carefully study each to find the underlying markers. It was an enjoyable, if jolting, way to delve into Star Wars lore.