Books like 2312
What should you read after Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Kim Stanley Robinson
- 2012
- Hard science fiction
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after 2312
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchRed Mars
Kim Stanley Robinson
Robinson's own foundation text: the same engineering imagination, and the same conviction that terraforming is a political argument long before it is a technical one.
- A terraformed solar system
- Economics taken seriously
- Earth as the broken place
- Slower, more committee-room
Worth a look — with a warningAltered Carbon
Richard K. Morgan
Bodies as swappable hardware, chosen and discarded — Robinson's questions about embodiment rendered as hard-boiled noir, with none of the tenderness.
- Bodies redesigned by choice
- Economics taken seriously
- A terraformed solar system
- Graphic violence and sex
Great matchFoundation
Isaac Asimov
Asimov thinking in centuries about how civilisations manage themselves, which is the intellectual habit 2312 inherits even where it disagrees about the answers.
- Economics taken seriously
- Earth as the broken place
- Lists and excerpts between chapters
- Almost no sensory texture
Great matchThe Three-Body Problem
Cixin Liu
Another novel that treats physics as narrative and humanity as a species-level problem, with the same willingness to stop and explain something for ten pages.
- Earth as the broken place
- Economics taken seriously
- Lists and excerpts between chapters
- Flat characterisation throughout
Great matchOld Man's War
John Scalzi
Bodies rebuilt to specification and consciousness moved into them, done briskly and with jokes. A much lighter entry point to the same set of questions.
- Bodies redesigned by choice
- Economics taken seriously
- A terraformed solar system
- A military adventure
Great matchPandora's Star
Peter F. Hamilton
Hamilton builds a working, wealthy, sprawling human civilisation and then spends nine hundred pages showing you exactly how its economy and politics run.
- Economics taken seriously
- Bodies redesigned by choice
- A terraformed solar system
- Doorstop length, two volumes
Best for the lived-in futureThe Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
Becky Chambers
If the pleasure was Swan wandering through habitats meeting strange, kind people, Chambers wrote an entire novel of that and almost nothing else.
- Hollowed asteroids as gardens
- Bodies redesigned by choice
- A romance between two strange people
- Very little plot
Best for the strange romanceThe Left Hand of Darkness
Ursula K. Le Guin
Two people who barely fit each other's categories, thrown together across an impossible crossing. The intimacy 2312 reaches for, achieved completely.
- A romance between two strange people
- Bodies redesigned by choice
- Economics taken seriously
- One cold planet
Worth a look — with a warningNinefox Gambit
Yoon Ha Lee
Shares Robinson's habit of dropping you inside a system and letting you work it out, except Lee provides no glossary and no mercy whatsoever.
- Bodies redesigned by choice
- Economics taken seriously
- Lists and excerpts between chapters
- Deliberately opaque opening
Great matchThe Stars Are Legion
Kameron Hurley
Living, rotting worldships and bodies that manufacture the parts the fleet needs. Hurley pushes the engineered-body idea somewhere far more visceral.
- Hollowed asteroids as gardens
- Bodies redesigned by choice
- A romance between two strange people
- Body horror throughout
Great matchAurora
Kim Stanley Robinson
Robinson arguing the opposite case: that a designed closed ecosystem will fail, and that leaving Earth may be a mistake. Read it as 2312's rebuttal.
- Earth as the broken place
- A terraformed solar system
- Economics taken seriously
- Deliberately deflating in tone
Worth a look — with a warningAnathem
Neal Stephenson
For readers who enjoyed the interstitial excerpts more than the plot: Stephenson invents an entire intellectual culture and then includes the coursework.
- Lists and excerpts between chapters
- Economics taken seriously
- Earth as the broken place
- Nine hundred dense pages
What should you read after 2312?
2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson — robinson's own foundation text: the same engineering imagination, and the same conviction that terraforming is a political argument long before it is a technical one.
If what stayed with you was bodies redesigned by choice, read Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan instead: bodies as swappable hardware, chosen and discarded — Robinson's questions about embodiment rendered as hard-boiled noir, with none of the tenderness. Foundation by Isaac Asimov is the other strong option — asimov thinking in centuries about how civilisations manage themselves, which is the intellectual habit 2312 inherits even where it disagrees about the answers.
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