Books like The Expanse
What should you read after James S. A. Corey’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- James S. A. Corey
- 2011
- Space opera
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after The Expanse
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchLeviathan Wakes
James S.A. Corey
Where it starts. A missing-persons case on Ceres and the destruction of an ice hauler converge, and the noir-plus-space-opera formula arrives fully formed.
- A detective plot inside space opera
- Alternating viewpoint chapters
- Belters with their own language
- The horror elements surprise people
Great matchRed Mars
Kim Stanley Robinson
The serious version of the same argument: who owns a world, who pays for the air, and how fast settlers stop thinking of Earth as home.
- A solar system split three ways
- Politics sliding toward war
- Physics that actually costs something
- Far slower throughout
Great matchDune
Frank Herbert
The template for factional politics and resource control, where whoever holds one substance holds everyone. Corey's houses and navies owe it plenty.
- Politics sliding toward war
- A solar system split three ways
- An alien thing nobody understands
- Feudal rather than industrial
Worth a look — with a warningThe Stars Are Legion
Kameron Hurley
For the protomolecule half of your brain: living worldships and biology that has no interest in what you think it ought to do.
- An alien thing nobody understands
- Alternating viewpoint chapters
- Physics that actually costs something
- Body horror throughout
Great matchAltered Carbon
Richard K. Morgan
Detective fiction wearing a science-fiction coat, which is precisely Miller's half of the series — just meaner, and with the body-swapping turned right up.
- A detective plot inside space opera
- Politics sliding toward war
- Belters with their own language
- Graphic sex and torture
Great matchPandora's Star
Peter F. Hamilton
An enormous, plausible human civilisation going about its business until it meets something that cannot be negotiated with. The same shape, four times the length.
- An alien thing nobody understands
- Alternating viewpoint chapters
- Politics sliding toward war
- Two enormous volumes
Great matchAncillary Justice
Ann Leckie
Empire, colonised populations and a narrator who used to be a warship. Leckie is after the same politics of who counts as a person, in a stranger voice.
- Politics sliding toward war
- A solar system split three ways
- An alien thing nobody understands
- The pronoun conceit takes adjusting
Best for the scaleHyperion
Dan Simmons
A civilisation on the edge of a war it does not understand, told through seven lives. If you want the Expanse's ambition with literary machinery, start here.
- An alien thing nobody understands
- Alternating viewpoint chapters
- Politics sliding toward war
- The story ends unresolved
Great matchEnder's Game
Orson Scott Card
Humanity organising itself entirely around a single alien encounter, with children sent to pay the bill. The cleanest, fastest version of that premise.
- An alien thing nobody understands
- Politics sliding toward war
- A crew that becomes a family
- Military school setting
Worth a look — with a warningRevelation Space
Alastair Reynolds
Reynolds keeps the physics honest exactly as Corey does, with no faster-than-light shortcuts. He is simply colder about it, and he takes his time.
- Physics that actually costs something
- An alien thing nobody understands
- A crew that becomes a family
- Slow and forbidding
Great matchDark Matter
Blake Crouch
If what carried you through the series was pure momentum, Crouch offers the purest dose available: one idea, executed at a sprint.
- Physics that actually costs something
- A detective plot inside space opera
- Alternating viewpoint chapters
- No politics or scale
Great matchCaliban's War
James S. A. Corey
Book two, and where the series works out what it is: new viewpoints, a botanist looking for his daughter, and politics that finally get funny.
- A crew that becomes a family
- Alternating viewpoint chapters
- Politics sliding toward war
- Assumes book one
Great matchThe Three-Body Problem
Cixin Liu
Politics between planets, an alien intelligence with unreadable motives, and the slow discovery that the timescale is far longer than anyone budgeted for.
- An alien thing nobody understands
- Politics sliding toward war
- Physics that actually costs something
- Flat, functional characters
What should you read after The Expanse?
The Expanse by James S. A. Corey 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 Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey — where it starts. A missing-persons case on Ceres and the destruction of an ice hauler converge, and the noir-plus-space-opera formula arrives fully formed.
If what stayed with you was a solar system split three ways, read Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson instead: the serious version of the same argument: who owns a world, who pays for the air, and how fast settlers stop thinking of Earth as home. Dune by Frank Herbert is the other strong option — the template for factional politics and resource control, where whoever holds one substance holds everyone. Corey's houses and navies owe it plenty.
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