The Expanse combined realistic politics, interplanetary scale and flawed characters. Readers who finish it often want the same register. Five titles that deliver it.
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.
A scientist wakes alone on a spaceship and has to save Earth, with the science worked out step by step.
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu.
First contact and cosmic-scale physics, from China’s Cultural Revolution to an alien threat.
Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds.
Dark galaxy-scale space opera with alien archaeology and unsettling technology.
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine.
Political intrigue inside a stellar empire, seen through an ambassador in a world not her own.
H.O.M.S. by Demetrio Triglia.
Like The Expanse it puts crew, politics and moral stakes on an interplanetary scale, adding a biotech premise about genetic discrimination and an investigation that opens a war between parallel universes. Complete trilogy in Italian, English and French.
