Isaac Asimov’s Foundation is built on a premise that was close to provocative for an adventure novel in 1951: the protagonists decide almost nothing. Hari Seldon uses psychohistory to calculate the fall of the Galactic Empire, sets a plan measured in centuries, and leaves the stage almost immediately. What remains is a structure that keeps running without him, and generations of characters who discover they are inside a statistical forecast made before they were born.

The pleasure this produces has little to do with the hero who saves the galaxy on the last page. Readers looking for more of it are usually not looking for space opera in general. They are looking for books where deep time and institutions weigh more than individual choices. Here are five that do exactly that.

1. Consider Phlebas, Iain M. Banks (1987)

The first Culture novel follows a war between a post scarcity civilisation run by artificial minds and a theocratic empire that regards such freedom as an obscenity. Banks makes a disorienting choice: the main viewpoint belongs to a mercenary fighting against the Culture, which is to say against the society most readers would recognise as their own. The war lasts decades and is summarised in an appendix with a few lines of statistics, a minor incident in galactic history. Four hundred pages of personal struggle end up weighing roughly as much as a footnote.

2. Revelation Space, Alastair Reynolds (2000)

Reynolds is an astrophysicist who worked at the European Space Agency, and it shows in his refusal of every shortcut. No hyperspace, no warp drive: ships take decades to cross between systems, and the characters age accordingly. At the centre sits a galactic scale question about why the observable universe is so quiet, and the answer the novel assembles makes every human ambition look small. The first book of a cycle that spans millennia.

3. A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge (1992)

Vinge divides the galaxy into zones where physical law itself changes: near the core, intelligence and technology are capped; further out, superintelligence becomes possible. The idea turns geography into destiny, since a civilisation is worth whatever band it happens to be born in. The novel alternates a galactic threat with a medieval court story on a backward planet, and the tension comes from two timelines that move at incompatible speeds. Hugo Award, 1993.

4. Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky (2015)

A human terraforming project goes wrong and a virus meant to uplift monkeys reaches the spiders of a distant world instead. The novel follows that species across millennia, generation after generation, as it builds language, mathematics and religion. Meanwhile the last humans travel towards the same planet aboard a decaying generation ship. No single human character carries through the whole book, and the real protagonist is a civilisation. Arthur C. Clarke Award, 2016.

5. A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine (2019)

An ambassador arrives at the capital of an empire that absorbs neighbouring cultures through poetry and literary quotation well before it uses its fleets. She carries the implanted memory of her predecessor, who died in murky circumstances and whose recorded version is fifteen years out of date. Martine is a Byzantine historian, and the novel works as a portrait of how an empire digests the people who admire it. Hugo Award, 2020.

Where H.O.M.S. fits

Closing with my own, and stating the authorship plainly. Foundation is one of the references I put in writing when I built the trilogy, and the reason has to do with a character. Hari Seldon calculates the behaviour of populations and sets a plan that outlives him. H.O.M.S. has someone who runs the same calculation with the same coldness, and the difference is that he is not on the protagonists’ side. I cannot go further without spoiling the first volume.

Around that mechanism sits the social structure the series is named after. The acronym stands for Homo Origenis Mutatae Sapiens, a laboratory modified population now in its second generation, living alongside Sapiens without being their equal. Out of it come a dedicated police force called the Inclusive Police, which on paper is exactly what it claims to be, and a ghetto called Freak Side that no police force enters. The Homs, for their part, have a word for those who were never modified: «normo».

The characters do not reform that system. They live inside it, use it where they can, and pay for it where they cannot. Readers who valued Foundation for the idea that a structure outlives the people who inhabit it will find the same approach here, on a tighter scale, across three volumes meant to be read in order.

The novels were written in Italian and are available in English translation.

Phase One: Space Conspiracy on Amazon

You may also like books like The Expanse, books like Dune and books like The Three-Body Problem.

Background photo in the featured image: NASA, ESA/Hubble (NASA Goddard)