Books like Childhood's End
Vast alien ships appear over Earth's cities, and their unseen Overlords end war and want, but the golden age they bring comes at a price humanity cannot yet understand.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Childhood's End
2001: A Space Odyssey
A mysterious black monolith guides human evolution from ape to astronaut, culminating in a voyage to Jupiter that transforms a man into something beyond human.
Blood Music
Vergil Ulam, a brilliant and reckless researcher at a California biotech firm, is ordered to destroy his secret experiment, cells that can think, and smuggles them out of the lab the only way he can, inside his own body.
The Three-Body Problem
During the Cultural Revolution, astrophysicist Ye Wenjie answers a signal from space, and decades later nanomaterials researcher Wang Miao, investigating a wave of scientists' suicides, is drawn into a strange virtual-reality game and the secret behind it.
Rendezvous with Rama
A massive, empty alien spacecraft enters the solar system, and a crew of explorers boards it to discover its purpose.
Spin
One night the stars go out all at once, and Tyler Dupree and his friends Jason and Diane grow up beneath a mysterious barrier that has sealed the Earth off from the universe, while time outside races by.
Contact
Ellie Arroway, a radio astronomer, picks up a signal from the star Vega that turns out to carry the plans for a machine, and the world has to decide whether to build it and who should go.
Galápagos
A million years from now, the last humans have devolved on the Galápagos Islands, and a ghost narrates how the big brains that caused all our problems finally went away.
Seveneves
When the Moon is shattered by a mysterious agent, humanity has two years to get enough people off Earth before the hard rain of debris makes the surface uninhabitable.
Children of Time
Spiders inherit a terraformed world meant for humans and evolve into a civilisation, until the last human ark ship arrives to claim what was never theirs.
Solaris
Kris Kelvin, a psychologist, arrives at the research station hovering over the ocean planet Solaris to find one of its three scientists dead, the other two barely holding together, and people walking its corridors who should not be there.
The Mountain in the Sea
Ha Nguyen, a marine biologist, is brought by a technology corporation to the Con Dao archipelago off Vietnam, now sealed off from the world, to study a species of octopus that may have developed its own language and culture.
Hominids
Ponter Boddit, a Neanderthal physicist from a parallel Earth where his species survived, is accidentally transported into a neutrino detector deep under Ontario.