Books like Foundation
As the Galactic Empire decays, mathematician Hari Seldon plants a colony of scholars on a remote planet to shorten the coming dark age, and his successors survive crisis after crisis his equations foresaw.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Foundation
Ancillary Justice
A warship's AI, trapped in a single human body after the destruction of its ship, uncovers a galactic conspiracy at the heart of a brutal empire.
The Player of Games
The Culture sends one of its citizens to infiltrate a game-obsessed empire, and the board game he must win has consequences far beyond the tournament.
A Memory Called Empire
A young ambassador from a small colony arrives at the heart of a vast empire, where memory is currency and identity is a political weapon.
The Dreaming Void
In the far future, a man begins dreaming of a perfect world inside the Void at the centre of the galaxy, and when millions decide to follow him there, the galaxy's powers fear that the pilgrimage will trigger the Void's expansion and destroy them all.
The Mote in God's Eye
In 3017, a thousand years after humanity spread to the stars, a probe arrives from the Mote, a star nobody has ever visited, and the Second Empire of Man sends the battlecruiser MacArthur to meet whoever sent it.
Pandora's Star
In 2380 humanity has spread across hundreds of worlds linked by wormholes, and when an astronomer sees two distant stars vanish inside a barrier, a starship is sent to find out why, with consequences no one foresaw.
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.
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.
The Naked Sun
Detective Baley travels to a Spacer world where one human lives alone with thousands of robots, and a murder investigation becomes a meditation on agoraphobia and contact.
The Gods Themselves
A pump that trades matter with a parallel universe gives Earth free energy, and in three linked stories, a disgraced scientist, a lunar researcher and the beings of the other universe discover what it may cost.
Rendezvous with Rama
A massive, empty alien spacecraft enters the solar system, and a crew of explorers boards it to discover its purpose.
Diaspora
In 2975 most of humanity lives as software in polises, and Yatima, a mind born of no parents, comes into being in one of them, not long before a disaster in space threatens the flesh-and-blood humans left on Earth.