Books like The Fountains of Paradise
An engineer's lifelong dream to build a space elevator becomes a meditation on human ambition and the reach of civilisation.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Fountains of Paradise
Rendezvous with Rama
A massive, empty alien spacecraft enters the solar system, and a crew of explorers boards it to discover its purpose.
Timescape
In 1998, with the world dying of ecological collapse, Cambridge scientists try to warn the past using tachyons, and in 1962 a young physicist in California picks up the strange noise in his experiment and tries to make sense of it.
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.
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.
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 Ministry for the Future
Beginning with a deadly heat wave in India, a near-future novel told through eyewitness accounts, meeting notes and dispatches follows an agency created to speak for future generations as the world fights its way through climate catastrophe.
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.
Ringworld
Explorers discover a massive ring-shaped artificial world orbiting a distant star and must survive its ancient, dangerous wonders.
The Martian
An astronaut stranded on Mars must science his way to survival, one potato at a time.
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.
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.
Red Mars
The first hundred colonists on Mars attempt to terraform the planet while their ideological differences threaten to tear the mission apart.