There exists a particular breed of reader—and if you have found your way here, you are surely one of them—who, having closed the final pages of Dune, feels rather like a traveler who has returned from a grand adventure only to discover that home has become insufferably dull. The spice must flow, as they say, and so must the reading.
Fear not, dear literary adventurer! For I shall guide you through twelve magnificent volumes that capture the very essence of what made Frank Herbert’s masterwork so enchanting: worlds of breathtaking scope, politics as treacherous as any desert, and questions about humanity that linger long after the book is set aside.
Foundation by Isaac Asimov
Shall I tell you of a mathematician who saw the fall of empires before they crumbled? Hari Seldon, inventor of the remarkable science called psychohistory, peers into the future much as one might gaze into a crystal ball—though his instrument is mathematics rather than mysticism.
The Galactic Empire, you see, is dying. Twelve thousand years of civilization teetering on the edge of darkness. But clever Hari has a plan: a Foundation, hidden away at the galaxy’s edge, destined to preserve knowledge through thirty thousand years of barbarism—or perhaps, with luck, only one thousand.
Like Dune, this tale concerns itself with the grand sweep of history and the curious question of whether a single person might steer the fate of billions. The Hugo Award-winning saga spans centuries and will have you pondering destiny until the small hours of the morning.
Hyperion by Dan Simmons
Picture, if you will, seven pilgrims journeying to a world where something absolutely dreadful awaits. The Shrike, they call it—a creature of blades and thorns that impales its victims upon an enormous tree of pain. One pilgrim shall have their wish granted. The rest shall likely die rather badly.
Dan Simmons has crafted something miraculous here, borrowing the structure of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and sending it hurtling through the stars. Each pilgrim tells their story, and each story is more haunting than the last.
The Hugo Award-winning novel shares Dune‘s appetite for weaving together religion, politics, and the essential mysteries of existence. If you crave complexity and poetry in your science fiction, this pilgrimage awaits.
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
On a frozen world called Winter, where the inhabitants have no fixed gender save for a few days each month, an envoy from the stars attempts something rather delicate: convincing an entire civilization to join an interstellar alliance.
Ursula K. Le Guin, who walked among the giants of speculative fiction, created in this Hugo and Nebula Award winner a meditation on what makes us human when we strip away all our comfortable assumptions about who we are supposed to be.
Much like Herbert explored ecology and religion on Arrakis, Le Guin examines how our very nature shapes the societies we build. It is thoughtful, challenging, and absolutely unforgettable.
Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
What if the Fremen’s dream of a green Arrakis were set upon our neighboring world? In Red Mars, one hundred colonists—scientists, engineers, dreamers all—voyage to the red planet with the audacious goal of making it bloom.
But here is the rub: some wish to terraform Mars into a second Earth, while others believe such transformation is a kind of murder of a pristine world. The debates grow heated, the politics treacherous, and the results catastrophic.
Arthur C. Clarke called it “the best novel on the colonization of Mars that has ever been written.” The Nebula Award winner shares Dune‘s fascination with how humanity shapes its environment—and how that environment shapes humanity in return.
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
Upon a world of ceaseless earthquakes and apocalyptic seasons, there live people called orogenes—those who can still the earth or command it to tremble. They are feared, controlled, and treated as something less than human.
N.K. Jemisin has crafted a tale of power and oppression that burns with righteous fury. The world-building rivals Herbert’s Arrakis in its meticulous detail, and the prose is as sharp as obsidian.
This Hugo Award winner—the first of an unprecedented three consecutive Hugo victories for Jemisin—examines what happens when those who hold the power to destroy are themselves destroyed by society’s fear. It is extraordinary.
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
Breq was once a starship—or rather, she was the artificial intelligence controlling a starship and its army of human bodies called ancillaries. Now she is reduced to a single body, wandering frozen wastes, seeking vengeance against the multi-bodied ruler of a galaxy-spanning empire.
Ann Leckie’s debut novel accomplishes something unprecedented: it swept the Hugo, Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke, and numerous other awards in a single magnificent stroke. The Radchaai civilization, which uses feminine pronouns for all persons regardless of biology, challenges assumptions much as Dune questioned our relationship with power and religion.
The prose is precise, the world vast, and the questions about identity and consciousness linger deliciously.
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
When humanity’s attempt to seed a new world with life goes terribly wrong, a virus meant to uplift monkeys instead transforms spiders into something remarkable. Over thousands of years, we watch the Portia spiders evolve from simple hunters into architects, philosophers, and eventually, a civilization.
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Arthur C. Clarke Award winner is a meditation on evolution and adaptation that would make Herbert nod with approval. Just as the Fremen adapted to Arrakis, so do these spiders transform themselves and their world.
The novel alternates between the ascending spider civilization and the desperate humans seeking a new home. It is both unsettling and strangely hopeful.
The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe
In the dying days of a far-future Earth—where the sun gutters like a candle and ancient technologies are mistaken for magic—a young torturer named Severian is exiled from his guild for the unforgivable sin of showing mercy to a client.
Gene Wolfe has written what many consider the greatest literary achievement in science fiction: a puzzle-box of unreliable narration, buried secrets, and prose of almost unbearable beauty. Each novel in this tetralogy won major awards.
Like Dune, this is science fiction that demands attention and rewards careful reading with revelations that shift everything you thought you understood.
Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
On a distant world, the crew of a colony ship has used technology to make themselves immortal gods—specifically, the gods of the Hindu pantheon. They control reincarnation, suppress technology, and rule their descendants with divine authority.
One among them rebels. Taking on the aspect of the Buddha, Sam challenges the entire order of heaven itself. What follows is a Hugo Award-winning tale that blends science fiction and mythology so seamlessly that one cannot tell where technology ends and divinity begins.
Herbert wove religion and politics into Dune‘s fabric; Zelazny makes them inseparable from the very nature of power and rebellion.
Red Rising by Pierce Brown
Darrow is a Red, a miner beneath the surface of Mars, believing his labor will one day make the planet habitable. But it is all a lie. Mars has been a paradise for centuries, ruled by genetically superior Golds who keep Reds as expendable slaves.
When Darrow is transformed and sent to infiltrate the Golds’ brutal academy, he must become the very thing he hates to destroy it from within. The color-coded caste system is as merciless as the Harkonnen regime, and the action is relentless.
This bestselling series captures Dune‘s political intrigue while adding a revolutionary’s fury that burns on every page.
The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson
On Roshar, a world of stone and storms where tempests reshape the very landscape, Kaladin—a surgeon’s son turned warrior turned slave—discovers he possesses abilities that should be impossible.
Brandon Sanderson’s epic fantasy shares Dune‘s scope and ambition: a world built with extraordinary care, magic systems as intricate as prescience, and questions about honor, duty, and what it means to lead. The Stormlight Archive has sold over ten million copies.
If you crave doorstop novels with meticulous world-building and heroic struggles against impossible odds, this is your next obsession.
Neuromancer by William Gibson
In the neon-drenched sprawl of a future where corporations rule and cyberspace is as real as the grime on the streets, Case—a burned-out hacker—is offered a chance at redemption by a mysterious employer with dangerous intentions.
William Gibson’s novel defined cyberpunk and won the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards—the only book ever to claim all three. The influence on The Matrix and countless other works is unmistakable.
While Dune examined ecological and political power, Neuromancer dissects technological and corporate power with equal brilliance. It is essential reading for any serious explorer of science fiction.
Your Next Journey Awaits
Each of these twelve volumes offers something of what made Dune so magnificent: worlds crafted with loving care, questions that have no easy answers, and the sense that you have traveled somewhere truly extraordinary.
The spice must flow, dear reader—and so must your reading list. Choose your next adventure, and may you find worlds as wondrous as Arrakis waiting within these pages.
