Books like “Childhood's End”

What to read after “Childhood's End” by Arthur C. Clarke: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.

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1
Speaker for the Dead
Orson Scott Card · 1986
Similar atmosphere: “Philosophical”
- Philosophical
- First Contact
Years after the war against the Formics, Andrew Wiggin travels as a Speaker for the Dead, revealing the truth of the departed. On the colony world Lusitania he is drawn into the fate of a human family and the alien Pequeninos, whose customs hide a terrible secret.
2
Solaris
Stanisław Lem · 1961
Similar atmosphere: “Philosophical”
- Philosophical
- First Contact
A scientist arrives at a station orbiting the ocean planet Solaris, where the crew is haunted by visitors shaped from their own memories. As the planet resists every attempt to understand it, he confronts what the living sea seems to be doing to them.
3
The Three-Body Problem
Cixin Liu · 2008
Similar atmosphere: “Philosophical”
During the Cultural Revolution a secret military project sends signals into space, and an answer comes back. Decades later a scientist is pulled into a hidden struggle over how humanity should reply to an alien civilization facing its own collapse.
4
The Left Hand of Darkness
Ursula K. Le Guin · 1969
Similar atmosphere: “Philosophical”
- Philosophical
- First Contact
An envoy from a galactic federation lands on the frozen world of Gethen to invite its nations into an alliance. Its people have no fixed gender, and as he crosses the ice with a disgraced politician, he learns how much of his own culture he took for granted.
5
Foundation
Isaac Asimov · 1951
Similar atmosphere: “Philosophical”
- Philosophical
As the Galactic Empire begins to decay, mathematician Hari Seldon foresees thirty thousand years of chaos. To shorten the coming dark age he gathers scholars on the remote world Terminus, where the Foundation must survive plots, warlords and its own predictions.
6
The Time Machine
H. G. Wells · 1895
Similar atmosphere: “Philosophical”
- Philosophical
An inventor builds a machine that carries him far into the future. He finds a gentle people living above ground and a sinister race below, and slowly learns what became of humanity. A short, influential tale of time travel and a dark vision of the end.
7
Earth Abides
George R. Stewart · 1949
Similar atmosphere: “Philosophical”
- Philosophical
A plague kills nearly everyone on Earth. An ecologist emerges from the mountains to find empty cities and a few survivors, and spends the rest of his life watching a new, smaller society take shape without the old world's machinery.
8
Starship Troopers
Robert A. Heinlein · 1959
Similar atmosphere: “Philosophical”
- Philosophical
- Alien Invasion
A young man joins the mobile infantry and is shaped into a soldier through brutal training and interstellar war. Told as his reflections on duty, citizenship and violence, the novel follows his rise from recruit to officer against an enemy unlike humanity.
9
Contact
Carl Sagan · 1985
Similar atmosphere: “Philosophical”
- Philosophical
- First Contact
A radio astronomer detects a signal from a star system twenty-six light years away, and the message it carries turns out to be a set of instructions for a machine. As governments and faiths argue over its meaning, she must decide what she will risk to make the journey.
10
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Philip K. Dick · 1968
Similar atmosphere: “Philosophical”
- Philosophical
In a dust-choked future, a bounty hunter is paid to retire androids that have escaped to Earth and passed as human. As he tracks them down he starts to question what makes a life real, and whether he can trust his own memories.
11
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut · 1969
Similar atmosphere: “Philosophical”
- Philosophical
Billy Pilgrim, a chaplain's assistant and prisoner of war in Dresden, becomes unstuck in time, living his life out of order among moments in the war and on another planet. His flat, looping account turns a firebombing and a life's small cruelties into a dark joke about fate.
12
We
Yevgeny Zamyatin · 1924
Similar atmosphere: “Philosophical”
- Philosophical
In the glass city of OneState, citizens live by a strict timetable and are known only by numbers. When the mathematician D-503 begins to keep a private journal, a woman named I-330 draws him into a movement that wants to tear down the walls of the ordered world.