A colony ship bound for a distant star suffers an accident that leaves it unable to decelerate. As the crew repairs the engines, relativistic time dilation turns their journey into a passage through the far future, and they must decide whether to keep going.
The first hundred colonists arrive on Mars in 2026 to build a new world, a mission split between those who want to preserve the planet and those who want to change it. Over decades their disagreements grow into open conflict with Earth.
After humanity's fall, a terraforming experiment leaves a world where evolved spiders build a growing civilisation. A last ark ship of humans arrives above the planet, setting the two species on a collision course across centuries of war, memory and first contact.
A human ship arrives at a neutron star and finds intelligent life on its surface: the cheela, tiny creatures living and evolving a million times faster than humans. As the crew watches, the cheela build a civilization and reach for the stars.
An aging astronomer stays behind at a remote Arctic research station after the world loses contact with everyone else. Far above, the crew of a returning space mission hears nothing from Earth. Their two stories move toward each other across the ice and the dark.
In 1952 a meteorite strikes the American East Coast. Mathematician and pilot Elma York survives, then calculates that the climate damage will soon make Earth unlivable. She joins the international push to reach space and fights for women to be allowed into the astronaut corps.
A man wakes on a spacecraft with no memory of his name and two dead crewmates. As his past returns, he learns he is humanity's last hope against a dying sun, and that his only ally may be something he never expected.
A crew is sent to the edge of the solar system to meet an alien intelligence that has been watching Earth. Led by a man who has rewired his own brain, they discover that the visitor's mind works nothing like their own.
During a mission to Mars, astronaut Mark Watney is presumed dead and left behind. Alone with limited supplies and no way to call Earth, he applies his botany and engineering skills to grow food and signal that he is alive.
A giant cylinder enters the solar system, and a small expedition is sent to meet it. Inside they find a sealed alien world of cities, seas and machines, with no sign of its makers and systems that are beginning to wake.
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.
A vast alien craft from Alpha Centauri enters the Solar System, and the elephant-like Fithp announce themselves by destroying satellites and a Soviet space station. They land in Kansas and demand humanity's surrender, while scientists, soldiers and even science-fiction writers scramble to understand the invaders and mount a defence.
A climate crisis is already killing people when a new international ministry is created to protect future generations. Scientists, economists, activists and officials try to keep the planet livable, while ordinary people organise in the face of drought, heat and political resistance.
A father and his young son walk through a burned America, pushing a cart of scavenged supplies and hiding from bands of survivors who hunt people for food. Their only aim is to keep moving south and stay alive while holding on to decency.
A human expedition reaches Mesklin, a world where gravity varies wildly and the natives are intelligent, centipede-like traders. When the expedition's rocket is stranded at the pole, a human scientist must trust a Mesklinite captain to cross a brutal landscape and recover it.
A meteor shower blinds most of humanity, leaving a few sighted survivors in a world where walking, venomous plants have escaped from farms. A young man and a small group try to reach safety and decide what kind of society can be rebuilt.
After a flu wipes out most of humanity, a travelling theatre troupe moves between the small settlements that remain, performing Shakespeare. The story follows survivors across decades and asks what of civilization is worth carrying forward.
A religious sect called God's Gardeners expects a coming catastrophe and tries to live apart from the corrupt world around it. Two women, Toby and Ren, tell how they reached the group and what happened to them after the disaster they predicted.
Four years after Mal vanished on Bodmin Moor, she returns with no explanation. A security investigator and a physicist are drawn into the same case, which leads to cracks between our world and a series of parallel Earths where evolution took very different paths. As the doors open, creatures long separated from humanity begin to cross over.
A millennial office worker in New York keeps showing up to her publishing job as a fever turns people into repetitive, wandering shells. Her account of the collapse moves between satire of work and the quiet end of the world.
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.
After a series of waves wipes out most of humanity, sixteen-year-old Cassie is alone and running from an enemy that could look like anyone. To find her little brother she will have to trust a stranger, even as she learns how the invasion really works.
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.
In a near-future California wrecked by drought and lawlessness, a teenage girl who feels the pain of others builds a new belief while her walled neighbourhood falls apart. She leads a small group north, looking for land and for something to hold on to.
Start with “Tau Zero”, “Red Mars”, “Children of Time”: they are the closest to “Seveneves” in tropes and mood. Under each book in the list you will see what exactly it has in common.
How are similar books chosen?
We compare tropes (for “Seveneves” these are Hard Science Fiction, Apocalypse, Post-Apocalyptic World), genre, plot, era and tone. It is not “readers also bought”; it is similarity in the content itself.
Are there recent books in this list?
Yes. Among the newer ones are “Children of Time”, “Good Morning, Midnight”, “The Calculating Stars”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
