19 High-Stakes Sci-Fi Books Like Project Hail Mary

William Mandella is a physics student who has been reluctantly conscripted into service for the United Nations Exploratory Force, a highly trained unit at war against an unknown and seemingly unbeatable alien enemy. It's a war with seemingly no end in sight, and due to the dilation caused by space travel, time has shifted in drastic ways. While Mandella ages by months, the Earth he left behind is aging in centuries. Everything he has ever known is dead. What is there left to fight for?

Rip Cantrell has made the ultimate discovery: a flying saucer embedded in the Sahara sandstone. Buried for eons, it's clearly the work of something beyond humanity's capability. But before Rip can reveal it to the world, he's outwitted by an enterprising billionaire set to steal the saucer's tech for his own nefarious purposes. Rip must team up with test-pilot Charlotte Pine to protect the saucer and uncover a mystery 140,000 years in the making.

Touré, a twenty-something coder from Cambridge, wakes up one morning to discover that he is seemingly the only person left in the city. Once he finds Robbie and Carol, two Harvard students, they're no closer to finding out what has happened to everyone else. Overnight, the city has become overgrown with vegetation and wild animals now roam the cracked streets. The weather has gotten erratic, with snowstorms one moment and heatwaves the next. And someone or something might be hunting them. Is this the apocalypse? Or something even weirder?

One cold April night, the Gorgon race arrived on Earth and blasted its biggest cities to dirt. Then the Cyphers followed, arriving through portals in the sky, with both alien species bent on mutual destruction. In Colorado, just over a hundred survivors have found sanctuary in the ruins of an apartment complex. As well as the aliens above, they're running away from the Grey Men, mutated humans who became monsters thanks to something toxic in the atmosphere. It seems that all hope is lost until a teenage boy appears with no memory of his identity but a strange power within himself that repels the Grey Men. Could he be their savior or is he just another enemy in disguise?

Frank Herbert’s Dune saga is one of the undisputed masterpieces of sci-fi, a legendary and wildly influential tale of politics, warring families, and sandworms. After his death, Frank’s son Brian took over and kept expanding the worlds of the Atreides family, Arrakis, and the ever-flowing spice. Tales of Dune compiles three previously uncollected stories set in the Dune universe, including “Wedding Silk,” a story of young Paul Atreides.

Hundreds of miles above Earth, the space station Ciudad de Cielo—The City in the Sky—stands tall as a symbol of hope and ambition for humanity and its plan to travel beyond their home planet. But not everyone onboard is there for altruistic reasons. The station is full of bootleggers, sex workers, and mob-like businesses with gang wars fighting for total control of this floating city. The authorities are happy to turn a blind eye until a disassembled corpse is discovered and a murder investigation is launched. Nikki "Fix" Freeman and Alice Blake are put in charge of the case, but the bodies just keep piling up. Has gang warfare gotten out of control or are more nefarious forces at play?

There are few authors in modern science fiction who are more dedicated to layered and complex worldbuilding than Neal Stephenson. Earth is in its dying days following a catastrophe that has kickstarted its own extinction. The nations of the world are forced to unite and devise a plan to ensure humanity's survival beyond the stars. Five thousand years later, the effects of those early days are still felt by the progeny of the original explorers. Seven distinct races of over three billion see history repeat itself. They must, like their ancestors, embark on an ambitious mission into the great unknown to find a world that has been drastically changed over the millennia: a planet once known as Earth.

The rocket launching the Mars Transit Vehicle on its first-ever journey explodes before take-off, killing its four crewmen. Now, Earth has put an end to its plans to launch a manned mission to the Red Planet. Billionaire John Axelrod, however, has other plans. He offers to fund the project, if only to get America to Mars before a planned European-Asian expedition. The race is on. Who will get there first, and will any of them be able to return home?

Carl just wants some peace and quiet to get over his ex and deal with her annoying cat. But then, in a flash, humanity is decimated and every human-erected construction on Earth sinks into the underground. The planet has been taken over by aliens who have turned it into a massive location for the universe's most beloved and sadistic game show. And Carl is now competing for his life.

The last remnants of the human race were forced to flee a dying Earth in search of greener pastures for the species to survive. Their travels lead them from Earth's ruins to a planet discovered by their ancestors, one already terraformed and ready for them to live on. But this new Eden is not as it seems. In the long years since the planet was abandoned, the work of its architects has mutated into something sinister. This planet is not unoccupied. It has new masters and they're waiting for the humans to find them...

In 2077, an asteroid strikes Earth, leading to the creation of The Spaceguard system to protect the planet from future impact. Over 50 years later, Spaceguard detects an interstellar object entering the Solar System, which they nickname Rama. Their intel shows that it's no mere asteroid but an item created by intelligent beings. The crew of the Endeavor is sent to study Rama and figure out of it is friendly or hostile to Earth. This will be mankind’s first encounter with aliens. Will it be positive or dangerous?

There are few narrative voices in modern sci-fi more distinct than that of Murderbot, the sentient securities robot who just wants to watch TV all day but keeps finding itself involved in the nonsense of humans, corporations, and treachery. In the first book in Martha Wells’s multi-Hugo Award-winning series of novellas, Murderbot has to pretend to be a rule-follower when it’s assigned to work for a group of scientists who don’t like having to order an autonomous being around. Things go awry when a neighboring mission goes dark and it’s up to Murderbot and its team to uncover the truth. 

Every space mission needs a redshirt: those expendable crew members who are usually sacrificed early in the story to get the true heroes motivated to save the day. Ensign Andrew Dahl has just been assigned to the Universal Union Capital Ship Intrepid, but he's saddened to discover that the Intrepid has a run of bad luck when it comes to their low-ranking crew members. Like himself. Below deck, everyone is just trying to survive, when Andrew uncovers the truth of Intrepid's mission and why the poor redshirts keep dying.

Humanity has colonized the solar system. Earth is governed by the United Nations and Mars is run as its own republic, with the two planets maintaining an uneasy alliance. In-between them is the Asteroid Belt, where Belters live and work in mining. Jim Holden is an ice miner making runs from the rings of Saturn to the mining stations of the Belt. When he and his crew stumble upon a derelict ship, they become embroiled in a deadly political secret that could shake up the hierarchy of the entire galaxy.

If you loved Project Hail Mary and haven't read Andy Weir's beloved debut, you have no excuse now! The Martian was one of the most read and biggest selling sci-fi novels of the 2010s and was adapted into a movie by Ridley Scott with Matt Damon in the lead. 

Mark Watney was one of the crew members on humanity's first manned mission to the surface of Mars. But after an unexpected dust storm nearly killed him, his crew evacuated the planet and left him behind, believing him to be dead. Now, he might as well be. Even if he finds a way to let Earth know he's alive, his supplies would run out before a rescue team could get there. But Mark's no quitter. He's decided to achieve the impossible: He'll find a way to grow food on Mars, stay alive for over a year, and become the focus of the most incredible rescue mission in the solar system!

The world is ending. With the clock ticking towards destruction, nations around the globe band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond the Solar System, into the great unknown. Five thousand years later, the descendants of those original explorers have divided into seven distinct races, and they're now on a radical new mission to a near-mythic alien world once known as Earth.

When COVID-19 leads to a worldwide lockdown, Jamie Gray is worried that he'll be stuck in his dead-end food delivery job for the rest of time. But things change when he makes a delivery to an old acquaintance, Tom, who works at what he calls "an animal rights organization." Tom offers Jamie a job, which he accepts without question. What Tom didn't tell him was that the animals he cares for are not from this dimension. They're Kaiju, and they're at risk of extinction. Because it's not just the Kaiju Preservation Society that's found its way to the alternate world. If things keep falling apart, millions of Kaiju and humans alike could die.

One cold night on the streets of Chicago, Jason Dessen is walking home when a masked abductor knocks him out. The last words he hears before he falls unconscious are, "Are you happy with your life?" When he awakens, he finds himself strapped to a gurney, surrounded by strangers in hazmat suits. He's now living a life unlike his own. His wife is not his wife. His son was never born. And Jason is not an ordinary college physics professor, but a celebrated genius who has achieved the seemingly impossible. Why has this happened, and can Jason return to the family he loves?

During China's Cultural Revolution, astrophysicist Ye Wenjie witnesses her father beaten to death. In adulthood, she is recruited by a secret military group to aid their search for extraterrestrial life. Several decades later, several of Earth's most brilliant scientists are dying in a mass of supposed suicides. Wang Miao, a nanotechnologist recruited to investigate the problem, discovers a mysterious virtual reality game that could reveal the truth of life beyond the stars.