10 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?

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?

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.

Carl's really going through it in Matt Dinniman's hugely popular comedic fantasy series which was initially self-published before being picked up by Ace Books in 2024.

Carl, a Coast Guard veteran, is dealing with a messy break-up which has left him stuck with his ex's cat, Princess Donut. Aliens invading Earth and turning the entire planet into an intergalactic game show only makes things worse. Now, Carl must survive this live-streamed, gladiatorial game show, Dungeon Crawler World, which is full of traps, exploding goblins, puzzles, and endless things trying to kill him for entertainment.

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...

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.

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!