Books Like Project Hail Mary: 10 Science Fiction Novels to Read Next

If you haven’t read Andy Weir’s first novel, start here. Astronaut and botanist Mark Watney is left behind on Mars after his crew believes him dead, and he has to stay alive with limited food, failing equipment and a long wait for any chance of rescue. The book is told mostly through his mission logs, so you get every calculation, every disaster and every dry joke as it happens.

It’s the clearest ancestor of Project Hail Mary: one resourceful person, a hostile environment and a steady run of problems that can only be solved by thinking hard. If you loved watching Ryland Grace work things out from first principles, Watney growing potatoes in Martian soil will feel like coming home.

Humanity’s last survivors cross space in an ark ship, looking for a planet that was terraformed long ago. But an experiment on that planet went wrong, and its new inhabitants have been evolving for thousands of years. Tchaikovsky tells the story from both sides, and one of them is a species of spider.

This is the book for readers who loved how Project Hail Mary makes a truly alien mind believable. Tchaikovsky builds a civilization from the biology up, and it’s so well thought through that you’ll end up rooting for creatures you would normally run from. It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2016.

Software engineer Bob Johansson signs up to be cryogenically preserved after his death. He wakes more than a century later as a computer program, installed in a self-replicating space probe and sent out to find new worlds. So he does what any engineer would: he makes copies of himself and gets to work.

If the humor was your favorite part of Project Hail Mary, this is your next read. Bob is sarcastic and endlessly curious, and the book is full of the same practical, step-by-step problem-solving, only with a whole crowd of Bobs arguing about how to do it.

Cave diver James Tighe is recruited by an eccentric billionaire for the first commercial mission to mine an asteroid. The crew trains on Earth, launches and then discovers how unforgiving deep space really is, a long way from any help.

Delta-v is set in a near future that feels only a few years away, and Suarez takes the engineering seriously: orbital mechanics, radiation and the costs of every decision all matter. It’s a good pick if you enjoyed the realistic science of Project Hail Mary and want a tense survival story with a full crew.

The story begins during China’s Cultural Revolution, when a young astrophysicist makes a decision that will change the fate of the planet. Decades later, scientists are dying in strange circumstances, and a nanotech researcher is drawn into a mystery that leads to a virtual-reality game and to contact with another world.

Like Project Hail Mary, it treats first contact as a problem of physics and communication rather than spaceships and lasers. It’s darker and more philosophical than Weir’s novels, but if you want big ideas about what it would really mean to meet another civilization, few books do it better. Ken Liu’s English translation won the Hugo Award in 2015.

The Moon breaks apart without warning, and scientists soon calculate that the falling debris will make Earth uninhabitable within two years. With that deadline, the world races to keep a small part of humanity alive in orbit.

Seveneves shares Project Hail Mary’s premise of a planet-sized threat and a desperate, science-driven response. It’s a long book and very detailed about how orbital life would actually work, so it suits readers who want even more of the engineering. The final part jumps thousands of years ahead, which makes the scale of the story hard to forget.

An enormous cylindrical object enters the solar system, and it is clearly not natural. The crew of the nearest spaceship has a few weeks to land on it and explore before it swings around the Sun and leaves.

This 1973 classic is the original sense-of-wonder book, and much of Project Hail Mary’s joy of discovery comes from this tradition. Clarke is less interested in battles than in puzzles: how the object works, who built it and why. It won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and it’s short enough to read in a weekend.

Radio astronomer Ellie Arroway detects a signal from the star Vega, and it contains instructions for building a machine. What follows is a story about science, politics, faith and what happens when the whole world has to decide whether to trust a message from the stars.

Carl Sagan was a working astronomer, and it shows: the scientists here think and argue like real scientists, which is exactly what makes Project Hail Mary so satisfying. If you’ve only seen the 1997 film with Jodie Foster, the novel goes deeper and further.

Rosemary Harper joins the crew of the Wayfarer, a ship that punches tunnels through space, for a long job at the edge of the galaxy. Her crewmates are human and alien, and most of the book is about how they live, work and care for each other along the way.

This is the warm-hearted choice. If the friendship at the center of Project Hail Mary was what stayed with you, Chambers writes aliens who feel like real people, with their own cultures, bodies and ways of loving. It’s gentle, funny and quietly moving.

A security android protects a team of scientists on a planetary survey. It has secretly hacked the module that controls it, and it would much rather be watching entertainment feeds than talking to people. Then the mission starts to go wrong, and it has to decide how much it cares about the humans it’s guarding.

The first book in the Murderbot Diaries is a short, sharp read with a narrator as funny and as reluctantly heroic as Ryland Grace. It won the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novella, and if you like it there are several more books in the series.