The nine novels and various short stories and novellas that make up space operas without "Star" in the title in the public eye much in the way George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire did for fantasy back in the 2010s.
To get specific about sci-fi subgenres, The Expanse is a brilliant bridge between "hard" sci-fi – stories with heavy attention to scientific accuracy and verisimilitude, like Andy Weir's The Martian, that often are limited in focus to our own star system – and space opera – stories that span entire galaxies and tell about sweeping galactic conflict. In fact, James S. A. Corey has spoken in interviews about how the starting point of writing The Expanse came from wanting to show that bridge between humanity's pre- and post-scarcity realities.
Space opera is one of sci-fi's greatest forms, as it has a long tradition and canon to draw from, yet there are always plenty of brilliant new authors telling phenomenal, genre-bending stories. Whether your favorite thing about The Expanse is the fascinating discussions of the details of space travel, the interstellar political brinkmanship, or the weirdness that comes from beyond our understanding of known space, these books each have something to offer to anyone yearning for intergalactic thrills.
1 VoidBreaker
By Bryan Young (2025)
One of the most recent releases in the newly revitalized BattleTech series, VoidBreaker is a thrilling read for anyone who wants their space opera to not just be of the military sci-fi bent, but to also involve both giant robots and clever James Bond references. VoidBreaker tells of the thrilling race to restore intergalactic communications after decades of chaos as the various factions of the Inner Sphere grapple with a massive shift in the balance of power. In another fun similarity to The Expanse, there are even Belters, although these ones have a few surprising differences from the Outer Planets Alliance.
BattleTech is more than just a nearly-40-year-running novel series; it's a tabletop game that's been in print since 1984, and is also the source material for the smash hit MechWarrior video games.
While several of VoidBreaker's central characters are ones who have been the focus of multiple BattleTech novels over the years, the book's viewpoint through the eyes of Kenja Rodriguez, agent of the Watch for Clan Sea Fox, makes it perfect entry point for anyone unfamiliar with the universe at large. The setting's mecha-centric approach to military sci-fi will make it a particularly good read for anyone who wished Bobbi Draper had been The Expanse's main character.
2 Persephone Station
By Stina Leicht (2021)
While much of space opera focuses on its roots in classic forms of sci-fi, there's no denying that the genre has been equally influenced over the years by the interesting overlap between Westerns and the films of Japanese cinematic legend Akira Kurosawa. Aside from how those both have heavily influenced everything from Star Wars to Firefly, they also served as inspiration for Stina Leicht in writing Persephone Station.
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Specifically, after Leicht saw the 2016 film The Magnificent Seven (a remake of the 1960 film of the same name, which itself was a Western retelling of Kurosawa's 1954 Seven Samurai), she wanted to put her own feminist spin on the story, as well as play around in the space between "hard" and "soft" sci-fi (via The Austin Chronicle). Leicht's version of the story has a group of seven mercenaries and outcasts – all women or non-binary – come together to protect not a small frontier town, but the Emissaries, the indigenous and exploited population of the planet Persephone.
3 Dune
By Frank Herbert (1965)
While there are other space opera series that predate Dune, like E. E. Smith's Lensman books and Isaac Asimov's Foundation, Dune took the pieces of the genre that had coalesced in those earlier works and began to build in a wholly new direction. Eschewing Asimov's disionate rationalism, Frank Herbert crafted the beginnings of a saga that spoke of the double-edged sword of human belief and zeal, which can build and shatter empires in ways even the greatest minds could never predict.
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Dune paints the picture of a galaxy where humans are the only intelligent life worth mentioning. Unlike The Expanse, which uses the disconnect between human understanding and the tools provided by Ring-Builder technology to demonstrate the dangers of human ambition, Dune thematically considers the nature of humanity differently, positing that there may be a fundamental difference between someone just being homo sapiens and a more inexplicable "human" nature.
4 Ancillary Justice
By Ann Leckie (2013)
Ann Leckie's debut novel took the sci-fi community by storm, winning a Nebula and a Golden Tentacle Award in 2013 and a Hugo, a Locus Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2014. Ancillary Justice is the first book in Leckie's Imperial Radch universe, set thousands of years after our own time, in an era where humanity has expanded and fragmented across the galaxy amid dozens of other species. The most powerful human polity is the aggressively expansionist and xenophobic Radchaai empire.
One of Leckie's most fascinating choices in creating the Radch is that their language only has a single third-person pronoun, represented in the books as she/her. While Radchaai humans have a wide variety of gender expressions, they have no bearing on how anyone is referred to; Radchaai interacting with other humans tend to struggle with understanding how gendered pronouns function.
Ancillary Justice and its sequels, Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy, follow the story of Breq, a human body that serves as host to a fragment of a shattered artificial intelligence that once ran a Radchaai warship. Over the course of the story, Breq goes from craving vengeance for her shattering to wanting something more for herself and other AIs, which makes for another fascinating exploration of the nature of humanity, gender, and personhood in a setting devoid of our own hangups and cultural baggage around the concept.
5 The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
By Becky Chambers (2014)
As a relatively hard science fiction series, The Expanse makes it clear that space travel is something done over very long periods of time, and over the course of the series the crew of the Rocinante turn their stolen Martian gunship into a very real home. Becky Chambers' debut novel works off the same principle, although in a much less violent universe. The cast of the book is the crew of the Wayfarer, an even more ill-fitting group of misfits than ever set foot on the Roci.
6 The Collapsing Empire
By John Scalzi (2017)
Scalzi is no stranger to space opera; his Old Man's War series is an oddly humanist approach to military sci-fi with galactic stakes, while Redshirts is a love letter to some of the genre's more glaring narrative absurdities and overused tropes. Yet it's The Collapsing Empire, book one of the Interdependency trilogy, that contains some of Scalzi's best work in the genre.
Aside from his numerous flavors of sci-fi books, Scalzi also wrote five stories for the first three seasons of Netflix's animated sci-fi anthology Love, Death & Robots.
If The Expanse is a story about humanity learning how to first walk, then run, into galactic prominence, then The Collapsing Empire is a story about humanity getting the rug getting yanked out from under them while running at full speed. The natural forces that power human hyperspace technology have begun to fail, and the ensuing chaos may see humanity as a whole fail thanks to the selfish actions of a few self-interested elite. It's a relevant parable, and as nail-bitingly thrilling as any of Scalzi's other galaxy-spanning jaunts.
7 Sundiver
By David Brin (1980)
Sundiver is the first book in David Brin's Uplift series, which comprises two trilogies that tell a story about a very similar kind of humanity to The Expanse: a scrappy, irreverent species who will happily use whatever they find in order to secure their own position. Unlike The Expanse, where galactic society at large was long dead, the Uplift series shows that the galaxy is actually quite densely populated – and that humanity's aggressively self-interested approach flies in the face of thousands of years of galactic tradition.
"Uplift" is a sci-fi concept that appears in more than just the works of David Brin; it's a term used to refer to the practice of an established galactic power helping a less advanced species enter the galactic stage. Think of it as the ideological opposite of Star Trek's infamous Prime Directive.
As the beginning of the series, Sundiver is a story about humanity's initial attempts to collaborate with the galaxy's other sentient races, and turns into a pulse-pounding detective story as a mystery about a possible new species evolving inside the Sun reveals a life-or-death struggle for the fate of the human race. The rest of the books come centuries later, after humanity has better established themselves on the galactic stage.
8 Legend of the Galactic Heroes
By Yoshiki Tanaka (1982)
Dawn, the first volume in Legend of the Galactic Heroes, was a relatively unassuming book when it first released in Japan in 1982, but by the time the series' tenth volume was released in 1988, it had grown in popularity enough to get not just one anime adaptation, but both a film and an OVA series. Since then, LOGH has been adapted into six different anime series, as well as a manga and several stage productions.
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This fundamental classic of Japanese space opera – finally released in English between 2016 and 2019 – is a massive, sweeping saga that feels like the science-fiction equivalent of Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Its rapid shifts from examining the interpersonal lives of the galaxy's movers and shakers to the broad strokes of the war makes for a more omniscient sort of narrative perspective than The Expanse, which may read as dry to some, but for anyone (like me) who enjoys reading historical s of naval battles, LOGH: Dawn will fit the bill perfectly.
9 Consider Phlebas
By Iain M. Banks (1987)
Consider Phlebas was the first in what would become Iain M. Banks' landmark Culture series, a space opera of epic scale. The series' eponymous Culture is a vast, decentralized, and post-scarcity civilization, and often comes into conflict with other galactic powers that are often in the way of the Culture's inscrutable, AI-driven goals.
"Consider Phlebas" is a line from English poet T. S. Eliot's 1922 work The Waste Land, referencing a Phoenician sailor whose death is foretold, and whose corpse is trapped eternally in a whirlpool as a warning about the cyclical futility of life and death, which the novel mirrors with its themes of war's own cyclical futility.
As often became the case with the Culture novels, Consider Phlebas' protagonist is actually an operative acting against the Culture, looking to undermine their efforts due to a severe disagreement with the Culture's ideologies. Interestingly, Consider Phlebas is a very different kind of narrative than The Expanse, in that much of The Expanse's story hinges on James Holden and his influence on politics, while Consider Phlebas was written as a refutation of the sci-fi genre convention of lone protagonists solving problems. As Banks said in Starlog magazine in 1994:
There's a big war going on in [Consider Phlebas], and various individuals and groups manage to influence its outcome. But even being able to do that doesn't ultimately change things very much. At the book's end, I have a section pointing this out by telling what happened after the war, which was an attempt to pose the question, "What was it all for?" I guess this approach has to do with my reacting to the cliche of SF's "lone protagonist." You know, this idea that a single individual can determine the direction of entire civilizations. It's very, very hard for a lone person to do that. And it sets you thinking what difference, if any, it would have made if Jesus Christ, or Karl Marx or Charles Darwin had never been. We just don't know.
10 The Three-Body Problem
By Liu Cixin (2008)
Liu Cixin's book, named after an orbital mechanics problem that has baffled mathematicians and physicists since Isaac Newton himself wrote about it in his Philosophæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, is similar to The Expanse in that it tells a story of humanity's first awkward steps from being isolated on Earth to their becoming a part of galactic politics at large. Unlike The Expanse, however, where humanity merely used what the Ring-Builders left behind to build their own galactic foothold, The Three-Body Problem not only has living aliens, but they have the explicit goal of subjugating and wiping out humankind.
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While The Three-Body Problem was initially published in 2008, it was only made available in an English translation in 2014; the translation won the Hugo Award for Best Novel that year, marking the first time an Asian author recieved that accolade. Netflix's recent adaptation, titled 3 Body Problem, was a smash success, and has been renewed for both a second and third season. Presumably, these will adapt the next two books in Remembrance of Earth's Past, The Dark Forest and Death's End.
The Expanse
- Created by
- Daniel Abraham, Ty Franck
- First TV Show
- The Expanse
- Latest TV Show
- The Expanse
- First Episode Air Date
- December 14, 2015
- Cast
- Steven Strait, Dominique Tipper, Wes Chatham, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Thomas Jane, Cas Anvar, Frankie Adams, Cara Gee, David Strathairn, Keon Alexander
Summary
The Expanse is a critically acclaimed science fiction franchise that originated as a series of novels by James S.A. Corey, the pen name for authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. Set in a future where humanity has colonized the Solar System, the series explores the political, social, and existential challenges faced by the inhabitants of Earth, Mars, and the asteroid belt. The franchise gained widespread popularity with its television adaptation, which ran for six seasons and was praised for its complex characters, intricate storytelling, and stunning visuals.