Books like Children of Time, according to Reddit

The read-alike list

Ranked by co-mention strength — how often each book shares a thread with Children of Time, normalized so ubiquitous books don't dominate.

#1

Blindsight

Peter Watts

A crew of post-human specialists, one of them a resurrected vampire, gets sent to first contact and finds aliens that may not be conscious at all.

683 shared threads

#2

Hyperion

Dan Simmons

Seven pilgrims travel together to a planet that kills, each one carrying the private story of why they volunteered to go.

701 shared threads

#3

Project Hail Mary

Andy Weir

A dying astronaut wakes up alone on a spaceship with amnesia, two corpses for company, and Earth's one shot at survival riding on him.

432 shared threads

#4

The Three-Body Problem

Liu Cixin

A disillusioned physicist's daughter answers a signal from another star and invites the invasion of Earth out of spite for humanity.

506 shared threads

#5

All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries)

Martha Wells

A security android with no interest in gender, romance, or heroics just wants to watch its shows, and ends up saving its clients from a conspiracy anyway.

506 shared threads

#6

Dune

Frank Herbert

Paul Atreides survives his family's massacre on a desert planet and becomes the messiah the empire engineered him to be, then has to live with it.

565 shared threads

#7

The Left Hand of Darkness

Ursula K. Le Guin

A human envoy crosses a glacier on foot with the one alien on the planet capable of ambisexuality, and neither of them trusts the other yet.

377 shared threads

#8

The Martian

Andy Weir

A botanist gets left for dead on Mars after a dust storm and has to grow his own food to survive until the next mission arrives, years later.

360 shared threads

#9

Ender's Game

Orson Scott Card

A child prodigy recruited into Battle School at six ends up commanding real war fleets, believing until the end that it's all just a simulation.

320 shared threads

#10

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

Becky Chambers

A ragtag crew tunnels a hole through space for a living, and the alien passenger they're ferrying turns the trip into a slow-burn found-family story.

289 shared threads

#11

The Fifth Season

N. K. Jemisin

An orogene comes home to find her son beaten to death and her daughter gone, the same day a continent starts splitting apart.

255 shared threads

#12

The Dispossessed

Ursula K. Le Guin

A physicist from an anarchist moon travels to the capitalist planet his people fled, carrying a theory of time that could unite both worlds or arm one of them.

301 shared threads

The overlap, in numbers

Where each pairing actually shows up. Click through for the full Reddit verdict on each book.

1. #1 Blindsight by Peter Watts — 683 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
2. #2 Hyperion by Dan Simmons — 701 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
3. #3 Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir — 432 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
4. #4 The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin — 506 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
5. #5 All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries) by Martha Wells — 506 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
6. #6 Dune by Frank Herbert — 565 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
7. #7 The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin — 377 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
8. #8 The Martian by Andy Weir — 360 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
9. #9 Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card — 320 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
10. #10 The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers — 289 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
11. #11 The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin — 255 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
12. #12 The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin — 301 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF