Books like Dune, according to Reddit

The read-alike list

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

#1

Hyperion

Dan Simmons

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

928 shared threads

#2

Foundation

Isaac Asimov

A mathematician predicts the empire's collapse centuries out and plants a colony at the galaxy's edge to shrink the coming dark age from thirty thousand years to one.

411 shared threads

#3

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.

451 shared threads

#4

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.

410 shared threads

#5

Children of Time

Adrian Tchaikovsky

A nanovirus meant to uplift monkeys lands on spiders instead, and eight thousand years later the last human survivors arrive looking for a new Earth.

565 shared threads

#6

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.

385 shared threads

#7

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.

429 shared threads

#8

Neuromancer

William Gibson

A washed-up hacker gets his nervous system rebuilt for one last job, in a world Gibson invented before the internet existed to copy it.

397 shared threads

#9

The Lord of the Rings

J. R. R. Tolkien

A gardener and three friends carry a cursed ring across a continent at war, because the only way to destroy it is to walk it into the volcano that forged it.

278 shared threads

#10

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.

522 shared threads

#11

Red Rising

Pierce Brown

A low-caste miner surgically altered to pass as the ruling elite infiltrates the academy that killed his wife, planning to burn the system down from inside.

309 shared threads

#12

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.

436 shared threads

The overlap, in numbers

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

1. #1 Hyperion by Dan Simmons — 928 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
2. #2 Foundation by Isaac Asimov — 411 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
3. #3 The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin — 451 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
4. #4 Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card — 410 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
5. #5 Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky — 565 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
6. #6 The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin — 385 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
7. #7 The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin — 429 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
8. #8 Neuromancer by William Gibson — 397 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
9. #9 The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien — 278 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
10. #10 Blindsight by Peter Watts — 522 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
11. #11 Red Rising by Pierce Brown — 309 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
12. #12 All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries) by Martha Wells — 436 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF