Books like Ender's Game, according to Reddit

The read-alike list

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

#1

Dune

Frank Herbert

A duke's son survives his family's betrayal on a desert planet and becomes the prophet who leads its people to war.

410 shared threads · mixed

#2

Hyperion

Dan Simmons

Seven pilgrims journey toward a monster that grants one wish and kills everyone else, and each tells the story of why they came.

422 shared threads · mixed

#3

Foundation

Isaac Asimov

A mathematician predicts the fall of a galactic empire and hides the fix inside an encyclopedia nobody will read for a thousand years.

224 shared threads · panned

#4

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Douglas Adams

Earth gets demolished for a hyperspace bypass minutes after a man's house is demolished for a road, and his best friend turns out to be an alien with a towel.

182 shared threads · praised

#5

Red Rising

Pierce Brown

A miner's son fakes his way into the ruling class's brutal war-games academy to bring down the system that executed his wife.

192 shared threads · praised

#6

The Left Hand of Darkness

Ursula K. Le Guin

An envoy is sent alone to a planet where everyone is genderless most of the month, and he has to unlearn who he assumes is in charge.

235 shared threads · praised

#7

Children of Time

Adrian Tchaikovsky

A terraforming experiment goes wrong, a nanovirus lands on spiders instead of monkeys, and evolution builds a civilization nobody planned for.

320 shared threads · praised

#8

The Martian

Andy Weir

A botanist gets left for dead on Mars and has to grow food on a planet that wants him gone, one duct-taped fix at a time.

225 shared threads · mixed

#9

Neuromancer

William Gibson

A burned-out hacker banned from cyberspace takes one last job to breach the AI that might already own a piece of him.

227 shared threads · praised

#10

Snow Crash

Neal Stephenson

A pizza-delivery samurai and a skateboard courier chase a mind-hacking virus through a franchised, corporate America.

213 shared threads · mixed

#11

The Three-Body Problem

Liu Cixin

A Chinese radio astronomer's decades-old reply to an alien signal puts Earth on a collision course with an invasion fleet centuries out.

237 shared threads · panned

#12

Blindsight

Peter Watts

A crew of post-human specialists meets first contact and reports back that consciousness might be what's holding humanity back.

293 shared threads · praised

The overlap, in numbers

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

1. #1 Dune by Frank Herbert — 410 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
2. #2 Hyperion by Dan Simmons — 422 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
3. #3 Foundation by Isaac Asimov — 224 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
4. #4 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams — 182 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
5. #5 Red Rising by Pierce Brown — 192 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
6. #6 The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin — 235 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
7. #7 Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky — 320 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
8. #8 The Martian by Andy Weir — 225 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
9. #9 Neuromancer by William Gibson — 227 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
10. #10 Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson — 213 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
11. #11 The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin — 237 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
12. #12 Blindsight by Peter Watts — 293 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF