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

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.

410 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.

422 shared threads

#3

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.

224 shared threads

#4

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Douglas Adams

Earth gets demolished to build a hyperspace bypass, and the last man alive escapes only because an alien researching a galactic encyclopedia needed an assistant.

182 shared threads

#5

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.

192 shared threads

#6

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.

235 shared threads

#7

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.

320 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.

225 shared threads

#9

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.

227 shared threads

#10

Snow Crash

Neal Stephenson

Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for the Mafia, moonlights as a hacker-samurai, and stumbles into a virus that infects minds instead of computers.

213 shared threads

#11

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.

237 shared threads

#12

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.

293 shared threads

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