Books like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, according to Reddit

The read-alike list

Ranked by co-mention strength — how often each book shares a thread with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, normalized so ubiquitous books don't dominate.

#1

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.

182 shared threads

#2

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.

228 shared threads

#3

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.

168 shared threads

#4

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.

161 shared threads

#5

Hyperion

Dan Simmons

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

239 shared threads

#6

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.

142 shared threads

#7

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.

153 shared threads

#8

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.

211 shared threads

#9

Slaughterhouse-Five

Kurt Vonnegut

Billy Pilgrim comes unstuck in time, bouncing between a WWII POW camp, a Tralfamadorian zoo, and his own suburban optometry practice, all at once.

74 shared threads

#10

Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury

A fireman whose job is burning books meets a girl who keeps asking why, and can't stop asking himself the same question afterward.

67 shared threads

#11

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.

127 shared threads

#12

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.

137 shared threads

The overlap, in numbers

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

1. #1 Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card — 182 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
2. #2 All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries) by Martha Wells — 228 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
3. #3 The Martian by Andy Weir — 168 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
4. #4 Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson — 161 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
5. #5 Hyperion by Dan Simmons — 239 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
6. #6 Foundation by Isaac Asimov — 142 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
7. #7 Neuromancer by William Gibson — 153 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
8. #8 Dune by Frank Herbert — 211 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
9. #9 Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut — 74 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
10. #10 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury — 67 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
11. #11 The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers — 127 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
12. #12 The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin — 137 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF