Books like The Martian, according to Reddit

The read-alike list

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

#1

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.

404 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.

373 shared threads

#3

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.

360 shared threads

#4

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.

342 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.

353 shared threads

#6

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.

225 shared threads

#7

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.

168 shared threads

#8

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.

218 shared threads

#9

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.

243 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.

296 shared threads

#11

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.

218 shared threads

#12

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.

187 shared threads

The overlap, in numbers

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

1. #1 Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir — 404 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
2. #2 All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries) by Martha Wells — 373 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
3. #3 Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky — 360 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
4. #4 Dune by Frank Herbert — 342 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
5. #5 Hyperion by Dan Simmons — 353 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
6. #6 Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card — 225 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
7. #7 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams — 168 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
8. #8 Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson — 218 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
9. #9 The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin — 243 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
10. #10 Blindsight by Peter Watts — 296 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
11. #11 The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin — 218 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
12. #12 Foundation by Isaac Asimov — 187 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF