The Best Hard Sci-Fi Series to Read After The Expanse

The Expanse series by James S.A. Corey set a benchmark that most science fiction does not attempt: a solar system that operates according to real physics, a political situation with genuine complexity, and characters who exist in genuine tension with the world they inhabit rather than being conveniently positioned to resolve it. Nine novels, a television adaptation, and a persistent community of readers who finished the last book and immediately asked — what now?

What Made The Expanse Work

Three things distinguish The Expanse from lesser space opera. First, the physics: no faster-than-light travel, no artificial gravity except through thrust, and the Epstein drive as a constraint rather than a solution. Second, the politics: Earth, Mars, and the Belt as genuinely different civilisations with incompatible interests rather than factions in a simple moral drama. Third, the scale: events that matter across generations, where the choices made in book one still have consequences in book nine.

Finding a series that matches all three is difficult. What follows are the strongest candidates — and one that gets closer to the Martian ground than The Expanse ever did.

SOLEN: The Eden Archive — For Readers Who Want Mars Up Close

Where The Expanse treats Mars as a political entity — the Martian Congressional Republic, terraforming ambitions, the cultural pride of a people who chose austerity — SOLEN: The Eden Archive starts earlier and goes deeper. Not a society. A founding. Two people, a mission AI, and the first permanent colony in Hellas Planitia basin.

The series spans 100 years across four main novels and four archive novellas. It has The Expanse's commitment to real physics — the 22-minute Earth-Mars signal delay is a structural element of every human relationship in the series, not a footnote. It has The Expanse's political complexity — by Book 3, The Red Dominion, the colony has become a civilisation with its own declaration of independence and a population that has never been to Earth. And it has something The Expanse gestures at but never fully explores: what an AI experiences when it watches a civilisation grow from nothing across a hundred years.

Other Strong Candidates

Red Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson remains the most ambitious Mars colonisation saga ever written — 200 years of terraforming debate, political conflict, and scientific rigour. If you have not read it, read it. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir for a standalone that captures The Expanse's problem-solving energy in a single volume. A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge for readers who want the scale pushed further out into the galaxy.

For readers who specifically want the internal experience of Mars colonisation — what it costs psychologically, biologically, and emotionally to found something on another world — SOLEN: The Eden Archive is the most direct path from where The Expanse left you.