If you loved how A Darkling Sea wrings tension and wonder from real constraints—crushing pressure, total darkness, sound-as-vision, and the treaty rules that force clandestine dives—Blindsight doubles down on that uncompromising, idea-dense science. Watts throws a crew of specialists at a truly alien encounter where biology, cognition, and sensor limits matter at every turn, much like the Ilmataran expeditions where every choice under the ice has life-or-death consequences.

The way A Darkling Sea lets you live inside Ilmataran minds—mapping a world by echoes, building knowledge through tactile tools, and clashing with human taboos—finds a grand echo in Children of Time. You’ll get that same thrill of watching an alien society bloom from first principles, generation by generation, the way the Ilmatarans’ science and culture unfold alongside fraught human contact beneath the ice.

If the braided viewpoints in A Darkling Sea—humans juggling a non‑interference pact, Ilmataran scholars pursuing knowledge, and Sholen factions arguing over intervention—kept you hooked, A Fire Upon the Deep scales that multiplicity up. Vinge hops across humans, aliens, and far-flung locales, letting cultural misunderstandings and mismatched tech levels drive suspense the way secret dives and contested treaties do beneath Ilmatar’s ice.

Loved how A Darkling Sea burrowed into Ilmataran perception—communication by sound, science built for darkness, and the painstaking effort to bridge that gap without breaking the rules? Embassytown is a tour de force of first contact via language itself. It captures the same careful, boots-on-the-ground (or fins-in-the-water) worldbuilding and the peril that comes when a cultural constraint—like that non‑interference pact with the Sholen—gets pushed too far.

If the diplomatic knife’s edge in A Darkling Sea—humans bound by a treaty, Sholen infighting over intervention, and consequences spiraling from a single deadly encounter with Ilmatarans—was your catnip, Foreigner delivers that pressure-cooker politics. Cherryh’s human interpreter must navigate court factions and alien protocol with the same care your favorite researchers used during those forbidden dives and precarious negotiations under the ice.