If you were taken by how Jorl’s people guard koph on rain-washed Barsk while an interstellar alliance schemes to seize it, you’ll love how the ocean-dwelling Sharers of Shora use bio-crafted knowledge and consensus politics to resist offworld domination in A Door Into Ocean. Like the Fants, the Sharers’ ethics and ecology are inseparable, and the tension between a pacifist, insular society and a larger empire drives the story’s most gripping confrontations.

If the way Jorl “speaks” with the dead through koph—and the eerie counsel he gets from voices beyond—hooked you, Ubik pushes those questions into a surreal high gear. Its half-life chats with the recently deceased spiral into reality slippage and philosophical riddles about identity and continuity that echo Barsk’s most haunting scenes.

If you relished Barsk’s commitment to making the Fants a fully realized people—with taboos, language, and worldview—Children of Time delivers that same thrill of discovery. Watching Portia’s spider civilization evolve tools, culture, and ethics over generations scratches the same itch as learning how the Fants’ customs around koph shape every choice Jorl and Pizlo make.

If the Alliance’s maneuvering to monopolize koph—and the secret operations swirling around Barsk—kept you turning pages, Ancillary Justice offers a similarly taut web of power plays. Breq’s hunt through the Radch’s corridors of authority reveals how a single asset can tip empires, much like the way koph puts Jorl’s world at the center of interstellar intrigue.

If Barsk’s central dilemma—whether the power to commune with the dead should be used, traded, or hidden—stayed with you, Use of Weapons digs into comparable moral knots. Cheradenine Zakalwe’s missions for the Culture, overseen by Diziet Sma, constantly test where intervention becomes exploitation, echoing the lines Jorl must weigh as koph tempts both salvation and control.