If what gripped you was Gan’s negotiated bond with T’Gatoi—love tangled with obligation, eggs and grubs making survival literally interspecies—then Embassytown will hit that same nerve. Avice Benner Cho lives among the Ariekei, aliens who can only understand speech produced by paired human “Ambassadors.” When humans introduce a new way of speaking that the Ariekei can’t resist, it upends the fragile balance much like the Terrans’ bargains on the Preserve. The result is a tense unraveling of cohabitation, addiction, and consent between species.

If the power imbalance in Bloodchild—Terrans living under Tlic authority, families trading safety for survival, Gan forced to weigh personal desire against communal pressure—stayed with you, Le Guin’s novella offers a piercing companion. On Athshe, colonizing Terrans brutalize the forest-dwelling Athsheans until Selver leads resistance against Captain Davidson. Like the bargains in the Preserve, every choice tests the costs of coexistence, domination, and revolt.

If you were drawn to the uneasy, tender negotiations between Gan and T’Gatoi—care and control constantly in flux—you’ll appreciate the bond that grows between the anxious, autonomy-seeking SecUnit and Dr. Mensah’s team in All Systems Red. Murderbot begins as a contracted guardian with hardwired constraints, but like Gan choosing how to participate in Tlic reproduction, it must decide what protection, consent, and loyalty mean when the stakes turn lethal.

If Gan’s rite of passage—witnessing T’Gatoi’s grisly surgery, choosing implantation, and redefining family—moved you, Binti offers a resonant journey. Binti leaves her Himba community for Oomza Uni, survives a Meduse attack, and becomes a harmonizer between species, her very body altered (her okuoko-like changes mirror the way T’Gatoi’s brood reshapes Gan’s future). It’s a brave, intimate coming-of-age amid cross-cultural and cross-species peril.

If what lingered for you was the quiet dread under Gan’s choice—loving T’Gatoi while confronting what his body will be used for—then Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go will resonate. Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy grow up in Hailsham only to learn their lives are steered toward donation. Like the Terrans’ bargains on the Preserve, the novel lives in the interior spaces where affection and duty blur, asking how we consent under systems that claim our bodies.