If the long arc from the Overlords’ arrival to humanity’s surrender to the Overmind gripped you—especially Jan Rodricks returning just in time to witness Earth’s children transcending—then you’ll love how Star Maker scales that awe up to the entire cosmos. A lone traveler’s mind fuses with ever-larger collectives, surveying civilisations across eons, until it contemplates a universe-spanning intelligence much like the Overmind that absorbs Earth at the end of Childhood’s End.

If Karellen’s opaque motives and the Overmind’s unknowability left you pondering what “understanding” even means, Solaris will scratch that itch. On a station above the planet Solaris, a sentient ocean conjures living replicas of the crew’s most intimate memories, forcing psychologist Kris Kelvin to confront the limits of human perception—much as humanity misreads the Overlords’ devilish appearance and misconstrues their role in shepherding Earth toward its final metamorphosis.

If you were fascinated by the Overlords’ careful, arms-length management of Earth—and how humans constantly project their own fears and myths onto them—Embassytown digs into that dynamic through language itself. Avice Benner Cho navigates a colony where the alien Hosts speak a Language humans can only voice through paired Ambassadors; when a new Ambassador’s speech disrupts the Hosts, an entire society teeters. It echoes how Earth’s reliance on the Overlords—and New Athens’s pushback—reverberates in unpredictable, world-changing ways.

If the Overlords’ benevolent control—banning space research, ending war, guiding culture—made you wrestle with the cost of imposed peace, Le Guin’s novella offers a sharper, ground-level counterpoint. On Athshe, Terran colonists enforce order and extraction while figures like Captain Davidson and Raj Lyubov clash over the natives’ fate. The Athsheans’ resistance, and the moral price of intervention, mirror the tensions that flare in Childhood’s End when New Athens rejects Karellen’s “care” and pays dearly for autonomy.

If you loved the heady wonder of world-changing forces—the Overlords’ sudden peace, Jan’s secret voyage to the stars, and the elegiac finale as Earth’s children join the Overmind—Spin delivers that same vertigo. One night the stars vanish behind a membrane that accelerates time outside; as Tyler, Jason, and Diane race to understand and outlast a cosmic plan, humanity attempts audacious projects to survive and evolve, building toward a payoff that resonates with Clarke’s bittersweet transcendence.