If your favorite part of Defiant was Spensa’s evolving bond with M-Bot—the quips, the trust, and the thorny questions about identity—you’ll click with Zara Cole’s connection to Nadim, a living Leviathan starship. Nadim isn’t just transport; he’s a friend who jokes, worries, and chooses. Watching Zara and Nadim outmaneuver human authorities and alien threats echoes those high-adrenaline sorties and intimate cockpit conversations you loved with Spensa and M-Bot.

If Skyward Flight’s camaraderie in Defiant—Spensa leaning on FM, Kimmalyn, and the rest during impossible calls—gave you the warm fuzzies, you’ll love how the Wayfarer crew becomes family. Rosemary, Ashby, Sissix, and Dr. Chef face tense jobs and cultural frictions, but the heart is in the meals, the jokes, and the loyalty that forms under fire, much like those bunker-side debriefs and squad-room pep talks on Detritus.

If the cytonic feats in Defiant—those mind-bending jumps, delver-space perils, and power bounded by strange rules—hooked you, Ninefox Gambit will scratch the same itch. Kel Cheris fights with mathematics that literally reshape reality, guided by the razor-witted ghost of Shuos Jedao. The way calendrical technology bends physics feels like cytonics turned up to eleven, with tactical puzzles as tense as Spensa’s split-second choices in the nowhere.

If you loved how Defiant barrels forward on a clear objective—Spensa and crew racing to stop existential threats from the nowhere while keeping their people alive—this delivers that same white-knuckle momentum. Commander Adequin Rake and Cavalon Mercer must hold the crumbling edge of the universe together, improvising the way Skyward Flight does when plans break mid-sortie. Every chapter feels like one more desperate maneuver before the hull gives.

If Defiant’s mix of the Superiority’s species and the unfathomable delvers captivated you, Vinge’s tapestry of alien consciousness will blow your sensors. You’ll encounter the pack-mind Tines, skroderiders, and galaxy-spanning Powers as Ravna and Pham Nuwen race to stop the Blight. The sheer strangeness—and the sense of wonder and dread—mirrors those moments when Spensa realizes just how inhuman the forces beyond the nowhere really are.