If the collage-like chapters in Goliath—from the brick-hauling crews in ruined New Haven to the off-world returnees sampling neighborhoods like tourists—hooked you, you’ll love the way How High We Go in the Dark drifts across decades and perspectives. Like the salvage scenes and street-level survival you followed on Earth while spacers hovered above, Nagamatsu’s linked stories keep circling back to grief, adaptation, and small acts of care as a plague reshapes society.

You were immersed in Goliath’s climate-scarred Earth—crumbling housing stock, poisoned air, and communities improvising with whatever materials they can scavenge while wealth escapes off-world. The Ministry for the Future widens that lens: from survivors of lethal heatwaves to activists and policymakers, it blends on-the-ground hardship like those New Haven blocks with audacious attempts to remake the world, echoing the tension between those left behind and those with the means to flee.

If what stayed with you from Goliath was the brutal divide between Earthbound survivors and the returning spacers snapping up land—along with the street-level grind of securing food, water, and shelter—then Parable of the Sower will resonate. Lauren Olamina’s trek past walled enclaves and predatory opportunists mirrors those New Haven scenes where neighborhoods are priced out and policed, yet she gathers a fragile community from the ruins, much like the improvised families you saw forming on Earth.

In Goliath, the spacers’ return to Earth feels like a new wave of colonization—shopping for neighborhoods, importing prefab tech, and imposing tastes on those who never left. Le Guin’s novella sharpens that dynamic: human settlers strip a forest world for resources while the Athsheans resist. If the uneasy power plays, cultural erasure, and pushback you saw on those Connecticut streets intrigued you, this story’s confrontation over whose home it really is will hit the same nerve.

You gravitated to Goliath’s human-scale focus—workers salvaging bricks, tenants holding on as wealthier returnees transform their blocks—more than to gadgets or techno-fixes. On Such a Full Sea brings that same soft-SF attention to people and place: following Fan’s journey out of a labor settlement, it explores precarious work, gated privilege, and the stories communities tell about themselves, echoing the everyday survival and quiet defiance that powered those Earthbound chapters.