If you loved following Elijah Snow, Jakita Wagner, and the Drummer as they probed things like the Hong Kong "ghost cop" case and the buried kaiju skeleton, you’ll click with the way Inspector Borlú peels back overlapping realities to solve a murder in The City & the City. It delivers that same cool-headed sleuthing into the inexplicable—the feeling you got when Planetary exposed how the world hides its strangest truths, much like the Four burying evidence of super-science—but channeled through a razor-sharp noir mystery that keeps deepening with every clue.

Planetary’s joy is in decoding genre—from Doc Brass’s 1939 shootout in the snowflake engine to kaiju islands and pulp adventurers—and Redshirts brings that same meta thrill to space opera. If the issue where the team dismantles the secret architecture behind superhero archetypes hit your sweet spot, you’ll love how Scalzi pulls the curtain on expendable crew logic, then pushes further with clever, heartfelt twists that question how stories shape the people inside them.

The way Planetary stitches a hidden 20th-century history—from analogs of the Fantastic Four to suppressed super-tech—finds a kindred spirit in The Difference Engine. If the revelation of the Four’s stranglehold on innovation and the team’s globe-spanning digs into buried timelines grabbed you, this alt-Victorian thriller will scratch the same itch, showing how a single technological leap can rewires politics, culture, and conspiracy on a grand scale.

If you enjoyed Planetary’s single-issue expeditions—one week unearthing a kaiju graveyard, the next confronting a 1930s pulp myth—Chiang’s collection delivers that same satisfying burst of discovery. Each story, like Planetary’s best cases, presents a precise mystery and then unspools it with elegance and wonder; "Story of Your Life" in particular mirrors the book’s blend of heady concept and human awe that Elijah Snow keeps chasing.

Planetary thrives on awe—the snowflake computer, the multiversal pulp lineage, the Four’s covert empire—and Hyperion delivers that same cascade of big, mind-bending reveals. If the Doc Brass adventure made you feel like the world was vaster and stranger than anyone admits, the Shrike pilgrimage tales will hit hard: each narrative opens a door to a bigger secret history, building toward the kind of cosmic tapestry Planetary keeps hinting lies just out of sight.