If you were drawn to how Valentine Michael Smith’s Martian upbringing lets him interrogate Earth’s taboos—sparking heated debates with Jubal Harshaw and culminating in the Church of All Worlds—then you’ll relish Shevek’s journey in The Dispossessed. A brilliant physicist from an anarchist moon, Shevek travels to a capitalist world and becomes a living critique of both societies. Like Mike “grokking” humanity, Shevek tests every assumption about love, property, and community while pursuing a unifying theory of time. It’s the same heady mix of social challenge and big ideas—just as likely to ignite arguments as insight.

Mike’s struggle to grok human speech, ritual, and nuance—and the way Jubal relies on the cool precision of a Fair Witness—maps perfectly onto the linguistic mind-bender of Embassytown. Avice Benner Cho lives among the Hosts, aliens whose Language can only be spoken with two synchronized human mouths and who don’t understand lying—until humans introduce metaphors that become dangerously addictive. If you loved how Mike’s very different way of thinking exposes Earth culture, you’ll be captivated by how Language itself becomes the battleground for truth, power, and empathy.

If the book’s mockery of televangelist spectacle (the Fosterites), courtroom grandstanding, and media circus made you grin while Mike calmly upended it all, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy turns that impulse up to eleven. From Vogon bureaucracy that demolishes a planet like a zoning dispute to Deep Thought’s deadpan answer to life, the universe, and everything, Adams skewers the same human foibles Heinlein pokes—just with more towels, improbability drives, and gleeful absurdity.

If Mike’s founding of the Church of All Worlds—and the biting send-up of the Fosterite church—hooked you on religion as a lens for society, A Canticle for Leibowitz is a profound next step. Across centuries, monks guard scraps of scientific knowledge, from Brother Francis’s discovery of a relic to the Church’s wrenching choices as civilization repeats old mistakes. Like Mike’s final, martyr-like arc, the novel wrestles with faith, reason, and the cost of salvation with both irony and aching humanity.

If the water-brother household—sharing, cooking, and learning to accept difference—was your emotional center in Stranger in a Strange Land, you’ll feel right at home aboard the Wayfarer. Chambers follows Rosemary, Sissix, Dr. Chef, and a motley tunneling crew as they navigate interspecies etiquette, bigotry, and everyday joys. It carries the same generous spirit as Mike’s nest: people (and aliens) choosing one another, setting new norms, and finding meaning in care as much as adventure.