If you loved how Yalda iterates real mathematics to solve propulsion and survival in The Clockwork Rocket, you’ll click with Blindsight. Siri Keeton’s crew dissects the alien artifact “Rorschach” using brutal empiricism—EEG arrays, evolutionary game theory, and neurocognitive models—while contending with the inhuman “Scramblers.” The book keeps the same relentless, idea-first momentum, swapping orthogonal spacetime for razor-edged biology and information theory.

You spent a whole book living inside the Racem’s alien assumptions—three-sex reproduction, different optics, and engineering that follows their physics. In Embassytown, Avice Benner Cho navigates the Ariekei’s city where “Language” can only be spoken by paired mouths and literal truth, and where similes are created by staging living metaphors. Watching Hosts become addicted to lies echoes the same thrill of seeing culture and cognition emerge from biology, just as Yalda’s world springs from its alternate physics.

If the orthogonal spacetime of The Clockwork Rocket delighted you—the way sail design, medicine, and even reproduction pivot on different physics—Mission of Gravity offers that same rigor. On the fast-spinning world Mesklin, gravity ranges from hundreds of g at the poles to far less at the equator. Barlennan, a native trader, undertakes a perilous trek to recover a crashed probe, and every choice—speed, route, tools—follows directly from Mesklin’s unforgiving mechanics.

Egan asks you to rethink causality and even personhood as Yalda pushes her people toward the Peerless. Solaris presses the same philosophical nerve: psychologist Kris Kelvin arrives at the ocean planet and confronts an intelligence that manifests his dead lover, Harey. The question becomes not “How do we talk to it?” but “What does comprehension even mean?”—a cerebral, unsettling inquiry that echoes the big conceptual stakes you enjoyed.

If the payoffs of deriving new physics with Yalda—right down to ship design and the launch—hooked you, Anathem offers a similarly rich climb. Erasmas, a monk‑scholar in a cloistered “mathic” community, is pulled into debates on cosmology and consciousness that spill into an off‑world mystery. The book layers proofs, invented terminology, and thought experiments until the late revelations snap into place with the same satisfying click.