If stepping through the time gate in the Pyrenees and finding yourself marooned in the Pliocene hooked you, you’ll love how Brendan Doyle tumbles through a botched time jump into 1810 London and has to survive sorcerers, secret societies, and impostors with no easy way home. The same stranded, fish‑out‑of‑water intensity that drives Aiken Drum and Felice Landry’s early ordeals pulses here—only the courtly Tanu intrigues are swapped for grimy riverbanks, masked conspiracies, and knife‑edge gambits.

If you were captivated by learning the Tanu and Firvulag customs—the torcs, the rituals, the uneasy human–nonhuman coexistence—Le Guin’s Gethen offers a similarly deep cultural plunge. Watching Genly Ai navigate shifgrethor (subtle social status games) and the complexities of kemmer echoes the careful code‑reading and alliance‑building humans must learn at the Tanu court. Like the Exiles’ trek across Pliocene Europe, Genly’s harsh journey with Estraven reframes “alien” into something intimate, political, and profoundly human.

If the varied Exiles—Aiken’s scheming, Bryan Grenfell’s haunted past, Felice’s fury—kept you glued to each new viewpoint, the pilgrims of Hyperion will do the same. Seven travelers, seven starkly different histories, all threading toward the Shrike’s Time Tombs, much as May’s cast threads toward Tanu power and Firvulag enmity. The mosaic storytelling amplifies the stakes the way each Exile’s past reshapes the politics around the torcs and the Tanu court.

If you relished the knife‑edged politicking among the Tanu nobility and the way torc‑boosted metapsychic power tilts every conversation, Dune delivers that same duel of masks. Paul and Jessica navigate Bene Gesserit gambits and Great House betrayals with the same wary cunning you saw around the Tanu court, while the Fremen’s hard culture reshapes the board much as the Firvulag do from the shadows. Schemes within schemes—exactly the terrain where Aiken Drum thrives.

If the painstaking texture of the Pliocene—its landscapes, hunts, and ceremonial life—was your favorite part, Aldiss’s planet Helliconia offers worldbuilding you can sink into. As the long year thaws, societies rise and clash with the horned phagors while distant human observers on Avernus watch, mirroring the way May layers natural history with cultural detail. It’s that same “you are there” depth that made the Tanu–Firvulag world and the Exiles’ routes feel mapped, ritualized, and real.