If the way Gunn’s encyclopedia ranges from Olaf Stapledon’s cosmic vistas to entries on space opera and the Shrike-haunted “Time Tombs” hooked you, you’ll love the pilgrimage in Hyperion. It interweaves seven pilgrims’ tales—like the Consul’s tragedy on the ocean world of Maui-Covenant and Father Paul Duré’s harrowing resurrection cycle—against the looming enigma of the Shrike and the entropic Time Tombs, delivering that same panoramic sense of SF possibility with page-turning urgency.

If you lingered over encyclopedia entries on Platonic realism, multiverses, and the lineage from A Canticle for Leibowitz to “monastic SF,” Anathem dives straight into that territory. Following Fraa Erasmus and the cloistered avout, it turns debates about the Halikaarn Cosmology and the nature of “the Hylaean Theoric World” into high-stakes adventure—culminating in a first-contact mission that pays off the book’s cerebral build-up with exhilarating thought experiments.

If you were fascinated by the encyclopedia’s deep dives into ecology-in-SF and the detailed entries on Arrakis—its melange economy, the Bene Gesserit breeding program, and Fremen desert survival—Dune gives you the fully realized experience. Paul Atreides’ journey from Caladan exile to the sand-walks of the deep desert, with water discipline, crysknives, and the sandworm-riding sietch culture, is worldbuilding you can taste and breathe.

If the encyclopedia’s coverage of anthropological SF and the Hainish universe intrigued you—especially notes on Gethen’s ambisexuality and shifgrethor—Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness turns those entries into an intimate, profound story. Genly Ai’s fraught alliance with Estraven across the Gobrin Ice explores diplomacy, identity, and cultural misreadings with the rigor of an ethnography and the heart of a classic.

If you enjoyed how Gunn’s encyclopedia juxtaposes voices—historical snapshots, subgenre overviews, and author profiles—Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar uses a collage of “Tracking with Closeups,” “The Happening World,” and ad-copy snippets to build a living, breathing 2010s. Through threads like Norman House’s corporate maneuvering and Donald Hogan’s reluctant espionage, the book assembles a whole world from fragments, just as those encyclopedia entries do.