If Carlton’s dry observations and the way Alex Muscroft and Lewis Ashby keep stumbling from one gig to the next made you laugh, you’ll love the cosmic misadventures of Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Adams serves up the same blend of razor wit, philosophical asides, and improbable detours—from Vogon bureaucracy to a ship powered by improbability—that echo Carlton’s humor theory footnotes and the duo’s chaotic tour across cruise liners and stations.

You enjoyed how The Road to Mars lampoons show business while Alex and Lewis hustle for stage time—often surviving disasters that feel suspiciously scripted—so you’ll click with Redshirts. Scalzi’s characters realize their starship assignments follow absurd TV logic, and they fight back against it. It’s that same gleeful send-up of entertainment conventions that Carlton keeps dissecting as he studies why audiences laugh, only here the characters take on the script itself.

If the heart of The Road to Mars for you was riding along with Alex, Lewis, and Carlton between gigs—meeting oddballs, swapping stories, and letting the humor come from people rather than gadgets—then The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet will hit the spot. A tunneling ship’s crew meanders through the galaxy, building friendships and trading banter as warmly textured as Carlton’s field notes, with stakes that matter because the characters do.

Carlton’s thesis excerpts and academic footnotes give The Road to Mars its delightful patchwork feel. If that mosaic storytelling hooked you—especially alongside the mystery of those shipboard attacks—you’ll be riveted by Illuminae. It unfolds via chat logs, reports, and redacted memos as a besieged fleet fights to survive, capturing that same “read the margins to get the joke and the truth” energy that Carlton brings to the comedians’ Mars-bound tour.

If Carlton—the dutiful robot valet who can’t help turning Alex and Lewis’s chaos into data—was your favorite part, meet Murderbot. In All Systems Red, a security unit with hacked autonomy reluctantly protects a human survey team while liveblogging its disdain and curiosity. The sardonic asides, accidental heroics, and outsider’s-eye view of human foibles mirror Carlton’s role beside the comics, only with more blaster fire and even drier sarcasm.