If the microgravity logic of the Smoke Ring—and watching humans puzzle out how integral trees, airflows, and orbital mechanics actually work while Kendy’s legacy looms—hooked you, you’ll love how the Rama survey team methodically deciphers the rotating cylinder’s seas, cities, and lighting cycles in Rendezvous with Rama. It’s the same thrill of cracking a world’s rules to survive and understand it.

If you were fascinated by how Smoke Ring societies adapt to living in tufts and along the vast integral trees—farming, traveling, and fighting in free fall—Clement’s Mission of Gravity gives you another masterclass in worldbuilding where physics rules everything. Mesklin’s crushing gravity shapes its native peoples’ bodies, tech, and tactics as tightly as the Smoke Ring’s orbital winds shape its human tribes.

If scenes like drifting across kilometers-long integral trees or glimpsing the torus’s endless sky gave you goosebumps, Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep delivers that same awe at cosmic scale. From the mind-bending ‘Zones of Thought’ to the pack-mind Tines and their forested world, it pairs big physics ideas with startlingly original life—like seeing the Smoke Ring’s vistas and ecosystems turned up to eleven.

If clinging to life among the Smoke Ring’s predators, storms, and resource scarcities—and the way communities improvise tools and tactics in free fall—kept you turning pages, The Legacy of Heorot will hit the same nerve. Colonists on Avalon face the lethal ‘grendels,’ and survival hinges on reading the biology right, much like parsing the Smoke Ring’s hazards before they eat you.

If you enjoyed following multiple groups across the Smoke Ring—tribes on different trees, travelers, and those still shadowed by the shipmind Kendy—as their choices reshape a frontier, Red Mars offers a similarly rich ensemble. You’ll track Nadia, Maya, Sax, and others as engineering, ecology, and politics collide to build a world from scratch, the way tuft communities engineered life in zero‑g.