Books Like The Murderbot Diaries: 12 Sci-Fi Reads (2026)

Apple renewed Murderbot for Season 2 almost a year ago and still hasn't given us a premiere date. I've read the series, reviewed the show as a book reader, and hit the bottom of my SecUnit queue. If you're in the same spot, this list is what I'd hand you.

One thing before the list. "Books like Murderbot" is the wrong question, because nobody misses all of Murderbot equally. You miss a specific thing about it, so I've sorted this list by exactly that, and every book here is one I've actually read, with my rating attached.

(New to the series? Start with my Murderbot reading order guide instead, especially now that Platform Decay is out and the series runs eight books deep.)

If you miss the snarky machine narrator

Most lists answer this with "books with robots." What you actually want is a machine with a voice. (I dug into why that voice works in my Artificial Condition review.)

Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky (5/5)

The closest voice match on this list. Uncharles is a robot valet who loses his employer, in a way I won't spoil, and wanders a collapsing world looking for someone whose shirts he can iron. The comedy comes from watching impeccable service protocols collide with the apocalypse.

Where Murderbot copes with sarcasm, Uncharles copes with task queues. When his sidekick the Wonk diagnoses him with the Protagonist Virus and asks how being his own robot makes him feel, he answers "nothing," then allows that if feeling were an option, the pertinent emotions would be fear and anxiety. Five stars in my full review, and I'd give a sixth for the chapter titles alone, which smuggle Kafka, Orwell, and Dante in as robot serial numbers.

We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor (5/5)

Bob signs up for cryonic preservation, dies crossing the street, and wakes up a century later as the AI of an interstellar probe owned by a theocracy. His response is roughly "well, this is happening," followed by self-replication and increasingly nerdy names for his clones. A machine narrator who ends up more humane than the people who built him, which is the same trick Murderbot pulls.

I gave it five stars and started book two the same night. I'm five books into the Bobiverse now and the voice still lands, so start here and pace yourself.

Skyward by Brandon Sanderson (5/5)

This one is YA, and it's dogfights rather than corporate survey contracts, but M-Bot belongs in the snarky AI hall of fame. He's a wrecked stealth ship Spensa scavenges back to life, with her friend Rig doing the actual engineering, and his memory holds exactly one order, to lie low and wait for a pilot who never came back. He fills the gap by obsessively cataloging mushrooms, with complete sincerity and zero explanation.

Spensa drives the plot. M-Bot steals the book. I read the whole series through Defiant and the banter holds up to the end.

If you miss the reluctant hero who'd rather be watching media

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman (5/5)

Goodreads' algorithm already routes Murderbot fans here, and for once the algorithm is right. Carl gets dragged into an alien game-show apocalypse in his boxers, chasing his ex's cat, and spends the rest of the series protecting people while insisting he is not a hero. Sound familiar?

The dungeon's AI announcer is also the most chaotic machine personality this side of ART, and Jeff Hays' narration of him is reason enough to take this one in audio. I've written a full list of 19 books like Dungeon Crawler Carl if this one hooks you the way it hooked me.

Starter Villain by John Scalzi (4/5)

Charlie wants to buy a pub. Instead he inherits his uncle's supervillain business, complete with spy cats who turn out to be schemers in their own right, dolphins with a labour dispute, and a funeral where rival villains show up just to confirm his uncle is really dead. He spends the entire book trying to opt out of his own story, which is the most Murderbot energy a fully human protagonist can have.

It's lighter than anything else here, and Wil Wheaton's narration earns the audio pick, as I said in my review. Read it between heavier books, the way Murderbot watches Sanctuary Moon between contracts.

If you miss the humans worth protecting

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (5/5)

No snark, no androids, but the exact feeling of Murderbot slowly admitting it cares. Ryland Grace wakes up alone on a ship with no memory and humanity's survival on a deadline, and the friendship he builds mid-crisis is the best first contact I've read. "Fist my bump" has been stuck in my head since 2021.

The Ryan Gosling movie landed in March, but the friendship works better on the page, where you're inside Grace's head for every wrong guess. If the ART-and-Murderbot dynamic was your favorite part of the series, this is your book. I've written about why Network Effect is where the series starts over, and this scratches the same itch.

To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini (4/5)

Kira bonds with an alien symbiote and spends the book terrified of what her own body might do to the people around her, which is Murderbot's whole interior life with the serial numbers filed off. As a bonus, the Wallfish's ship mind Gregorovich, a human brain wired into the ship after an accident left his body beyond repair, talks in pithy, half-mad one-liners after years stranded alone in the dark.

It's 880 pages, the opposite of novella pacing. Save it for when you want to live inside one story for a month.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers (3/5)

Every other "books like Murderbot" list reaches for the Wayfarers books first. Book Riot recommends them, and so does every library readalike list I checked. I read this one and gave it three stars, and I'd rather tell you why than pretend otherwise.

The found-family warmth is real and the Wayfarer's crew is easy to love. What's missing is everything else Murderbot does: the deadlines, the danger, the sense that caring about humans costs something. If you miss the people of Preservation, you'll like it; if you miss being scared for them, you won't.

If you miss the novella pacing

The Dispatcher by John Scalzi (4/5)

Murderbot proved I'll take a tight novella over a bloated 600-page epic any day. The Dispatcher runs on one sharp premise, 999 times out of a thousand anyone who is murdered comes back, so a legal profession now exists to kill the dying as a mercy. Tony Valdez works that gray zone the way Murderbot works security contracts, reluctantly and very well.

The sequel, Murder by Other Means, is just as lean. Both are also exceptional in audio, which is how I read most of this list anyway.

If you want more nonhuman minds

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky (5/5)

Less funny, more awe. An uplift experiment goes sideways and you spend generations inside the minds of spiders building a civilization, complete with ant-colony computers.

The spiders talk through their webs and learn math from a satellite they worship as a god, and somewhere past the halfway mark I caught myself rooting against my own species.

The Humans by Matt Haig (5/5)

An alien lands in Cambridge wearing the body of a math professor who just proved the Riemann hypothesis, with orders to erase every trace of the discovery. It arrives convinced humans are the most repulsive species in the galaxy, then peanut butter sandwiches, Emily Dickinson, and a dog named Newton start sabotaging the mission. Watching it argue itself out of the assignment is the same pleasure as watching Murderbot pretend it doesn't care about its clients.

It's the least sci-fi book here, and the one I'd hand to someone who doesn't read sci-fi at all. The "Advice for a human" chapter near the end justified the five stars I gave it by itself.

Old Man's War by John Scalzi (4/5)

John Perry joins the army at 75 and gets a new body with a neural implant, which he promptly names Asshole. The body comes in photosynthetic green, with nanobot blood the military actually brands as SmartBlood. The book is warmer than its military sci-fi shelf suggests, and the BrainPal banter will feel familiar to anyone who enjoyed Murderbot's running commentary on its own hardware.

It's also the oldest book here, from 2005, and it has aged better than most of its decade.

Where to start

If you want the voice, Service Model. If you want the feeling, Dungeon Crawler Carl, and I say that as someone who put off reading it for a year because the title sounded silly.

And if you found this list without actually finishing the series, the reading order guide will sort you out, and Platform Decay is already waiting for you at the end of it. Murderbot would tell you to stop reading about it and go watch media instead. Don't listen.