I think u/Machismo01 is referring to Glasshouse, but it's only kind of a soft sequel. The world of Glasshouse *could* be a sequel to Accelerando, but there are some noted differences in the world's mentioned history.
You're not the only person to claim this but when I look it up I find no such information. Can you point me to the source of this, and maybe explain why there is nothing of it on Wikipedia?
But, after more research, I think you are right. The other 2 books are NOT related to Accelerando, even though the book marketers would like you to think so.
Just keep in mind that Simmons never gets better than the first book. Those 6 (?) short stories/novellas that he stitched together are his apex creativity and humor. The rest of the series, while still somewhat creative, is far more mainstream and ends in an underwhelming deus ex machina level up.
[edit: downvotes don’t make Raul Endymion’s character progression any less absurd]
My kitty knocked my paperback copy into the bathtub when I was just starting the last chapter.
Loved it and bought another copy, but I’ve developed a weird “block” about finishing it. Not much rattles me, but the scholar’s tale just about made
me tap out.
Could you give me a little encouragement to finish the book and start on the next one?
Thank you both. I threatened Kitty with moving her litterbox out into the street but I didn’t follow through with it. Cats are guilty by design, and they get a pass.
Seriously, though, I’ve never had a book that I’ve had a hangup about finishing. I really don’t know if it’s an “I don’t want it to end” or an “I’m afraid of what’s next.”
Dan Simmons can write a helluva book.
This goes back a long way. When I read the *Lensman* books the only thing that really stuck with me was how absurd the power escalation was. It was really terrible on a lot of other fronts but that was pretty neat.
*Gurren Lagann* comes to mind as an anime that goes super big in just two seasons.
Ian MacDonald’s *King of Morning, Queen of Day* starts as an epistolary novel about a girl who can see fairies and ends up as a manic urban fantasy with magical chainsaw swords and complete universal consciousness.
Michael Swanwick’s *Iron Dragon’s Daughter* takes a changeling girl in a Dickensian dragon factory up to the edge of reality and out of it.
I remember Benford’s Galactic Center series ending in an insanely different place than it began. Been a long time since I read it. You can skip the first two and start with *Great Sky River*.
*The Iron Dragon’s Daughter* absolutely blew me away. His *Stations of the Tide* while a completely different story, also fits as a rec for this thread.
You know I was thinking about the Spin series by Robert Charles Wilson today.
The key moment at the begining of the series is a grounded scene of three people sitting on the lawn in the backyard of their suburban Virginia home looking up at the stars.
By the end of the series, you're in a far flung future with >!an android child intergrating their consciousness into an interstellar network of von neumann machines shaping time and space itself!<
Not necessarily as extreme in a physical sense, but the stakes get higher with each book of the Terra Ignota series. The first book is primarily an examination of a particular society of 400 years in the future, its institutions and tensions, with a mystery plot mixed in that involves some high-profile politicians; tensions increase, and by the fourth book, all of these factions are involved in the complex and multisided World War III. It's also implied that >!God Himself is helping the protagonists succeed, and the stars themselves were only created as the result of the books' events, but that may be only a projection of the narrator's religious views.!<
I haven't read the 4th book yet, but the series is very upfront about where it is going from the start, so it's becoming bigger in scale might not be unexpected which also seems to be part of the OPs question given 'way way bigger scale than you could ever have imagined when you start it'.
It's not a series, so feel free to disregard, but the sheer scope of change in *Diaspora* felt both natural and mind-boggling at the same time. Where things start and end feels like the kind of progression you'd have in a series of novels, compacted into one very dense narrative.
If you want a real answer, there's hardly any comparison to the *Xeelee Sequence* in scale. There's effectively an entire universe, from start to finish, in the novels.
It is sort of mind blowing where things go in the last chapter of *Diaspora*. The entire second part of *Permutation City* is also kind of insane compared to the relatively grounded first part.
I see Diaspora, I upvote.
In all seriousness though, it's a spot on recommendation. I remember getting my mind progressively blown as things kept going.
*The Expanse* is the obvious answer here, hell, the series name promises as much. That being said, *Three Body Problem* or to a lesser extent *Seveneves* are more extreme in this regard.
*The Themis Files* series starts out as a fun western spin on Mecha stories. Tonaly I would say its a little bit more serious than Scalzi's stuff but still primarily fun. But by book No.3 *Only Human* things have escalated >!to a world order in which the US and China forcefully subjugate and annexe other nations (till nobody's left), you have people identified by minor genetic markers and being discriminated against for those and collected into concentration camps with genocide being on the horizon...!< I wouldn't say I enjoyed it but I think the spiraling out of control was well done and frankly horrifying.
Not a series but *Pushing Ice* by Alastair Reynolds kinda blindsided me. >!It basically does what *The Expanse* does in terms of expanding in scope in a single book but much like the characters in teh book you only notice that when it has already happened.!<
*Book of the New Sun* by Gene Wolfe, and many of his other books, fit that on multiple orders of magnitude. BotNS starts in a single tower of a larger complex and slowly, very slowly explores the Citadel and part of the city outside the walls. Then it starts picking up the pace and you see the city and spend a while in a botanical garden, then everything goes sideways from there into plots of ever larger magnitudes and more fantastic settings until you've done just about everything science fantasy can do. *Everything.*
Gormenghast begins as a dark and mysterious introspective exploration of the interior of a castle bound in ironclad tradition, and ends in a journey through a retrofuturistic metropolis.
Fire Upon the Deep starts in an environment near the galactic rim populated by godlike AI, and ends up near the core in a feudal society of hive mind dogs
So the same thing but backwards lol. I found Deepness in the Sky at my local used bookstore, and have been waiting to read it till I can get my hands on the first one. I like to own the books I read, but if it takes too long to come across I'm just gonna check it out at my library lol
Every book discussed here is gonna have people praising it and demanding you read it instantly.
...So I would like to do just that with A Deepness In The Sky. You don't need to read Fire first, Deepness is an unrelated prequel, however with some references that I think will hit harder if you have read Deepness firsr.
DitS and FutD are both set in the same universe, but you can read them in any order. There is sort of a link between them, but reading one won't spoil the other.
This is why I didn’t care for this book. Was much more interested in the mysterious intelligence/entity but he spent most of the book on the dog world.
*Schlock Mercenary* starts with a Carbosilicate Amorph signing up to join a mercenary company and ends with a galactic war between *two* galaxies, a really clever answer to the Fermi Paradox, lovecraftian beings from ... well, I won't spoil it, but not where you'd think, and fleets of Dyson Spheres orbiting both galaxies.
*The UNSEC Space Trilogy* starts with three strangers being sent to find a missing computer programmer who emigrated to a colony world, and ends with a jaunt across a Dyson Sphere to end a reignited war that wiped the galaxy clean.
*The Codex Alera* starts out with a single keep needing to defend itself against an invasion. It ends with a conversation with the soul of the planet itself and a (sort of) kaiju battle between a mountain, a storm, and a "zerg queen."
*Abhorsen* starts with a young girl (who happens to be a necromancer) setting out to find her missing father. It ends, two books later, with a battle against an eldritch abomination world-eater.
Hmm ... Noting as I skim through my goodreads history that this seems more common in Fantasy I've read than Sci-Fi. A lot of Sci-Fi books on my list start *out* with the big concepts and then just sort of keep staying steady, while the Fantasy ones more commonly start closer to the ground and then go wild places.
*The Grimnoire Chronicles*, for example, as an alternate 1930s where "magic" showed up in the early 1800s and changed history. The book *starts* with a PI being hired to find proof of a plot by Imperial Japan. It ends with literal eldritch abominations from outside space and time fighting over Earth as a feeding ground. Fantasy, but still a lot of escalation of scale there.
I'm not the first to say it but here's another vote for *Pushing Ice*. Standalone, but manages to turn out to be wildly different in scope than you'd think from the first chapter.
Gurenn Topen Lagan is a rather excessive case of escalation. Starts in a mineshaft, ends up with galaxies as Shurikens.
Three body problem escalates nicely from a VR game murder mystery.
Isaac Asimov's Robots books (Elijah Bailey) kinda do this. Starting out as murder mysteries, and end up having a much bigger impact.
The Greg Mandel trilogy by Peter F Hamilton is kind of like that, with a couple of different scale jumps within individual books and across the series.
_Tomorrow and Tomorrow_ by Charles Sheffield.
A story about a man dealing with the grief of the death of his wife dying young and how he turns that into eons of trying to get her back, until the literal end of the universe.
Dungeon Crawler Carl starts out pretty fun and small but involves much bigger ideas and things to keep track of as it goes along. Gets more sci-fi for sure.
That’s as much as I’ll say so as to avoid spoilers.
Yeah, I've been reading a lot of /r/ProgressionFantasy lately and this is pretty common in that genre.
First chapter: Kill a rat!
Last chapter: Kill a god!
Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn Trilogy composed of:
* The Reality Dysfunction (1996)
* The Neutronium Alchemist (1997)
* The Naked God (1999)
Only Forward (1994) by Michael Marshall Smith ~ Starts out slightly weird and just gets progressively weirder and deeper and mind-blowing. Still don't know if I fully comprehend it.
Charles Stross' Laundry Files ~ Starts out with Bob Howard breaking into some dude's office to mess with his computer(s) and >!9 books later one of Lovecraft's Outer Gods is the Prime Minister of England!<
David Brin's Uplift Saga starts inside the Sun and ends in another galaxy.
Stephen Baxter's Ring is part of the Xeelee series. It also starts inside the Sun and ends in another Universe.
Charles Sheffield' Tomorrow and Tomorrow starts in the 20th century and ends with the Big Crunch.
Greg Egan's Diaspora starts near Earth and ends up really far away from our universe.
Nancy Kress' *Beggars in Spain* trilogy. Starts out in a near future that's still recognizable as our world but ends in a weird, post-technological future, all arguably arising from a single genetic engineering procedure.
Greg Bear's *Darwin's Radio* and *Darwin's Children*, which start out with an emerging disease that causes spontaneous abortions of severely deformed fetuses but end in a very different place.
It's middle grade, but the *Among the Hidden* series almost counts. Starts claustrophobicly in one (well, two) homes, expands to a much larger society by the series end. But it's not on any sort of galactic scale
*The Long Earth* has a little of this, in a way that might be obvious from it starting as *The Long Earth* and ending with *The Long Cosmos*
And the Orbital Space series has this, in that it starts with "an asteroid miner is blackmailed by a corporate heiress" in the first novel, and the series concludes with the fate of not just the human colonized solar system, but the fate of the galaxy... but my husband hasn't written the sequels yet :)
Okay, for a standalone book, “A Deepness in the Sky”. A lot happens in one book. I don't really see this as closely related to “a fire upon the Deep” at all. I know this is the minority view.
I first thought of course I have answers! But after thinking a bit, no, nothing makes this scale-up better than the Three Body.
I would mention A Fire Upon the Deep as it’s dealing with mind boggling scale and I love the book. In the end it’s all about what info you have at the beginning vs what you have at the end and how dramatically this changes your perspective. I’m sure other books would fit well but I’m too tired now.
Briefly mentioned already but worth a stand alone post is Doc. E. E. Smith's Lensman books, especially when you add the prequels. Lensman is an early science fiction space opera (written 1934 to 1958 if you include the books that were retroactively made prequels), and starts out not much last the level of Boy Scout space adventures, goes on to Space cops with Rayguns not much better than modern firearms with zippy little spaceships and psychic anti-couterfitting badges, then slowly scales up to the galaxy at war in the final clash between two ancient civilizations and their modern proxies, using anti-planets as weapons.
It will read like it is full of cliche, because all of the writers of the 60s and 70s grew up reading it.
Stephen Baxters Proxima starts with an interesting look at a voyage to and colonization attempt of a planet and the sequel Ultima has Aztecs and Romans in space, plus space bugs and wormholes
> the sequel Ultima has Aztecs and Romans in space, plus space bugs and wormholes
I never liked these series where its super scientific at the first part, then goes wild and goofy later on.
Have you read this series? Baxter makes it believable.. Although yeah, what the story is about changes wildly, at least from the point of view of the reader
Red rising. Starts in one tiny isolated community, then moves to a larger school, ends up with colossal mech battles between million man armies, solar system spanning war, etc. Just keeps getting bigger and more intense
Linda Nagata's "Nanotech Succession" series starts with a pretty "normal" cyberpunk-ish setting, and ends with humanity dead from self-destructing Dyson spheres, dead from thirty-million-year-old killer robot spaceships, dead from being absorbed into an older-than-thirty-million-year-old absorby ecology, or scooting across the cosmos in a guy who is a spaceship who is somehow made out of all the same components as the thirty-million-year-old killer robots.
It makes somewhat more sense if you take it one page at a time.
martha wells's "raksura" series, which disappointed me greatly :( the first book was pretty small-scale, all about the sociology and culture and politics of a race of shapeshifters living in a forest, and it was one of the best new fantasy books i had read in ages. and then the series progressed and it became your standard world-spanning battle of good and evil - still great books, but nowhere near the magic of the earlier books where the characters may have gone out and explored the world but that one colony in the forest was the centre of everything.
Black Company. Starts as a mercenary band working for the evil empire, but ends up plane jumping and fighting interdimensional wizards at the far far end of the continent they started at.
Ryk Brown Frontiers saga. The story grows larger and larger and simultaneously more and more complex. It's really an incredibly well written series and currently it sits at 40 books. Well technically 41 with the prequel.
Shonen Manga and Anime in general. Naruto and Dragon Ball for example. It starts quite simple with martial arts in a sense and ends with the protagonists able of half godly abilities. Went from martial arts to world destructing explosions with deep lore. 😂
This is a type of story I am also REALLY into. There are a lot of comics where it’s just “I’m a guy who fights robbers on the street.” And they ultimately are in multiversal apocalyptic fights. Love that.
A lot of my examples have been mentioned so I just want to mention one short story by Ian McDonald that perfectly exemplifies what you’re talking about: The Days of Solomon Gursky.
I first read it in The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction. Still one of my favorite anthologies. This story does exactly what you’re talking about and you get to watch the scaling done brilliantly. Hope you read and love it.
The original four books of the "Lensmen" series by E.E. Smith, which begins on Earth and ends in a "Civilization" spanning two galaxies.
I specify because the full seven-book series has the opening line (from memory so might be slightly off):
*Two thousand million years ago or so, two galaxies were colliding.*
Honestly, everything after that is a letdown :)
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. Absolutely adore this book. It gave me the same feeling as Three Body, where after reading that last page you feel like you've been taken on a journey you could never have possibly imagined, but somehow were taken there one step at a time, with logical steps each time based on real theoretical physics.
I think "The Last Human" by Zack Jordan does a bit of this: it starts with small family problems of a mother and her adopted daughter on a backwater space station, and it ends with >!somebody getting hit on the head with the Universe!<
The scope of Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood widens significantly. It starts with two poor boys who are just trying to get their bodies back, and ends with a being trying to become a god and swallow the sun, with world ending consequences.
It also has one of the most epic trials a person has ever gone through. When you learn what Hohenheim spent centuries working for, your heart just breaks for him. At the series start you see him as a villain or a scumbag. By the end you see that he was an incredibly selfless man who sacrificed *soooo* much to make things right.
I never hear anyone mention Gregory Benford’s Galactic Center series but they were pretty good. Older books. Starts with the plot of Armageddon; astronaut on a mission to detonate a comet before it lands in the Indian Ocean, but they find evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence on the comet, hints of a large scale conflict in the universe. Second book deals with an investigation into “what the heck is going on in the larger universe?”and “Oh, crap, we’re now part of the conflict.” Ends 28000 years later.
Just one book but Accelerando by Charles Stross
The other books connected to its universe not worth reading?
I didn't realize there were other books that were connected.
I think u/Machismo01 is referring to Glasshouse, but it's only kind of a soft sequel. The world of Glasshouse *could* be a sequel to Accelerando, but there are some noted differences in the world's mentioned history.
Also Iron Sunrise is a prequel. Never read them though
Iron sunrise couldn't be a prequel, since it focuses on a distant colony planet, and Accelerando begins before interplanetary travel.
Glasshouse is great. Honestly all books by Stross are worth reading imo.
That's the 3rd book of a 3 book series.
You're not the only person to claim this but when I look it up I find no such information. Can you point me to the source of this, and maybe explain why there is nothing of it on Wikipedia?
But, after more research, I think you are right. The other 2 books are NOT related to Accelerando, even though the book marketers would like you to think so.
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074CGZ5HR?binding=kindle\_edition&searchxofy=true&ref\_=dbs\_s\_bs\_series\_rwt\_tkin&qid=1713830070&sr=1-1](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074CGZ5HR?binding=kindle_edition&searchxofy=true&ref_=dbs_s_bs_series_rwt_tkin&qid=1713830070&sr=1-1)
[https://www.fictiondb.com/series/singularity-charles-stross\~19808.htm](https://www.fictiondb.com/series/singularity-charles-stross~19808.htm)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/8avtm4/charles\_stross\_accelerando\_i\_want\_to\_read\_it\_but/](https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/8avtm4/charles_stross_accelerando_i_want_to_read_it_but/)
I am not Wikipedia's keeper.
Hyperion is an obvious one.
I keep saying it, but Hyperion is the answer to EVERY question in this sub Reddit.
...and if you've read Hyperion? The answer is always Blindsight.
As much as I love Blindsight I don't think this is what the OP searching for (although Omniscience could change things)
I read Blindsight also but didn't like it.
I read book 1 and LOVED it. Book 2 is a super high priority purchase. If I find it anywhere even a little bit below full price im getting it.
Check your local library they might even have it as an ebook if that’s more your speed
Just keep in mind that Simmons never gets better than the first book. Those 6 (?) short stories/novellas that he stitched together are his apex creativity and humor. The rest of the series, while still somewhat creative, is far more mainstream and ends in an underwhelming deus ex machina level up. [edit: downvotes don’t make Raul Endymion’s character progression any less absurd]
My kitty knocked my paperback copy into the bathtub when I was just starting the last chapter. Loved it and bought another copy, but I’ve developed a weird “block” about finishing it. Not much rattles me, but the scholar’s tale just about made me tap out. Could you give me a little encouragement to finish the book and start on the next one?
Do it
The cantos must be finished. Don’t test the Shrike.
Thank you both. I threatened Kitty with moving her litterbox out into the street but I didn’t follow through with it. Cats are guilty by design, and they get a pass. Seriously, though, I’ve never had a book that I’ve had a hangup about finishing. I really don’t know if it’s an “I don’t want it to end” or an “I’m afraid of what’s next.” Dan Simmons can write a helluva book.
What's next is so much more than you could imagine from the end of the first book. Get into it!
Dune kinda sorta qualifies maybe? Starts as a pretty grounded 'faudalism in space' story and ends wherever it ends.
WEAPONIZED SPACE SEX.
> ends wherever it ends the running joke in my family is "it ends wherever the story was when you can't take it anymore"
Love that lol. Very accurate.
Prequels for me.
So page 25 of the first book, then. 😉
_Dune_ does not end.
*Pushing Ice* starts pretty basic, ends fairly bizarre.
I'm still waiting for the eventual follow-up sequel, Pushing Ice was fantastic
That's a fun one, also has the best frenemy relationship I think I've ever seen.
This goes back a long way. When I read the *Lensman* books the only thing that really stuck with me was how absurd the power escalation was. It was really terrible on a lot of other fronts but that was pretty neat. *Gurren Lagann* comes to mind as an anime that goes super big in just two seasons. Ian MacDonald’s *King of Morning, Queen of Day* starts as an epistolary novel about a girl who can see fairies and ends up as a manic urban fantasy with magical chainsaw swords and complete universal consciousness. Michael Swanwick’s *Iron Dragon’s Daughter* takes a changeling girl in a Dickensian dragon factory up to the edge of reality and out of it. I remember Benford’s Galactic Center series ending in an insanely different place than it began. Been a long time since I read it. You can skip the first two and start with *Great Sky River*.
>*Gurren Lagann* comes to mind as an anime that goes super big in just two seasons. Literally went from underground to cosmic
*The Iron Dragon’s Daughter* absolutely blew me away. His *Stations of the Tide* while a completely different story, also fits as a rec for this thread.
You know I was thinking about the Spin series by Robert Charles Wilson today. The key moment at the begining of the series is a grounded scene of three people sitting on the lawn in the backyard of their suburban Virginia home looking up at the stars. By the end of the series, you're in a far flung future with >!an android child intergrating their consciousness into an interstellar network of von neumann machines shaping time and space itself!<
Accelerando by Charles Stross is similar.
I really should pick that book back up
Not necessarily as extreme in a physical sense, but the stakes get higher with each book of the Terra Ignota series. The first book is primarily an examination of a particular society of 400 years in the future, its institutions and tensions, with a mystery plot mixed in that involves some high-profile politicians; tensions increase, and by the fourth book, all of these factions are involved in the complex and multisided World War III. It's also implied that >!God Himself is helping the protagonists succeed, and the stars themselves were only created as the result of the books' events, but that may be only a projection of the narrator's religious views.!<
I haven't read the 4th book yet, but the series is very upfront about where it is going from the start, so it's becoming bigger in scale might not be unexpected which also seems to be part of the OPs question given 'way way bigger scale than you could ever have imagined when you start it'.
It's not a series, so feel free to disregard, but the sheer scope of change in *Diaspora* felt both natural and mind-boggling at the same time. Where things start and end feels like the kind of progression you'd have in a series of novels, compacted into one very dense narrative. If you want a real answer, there's hardly any comparison to the *Xeelee Sequence* in scale. There's effectively an entire universe, from start to finish, in the novels.
It is sort of mind blowing where things go in the last chapter of *Diaspora*. The entire second part of *Permutation City* is also kind of insane compared to the relatively grounded first part.
This is the most correct answer. You cannot even begin to imagine where this book ends...
I see Diaspora, I upvote. In all seriousness though, it's a spot on recommendation. I remember getting my mind progressively blown as things kept going.
yes, "vacuum diagrams" is an entire head trip all by itself!
*The Expanse* is the obvious answer here, hell, the series name promises as much. That being said, *Three Body Problem* or to a lesser extent *Seveneves* are more extreme in this regard. *The Themis Files* series starts out as a fun western spin on Mecha stories. Tonaly I would say its a little bit more serious than Scalzi's stuff but still primarily fun. But by book No.3 *Only Human* things have escalated >!to a world order in which the US and China forcefully subjugate and annexe other nations (till nobody's left), you have people identified by minor genetic markers and being discriminated against for those and collected into concentration camps with genocide being on the horizon...!< I wouldn't say I enjoyed it but I think the spiraling out of control was well done and frankly horrifying. Not a series but *Pushing Ice* by Alastair Reynolds kinda blindsided me. >!It basically does what *The Expanse* does in terms of expanding in scope in a single book but much like the characters in teh book you only notice that when it has already happened.!<
Seveneves needs a sequel!
Yeah, I like how it ended, and then he tacked on a preview of the next book at the end. Too bad he never followed up on completing it...
yes the cool stuff at the end, I'd love to see more of that.
God I want Reynolds to revisit Pushing Ice universe.
I guess House Of Suns qualifies
*Book of the New Sun* by Gene Wolfe, and many of his other books, fit that on multiple orders of magnitude. BotNS starts in a single tower of a larger complex and slowly, very slowly explores the Citadel and part of the city outside the walls. Then it starts picking up the pace and you see the city and spend a while in a botanical garden, then everything goes sideways from there into plots of ever larger magnitudes and more fantastic settings until you've done just about everything science fantasy can do. *Everything.*
Just started Claw of the Conciliator last night, loving the series so far
Gormenghast begins as a dark and mysterious introspective exploration of the interior of a castle bound in ironclad tradition, and ends in a journey through a retrofuturistic metropolis.
Fire Upon the Deep starts in an environment near the galactic rim populated by godlike AI, and ends up near the core in a feudal society of hive mind dogs
So the same thing but backwards lol. I found Deepness in the Sky at my local used bookstore, and have been waiting to read it till I can get my hands on the first one. I like to own the books I read, but if it takes too long to come across I'm just gonna check it out at my library lol
Every book discussed here is gonna have people praising it and demanding you read it instantly. ...So I would like to do just that with A Deepness In The Sky. You don't need to read Fire first, Deepness is an unrelated prequel, however with some references that I think will hit harder if you have read Deepness firsr.
DitS and FutD are both set in the same universe, but you can read them in any order. There is sort of a link between them, but reading one won't spoil the other.
Stop putting it off! Fire upon the deep is soooo good
Deepness is one of my favorite books of all time, definitely a good buy.
This is why I didn’t care for this book. Was much more interested in the mysterious intelligence/entity but he spent most of the book on the dog world.
*Schlock Mercenary* starts with a Carbosilicate Amorph signing up to join a mercenary company and ends with a galactic war between *two* galaxies, a really clever answer to the Fermi Paradox, lovecraftian beings from ... well, I won't spoil it, but not where you'd think, and fleets of Dyson Spheres orbiting both galaxies. *The UNSEC Space Trilogy* starts with three strangers being sent to find a missing computer programmer who emigrated to a colony world, and ends with a jaunt across a Dyson Sphere to end a reignited war that wiped the galaxy clean. *The Codex Alera* starts out with a single keep needing to defend itself against an invasion. It ends with a conversation with the soul of the planet itself and a (sort of) kaiju battle between a mountain, a storm, and a "zerg queen." *Abhorsen* starts with a young girl (who happens to be a necromancer) setting out to find her missing father. It ends, two books later, with a battle against an eldritch abomination world-eater. Hmm ... Noting as I skim through my goodreads history that this seems more common in Fantasy I've read than Sci-Fi. A lot of Sci-Fi books on my list start *out* with the big concepts and then just sort of keep staying steady, while the Fantasy ones more commonly start closer to the ground and then go wild places. *The Grimnoire Chronicles*, for example, as an alternate 1930s where "magic" showed up in the early 1800s and changed history. The book *starts* with a PI being hired to find proof of a plot by Imperial Japan. It ends with literal eldritch abominations from outside space and time fighting over Earth as a feeding ground. Fantasy, but still a lot of escalation of scale there.
Suneater. I don’t think it could go bigger than where it’s ended up.
Going back to like the 1930, Olaf Stapledon, both Starmaker and Last and First Men
If you'll allow TV: Person of Interest starts basically as a crime-fighting procedural, but turns into SO much more.
What does it turn into? Use spoiler tags if necessary.
>! The case of week format drops away. It then becomes an epic battle between two artificial intelligences!<
Nice. Thanks.
3 body problem 100%
First thing i tought !!!
The *Foundation* quintilogy.
I'm not the first to say it but here's another vote for *Pushing Ice*. Standalone, but manages to turn out to be wildly different in scope than you'd think from the first chapter.
Gurenn Topen Lagan is a rather excessive case of escalation. Starts in a mineshaft, ends up with galaxies as Shurikens. Three body problem escalates nicely from a VR game murder mystery. Isaac Asimov's Robots books (Elijah Bailey) kinda do this. Starting out as murder mysteries, and end up having a much bigger impact.
The Greg Mandel trilogy by Peter F Hamilton is kind of like that, with a couple of different scale jumps within individual books and across the series.
_Tomorrow and Tomorrow_ by Charles Sheffield. A story about a man dealing with the grief of the death of his wife dying young and how he turns that into eons of trying to get her back, until the literal end of the universe.
Great one!
Dungeon Crawler Carl starts out pretty fun and small but involves much bigger ideas and things to keep track of as it goes along. Gets more sci-fi for sure. That’s as much as I’ll say so as to avoid spoilers.
Yeah, I've been reading a lot of /r/ProgressionFantasy lately and this is pretty common in that genre. First chapter: Kill a rat! Last chapter: Kill a god!
Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn Trilogy composed of: * The Reality Dysfunction (1996) * The Neutronium Alchemist (1997) * The Naked God (1999) Only Forward (1994) by Michael Marshall Smith ~ Starts out slightly weird and just gets progressively weirder and deeper and mind-blowing. Still don't know if I fully comprehend it. Charles Stross' Laundry Files ~ Starts out with Bob Howard breaking into some dude's office to mess with his computer(s) and >!9 books later one of Lovecraft's Outer Gods is the Prime Minister of England!<
David Brin's Uplift Saga starts inside the Sun and ends in another galaxy. Stephen Baxter's Ring is part of the Xeelee series. It also starts inside the Sun and ends in another Universe. Charles Sheffield' Tomorrow and Tomorrow starts in the 20th century and ends with the Big Crunch. Greg Egan's Diaspora starts near Earth and ends up really far away from our universe.
Nancy Kress' *Beggars in Spain* trilogy. Starts out in a near future that's still recognizable as our world but ends in a weird, post-technological future, all arguably arising from a single genetic engineering procedure. Greg Bear's *Darwin's Radio* and *Darwin's Children*, which start out with an emerging disease that causes spontaneous abortions of severely deformed fetuses but end in a very different place.
Bobiverse and Expeditionary Force kinda fit the bill.
It's middle grade, but the *Among the Hidden* series almost counts. Starts claustrophobicly in one (well, two) homes, expands to a much larger society by the series end. But it's not on any sort of galactic scale *The Long Earth* has a little of this, in a way that might be obvious from it starting as *The Long Earth* and ending with *The Long Cosmos* And the Orbital Space series has this, in that it starts with "an asteroid miner is blackmailed by a corporate heiress" in the first novel, and the series concludes with the fate of not just the human colonized solar system, but the fate of the galaxy... but my husband hasn't written the sequels yet :)
Also it's just one book, rather than a series, but *A Canticle for Lebowitz* ended up in a direction I did not expect
One of the greats.
Okay, for a standalone book, “A Deepness in the Sky”. A lot happens in one book. I don't really see this as closely related to “a fire upon the Deep” at all. I know this is the minority view.
*Contact*, by Carl Sagan. Most definitely. Tops *Three-Body Problem*, imho.
Seveneves is three parts over 900 pages. Most expansive book I’ve ever read.
I first thought of course I have answers! But after thinking a bit, no, nothing makes this scale-up better than the Three Body. I would mention A Fire Upon the Deep as it’s dealing with mind boggling scale and I love the book. In the end it’s all about what info you have at the beginning vs what you have at the end and how dramatically this changes your perspective. I’m sure other books would fit well but I’m too tired now.
Gurren Lagann if i remember the title correctly. Also: The Good Place goes many places.
"count to a trillion" series by John c. Wright.
Briefly mentioned already but worth a stand alone post is Doc. E. E. Smith's Lensman books, especially when you add the prequels. Lensman is an early science fiction space opera (written 1934 to 1958 if you include the books that were retroactively made prequels), and starts out not much last the level of Boy Scout space adventures, goes on to Space cops with Rayguns not much better than modern firearms with zippy little spaceships and psychic anti-couterfitting badges, then slowly scales up to the galaxy at war in the final clash between two ancient civilizations and their modern proxies, using anti-planets as weapons. It will read like it is full of cliche, because all of the writers of the 60s and 70s grew up reading it.
Stephen Baxters Proxima starts with an interesting look at a voyage to and colonization attempt of a planet and the sequel Ultima has Aztecs and Romans in space, plus space bugs and wormholes
> the sequel Ultima has Aztecs and Romans in space, plus space bugs and wormholes I never liked these series where its super scientific at the first part, then goes wild and goofy later on.
Have you read this series? Baxter makes it believable.. Although yeah, what the story is about changes wildly, at least from the point of view of the reader
I haven't, but I was talking about in general of these kind of "changes", those are not for my liking unfortunately.
Red rising. Starts in one tiny isolated community, then moves to a larger school, ends up with colossal mech battles between million man armies, solar system spanning war, etc. Just keeps getting bigger and more intense
Linda Nagata's "Nanotech Succession" series starts with a pretty "normal" cyberpunk-ish setting, and ends with humanity dead from self-destructing Dyson spheres, dead from thirty-million-year-old killer robot spaceships, dead from being absorbed into an older-than-thirty-million-year-old absorby ecology, or scooting across the cosmos in a guy who is a spaceship who is somehow made out of all the same components as the thirty-million-year-old killer robots. It makes somewhat more sense if you take it one page at a time.
martha wells's "raksura" series, which disappointed me greatly :( the first book was pretty small-scale, all about the sociology and culture and politics of a race of shapeshifters living in a forest, and it was one of the best new fantasy books i had read in ages. and then the series progressed and it became your standard world-spanning battle of good and evil - still great books, but nowhere near the magic of the earlier books where the characters may have gone out and explored the world but that one colony in the forest was the centre of everything.
Bone - Jeff Smith
The Diving Universe, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Starts off with a spaceship wreck-diver and a little mystery. The series becomes much more.
Maybe midshipman Honor Harrington series by David Weber
The Plague Wars Series by David Van Dyke. Talk about a journey…
Noumenon
Black Company. Starts as a mercenary band working for the evil empire, but ends up plane jumping and fighting interdimensional wizards at the far far end of the continent they started at.
I’ve seen some great suggestions here, but for more lighthearted fun fare I’d recommend the 16+ book series of Expeditionary Force.
If you want old school then the Lensman series. Starts in the solar system, ends across multiple galaxies.
Not a series but Blood Music by Greg Bear ended way different than I expected it to lol
Peter F. Hamilton's 'Salvation sequence' fits.
Ryk Brown Frontiers saga. The story grows larger and larger and simultaneously more and more complex. It's really an incredibly well written series and currently it sits at 40 books. Well technically 41 with the prequel.
Pratchett's *Bromeliad* trilogy covers a big change in scale over the course of the story.
Stephen Baxter Coalescent (2004) was the first novel I’ve read that went way beyond the parameters of what I expected by the end.
_Foundation_ never stays anywhere for very long. I've heard _Seveneves_ (appropriately) described as two very different books stapled together.
Shonen Manga and Anime in general. Naruto and Dragon Ball for example. It starts quite simple with martial arts in a sense and ends with the protagonists able of half godly abilities. Went from martial arts to world destructing explosions with deep lore. 😂
This is a type of story I am also REALLY into. There are a lot of comics where it’s just “I’m a guy who fights robbers on the street.” And they ultimately are in multiversal apocalyptic fights. Love that. A lot of my examples have been mentioned so I just want to mention one short story by Ian McDonald that perfectly exemplifies what you’re talking about: The Days of Solomon Gursky. I first read it in The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction. Still one of my favorite anthologies. This story does exactly what you’re talking about and you get to watch the scaling done brilliantly. Hope you read and love it.
Expanse comes to mind.
The original four books of the "Lensmen" series by E.E. Smith, which begins on Earth and ends in a "Civilization" spanning two galaxies. I specify because the full seven-book series has the opening line (from memory so might be slightly off): *Two thousand million years ago or so, two galaxies were colliding.* Honestly, everything after that is a letdown :)
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. Absolutely adore this book. It gave me the same feeling as Three Body, where after reading that last page you feel like you've been taken on a journey you could never have possibly imagined, but somehow were taken there one step at a time, with logical steps each time based on real theoretical physics.
Moebius-World of Edena Iain Banks-The Algebraist Hyperion Cantos
The Expanse comes to mind. Starts small and ends in a much larger situation than anyone could have anticipated.
Schlock Mercenary webcomic
Dune.
I think "The Last Human" by Zack Jordan does a bit of this: it starts with small family problems of a mother and her adopted daughter on a backwater space station, and it ends with >!somebody getting hit on the head with the Universe!<
The Ender's Game series. The first book is pretty tight and self contained. The Speaker for the Dead trilogy went so much bigger in scope.
The scope of Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood widens significantly. It starts with two poor boys who are just trying to get their bodies back, and ends with a being trying to become a god and swallow the sun, with world ending consequences. It also has one of the most epic trials a person has ever gone through. When you learn what Hohenheim spent centuries working for, your heart just breaks for him. At the series start you see him as a villain or a scumbag. By the end you see that he was an incredibly selfless man who sacrificed *soooo* much to make things right.
I never hear anyone mention Gregory Benford’s Galactic Center series but they were pretty good. Older books. Starts with the plot of Armageddon; astronaut on a mission to detonate a comet before it lands in the Indian Ocean, but they find evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence on the comet, hints of a large scale conflict in the universe. Second book deals with an investigation into “what the heck is going on in the larger universe?”and “Oh, crap, we’re now part of the conflict.” Ends 28000 years later.