Novels for Readers Who Like Dune's Politics More Than Its Battles

The politics here is seduction. Mahit Dzmare comes to the Teixcalaanli capital as ambassador for Lsel, a small independent mining station, steeped in the empire's language and verse, and that fluency is both her best tool and her danger, because Teixcalaan wants Lsel and its courtiers make politics out of poetry. Her predecessor is dead, her only guide is an implanted copy of his memories fifteen years out of date, and the ageing emperor's succession is open. Arkady Martine is a historian of Byzantium, and this Hugo-winning debut grew from her research on the empire's annexation of the Armenian kingdom of Ani in 1044. It shows in how patiently an empire can absorb a neighbour that admires it.

The decisive weapon in this book is a ledger. Baru watches the Masquerade take her island through trade treaties, schools, medicine and planned epidemics, and she sets out to master its methods: Seth Dickinson's 2015 debut sends her, a star of its schools, as Imperial Accountant to Aurdwynn, a rebellious province of thirteen duchies, meaning to bring the empire down from inside. Armies do march once the province rises, but the moves that count are made with loans, inflation and a fiat currency, and Dickinson makes them more gripping than most writers' sieges. Know before you start that the ending is savage. For economics treated as statecraft, it has no equal on this list.

A diplomat who cannot read the culture he is sent to persuade is the whole tension of Le Guin's 1969 novel. Genly Ai is the lone envoy of the Ekumen, a league of worlds, sent to invite Gethen to join it: an ice-age planet whose people have no fixed sex and are neither male nor female for most of each month. The king's court in Karhide and the bureaucrats of Orgoreyn each treat him as a lever, and he misjudges both, because both run on shifgrethor, an unspoken code of prestige and face under which even an ally will not tell him plainly that he is one. A long stretch on the ice later in the book trades the courts for something more personal. It won both the Hugo and the Nebula.

Anarres is an arid moon where scarcity writes the rules, and Le Guin is as unsentimental about it as Herbert is about water. Anarchists left the rich planet Urras for it about 170 years before the story begins. Nobody there owns anything, the language discourages possessives, and a drought can send a theoretical physicist to hard labour in the desert for four years. Shevek is that physicist, and he crosses to Urras with a theory its governments badly want. Chapters alternate between the two worlds, weighing what each costs the people who live in it, and the subtitle, An Ambiguous Utopia, is honest: neither society gets off lightly.

Can a kind ruler carry a political novel? Katherine Addison's fantasy says yes. Maia, the unwanted half-goblin son of the elven emperor, has grown up in exile far from court, until an airship crash kills his father and the three sons ahead of him and leaves the throne to an eighteen-year-old who barely knows court manners. Formal speech demands 'we' for 'I', and he keeps fumbling it. His power grows with each lesson in whom to appoint, whom to trust and when to drop the formal pronoun on purpose.

Ada Palmer, a historian of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, imagines an Earth whose centuries of peace rest on a few powerful people and the bargains between them. By 2454 flying cars cross the planet in hours, so nations have given way to seven Hives that people join by choice, and since the Church Wars religion has been restricted, leaving talk of God to sensayers, part priest and part counsellor. The crisis that threatens it is told by Mycroft Canner, a convicted criminal serving his sentence among those leaders, in a deliberately eighteenth-century voice that takes a few chapters to settle into, and he works on you as busily as on them. It is the first of four books and stops abruptly, so have Seven Surrenders to hand.

Ann Leckie's debut is about the manners of empire as much as its machinery. Its narrator, Breq, was once the mind of a troopship, spread through many captured human bodies; now she is down to one and has a grievance against the Lord of the Radch, who rules an annexing empire through thousands of bodies of her own. The Radchaai think bare hands indecent and call everyone 'she', because their language does not mark gender, and Breq's trouble reading the gender and status cues of other worlds shows how deeply that empire shapes the minds that serve it. The two timelines and the pronouns take some adjusting to. It was the first novel to win the Hugo, the Nebula and the Clarke.

Salvor Hardin, the first mayor of Terminus, holds that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, and the book shares his conviction. The Galactic Empire is dying, and the mathematician Hari Seldon's psychohistory, a statistics of whole populations, predicts thirty thousand years of barbarism to follow. His Foundation, a colony of scholars on a remote planet, exists to cut that to one thousand, and each crisis it meets is settled by mayors, priests and traders rather than fleets. Most of the book first appeared as stories in Astounding between 1942 and 1944, so the cast changes every generation or so and nobody has much of an inner life. Read it for the schemes.

If the Fremen plan to make Arrakis green was your favourite thread in Dune, Kim Stanley Robinson gives the same argument a whole planet. His Nebula-winning novel, the first of a trilogy, follows the first hundred colonists sent to settle Mars, and their deepest quarrel is about rock: the geologist Ann Clayborne wants the planet left as she found it, while the physicist Sax Russell wants to warm it, thicken its air and turn it green. Back on Earth, transnational corporations work the loopholes in the treaty that governs Mars, and a dispute between scientists becomes a fight over who the planet is for. Expect more than 500 pages, long stretches of geology and engineering, and a final part that turns violent.