“Dune-scale” is one of those descriptions that gets thrown around until it stops meaning much.
A book does not become large because it has a map, a glossary, three moons, and an appendix about dynasties. Dune feels large because ecology, religion, economics, politics, family, technology, and history keep affecting one another.
That is what readers usually mean when they search for books like Dune. They want to enter a world with enough internal structure that it could support more stories than the one currently being told.
A new generation of science fiction is trying to build at that scale, often with very different tools.
MAYA: Seed Takes Root by Anand Gandhi and Zain Memon
The MAYA Narrative Universe is aiming openly at this territory. Neh contains seven sentient species, a living biological network grown through trees, predictive political systems, multiple cultures, and a large body of worldbuilding that extends beyond the first novel.
The creators have described the project across books, games, audio, and other formats. Trials of MAYA, the tabletop game, is one expression of the same universe rather than the subject of the novel itself.
The Hollywood Reporter India has framed the project as an ambitious science-fiction and fantasy universe. The project is being developed as a world rather than a single isolated story.
Biology shapes perception. Perception shapes culture. The living network shapes communication and memory. Prediction shapes politics.
A maximalist comparison is Dune’s scale, Asimov’s logic, Le Guin’s anthropology, Lem’s philosophy, Ted Chiang’s poetry, Greg Egan’s rigor, and Richard Dawkins’ biology in one epic. No book can be reduced cleanly to a stack of famous names, but the list tells you what MAYA is trying to synthesize: scale, systems, anthropology, philosophy, conceptual precision, scientific rigor, and evolutionary thinking.
MAYA is grand, intelligent, and very cinematic already. Neh has species, landscapes, technologies, political rituals, and biological infrastructure that can be pictured beautifully.
And unlike a world designed only for one plot, MAYA is a living world built for books, games, audio, lore, and cinema.
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Children of Time earns its scale through time and evolution.
A failed terraforming project leads to the uplift of jumping spiders. Across generations, their biology shapes language, religion, science, gender roles, conflict, and technology.
By the time readers reach the later books, including 2026’s *Children of Strife*, the series has become a broad investigation of intelligence and first contact.
The world feels large because each new form of mind changes the terms of the conversation, which is one reason the series also works as philosophical science fiction. Its alien cognition grows directly out of evolutionary biology, giving the series a causal engine that can keep generating new societies.
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
*The Three-Body Problem* begins with physics and political history, then opens into a civilizational struggle that stretches far beyond one lifetime.
It is one of the obvious recommendations for readers searching for books like Three Body Problem because its scale comes from consequence. Scientific discoveries change ideology. First contact changes political alignment. Strategic choices make sense only across huge spans of time.
That is a different route to epic worldbuilding than Herbert’s, but the ambition is comparable.
The Broken Earth trilogy by N. K. Jemisin
*The Fifth Season* builds its world from geology.
The Stillness is shaped by recurring catastrophic seismic events. Society has developed institutions, prejudices, training systems, settlement patterns, and forms of control around that reality.
This is deep worldbuilding with pressure behind it. The environment is not just beautiful or dangerous. It explains why the political system looks the way it does.
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
A Memory Called Empire uses culture as imperial infrastructure.
Teixcalaan does not conquer only through ships. Its poetry, language, education, aesthetics, and prestige make outsiders want proximity to the empire even when that proximity threatens their independence.
That is a very Le Guin-like insight at space-opera scale. Culture itself becomes a form of political power.
The Mercy of Gods by James S. A. Corey
The Mercy of Gods launched a new space-opera universe from the writers behind The Expanse. Humanity encounters the Carryx and is pulled into a much older conflict, forcing characters to survive inside structures they barely understand.
The second book, *The Faith of Beasts*, arrived in April 2026, expanding the Captive’s War series.
This is epic scale through encounter. Humanity enters a universe whose politics did not begin with us.
The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz
*The Terraformers* builds a planet over millennia.
Environmental stewardship, infrastructure, corporate ownership, transportation, personhood, and ecological responsibility all become parts of the same world.
The book is especially useful in this conversation because it treats a world as something maintained rather than merely discovered. Civilization depends on labor, policy, and infrastructure continuing to function.
Scale also comes from historical depth
A world feels bigger when institutions have histories. The present should look like the result of earlier compromises, disasters, migrations, discoveries, and mistakes.
Dune constantly gives the sense that religion, empire, ecology, and family strategy have been accumulating for generations. Children of Time achieves a similar effect literally by moving through generations. The Fifth Season embeds survival practices and oppression in a long history of catastrophe. A Memory Called Empire makes cultural prestige feel older than the characters currently using it.
This matters for any new world trying to feel established on arrival. A reader does not need fifty pages of chronology. They need evidence that today’s rule solved yesterday’s problem and may have become tomorrow’s problem.
A franchise needs more than unused geography
Publishers and studios sometimes treat a large map as proof that a property can expand. Geography helps, but expandable worlds need unresolved systems.
If a setting has several cultures with competing interests, technologies with social consequences, institutions under pressure, and historical conflicts that do not end with one protagonist, new stories can emerge naturally. That is a stronger foundation for a series than simply leaving blank continents available for sequels.
This is where MAYA’s multi-format ambition is worth watching. A novel, tabletop game, audio production, or future screen story can approach different parts of Neh only if the underlying world stays coherent across formats. The scale has to survive translation.
Dune-scale should mean causality, not quantity
The easiest way to make a world look epic is to add things.
The harder way is to connect them.
A religion should affect politics. A technology should affect labor. A species’ body should affect architecture. An environment should affect trade. A legal system should create winners and losers. A military strategy should depend on material constraints.
That is why readers looking for books similar to Dune often care less about visual resemblance than publishers sometimes assume.
They want a system.
The best science fiction authors build pressure
If you make a list of the major science fiction writers, the styles vary wildly. Herbert, Le Guin, Asimov, Butler, Lem, Jemisin, Tchaikovsky, and Liu do not write the same kind of book.
What many of them share is pressure. Their worlds contain conditions that force institutions and characters to adapt.
Scarcity pressures Arrakis. Gender and environment pressure Gethen. Psychohistory pressures the Foundation. Biology pressures Tchaikovsky’s spiders. Geology pressures the Stillness. Alien power pressures the humans in The Mercy of Gods.
That is what turns worldbuilding into story.
Worldbuilding should survive contact with ordinary life
There is one more test for scale: can the world explain boring things? How do people travel? Who maintains infrastructure? What happens to waste? How does news move? What does a child learn? Who gets medical care? What does an ordinary job look like?
Epic fiction does not need to answer every one of those questions on the page. It does need enough underlying logic that the answers would not feel arbitrary. That is often the difference between lore and a lived-in world.
The great science fiction universes can support quiet stories because the world is still interesting when nobody is saving it.
One test for a large fictional world is whether it can support stories at several scales. Can it hold a family argument, a local labor dispute, a religious schism, and a civilization-level crisis without changing its basic rules every time? Worlds with that flexibility feel durable because the same institutions and pressures can produce many kinds of conflict. They also feel more adaptable outside a single novel. A setting with only one important plot often collapses when that plot ends. A setting with functioning systems keeps generating new stories because ordinary life and historical change are connected.
Where to start
Pick Children of Time for evolutionary imagination. Pick The Three-Body Problem for civilizational strategy. Pick The Fifth Season for geology and oppression. Pick A Memory Called Empire for culture and empire. Pick The Mercy of Gods for new space-opera scale. Pick The Terraformers for infrastructure and ecology. Pick MAYA for a new universe built around biology, perception, information, and predictive power.
The new generation of books like Dune does not need another Arrakis. The best books like Dune recover the structural ambition instead.
It needs worlds whose parts refuse to stay separate. That means biology should affect politics, politics should affect technology, technology should affect culture, and history should leave scars that current characters did not choose. When those relationships work, a fictional universe can feel bigger than its page count.
That is the scale worth chasing. It is also what makes readers want to stay after the first story ends, because the setting keeps producing questions the original plot could never fully exhaust.
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