Welcome to /c/ScienceFiction
December book club canceled. Short stories instead!
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I'd reccomend the Bobiverse series by Dennis E. Taylor.
First person narrative that fully embraces its main character as an engineering superstar with galactic level influence.
Yeah, I've been told to reread it since apparently I missed some critical stuff my first time through.
"Planetfall" by Emma Newman might fit your preferences judging by the things you said about books you've read! it's a 4 book series (i think) and mostly deals with the inner psychology of the main character of each book. also has a bunch of engineering in it, mostly hard sci-fi!
Recently, I've been reading the Interdependency series by John Scalzi. It starts with The Collapsing Empire, featuring an unlikely heir to the throne, a time of trouble and strife, and the likely impending doom of all mankind. A lot of the story focuses on the unlikely heir grappling with how to hold things together against the catastrophe that most people don't really believe is coming.
Looks cool! I enjoyed Scalzi's Old Man's War series, will be nice to visit him again.
I'm sure you've read or heard this before, but project hail mary is great. The whole bobiverse series was incredibly satisfying to read and the 5th book is out recently in the form of an audio book. Low pressure, low commitment series thats just full of engineering porn.
Yeah, I loved pretty much all of Andy Weir. I should get back to the Bobiverse. I tried it once and couldn't get into it for some reason. I don't recall the exact details now, and maybe I was misunderstanding something, but there was some stuff about his drones destroying entire solar systems for raw minerals, that just seemed plain nonsensical to me? I guess with all the good things people are saying about it I should go back and figure out what rubbed me wrong the first time.
The Expanse is a great at engineering read. Doubly so for a space opera. Lots of very legit science in the science fiction there.
Oh yes, I love the Expanse. For some reason it doesn't quite strike me as engineering / competence porn though, maybe because there's a big focus on the human side.
Yeah it’s most definitely a space opera. There’s so much good science in there though.
Kim Stanley-Robinson
His Mars trilogy and Science in the Capital are amazing.
He is my favorite hard science fiction writer for the blend of tech, politics, critiques of capitalism, and drama. His novels after those trilogies are good but some people find them fairly long winded and boring in parts... actually I do too, ah well.
Thanks! I bounced off the Mars trilogy. All the petty human drama and politics just felt way too much like current news (which is probably a compliment to his writing skills, but it just wasn’t what I was looking for at the time). I think I probably need a very relaxed state of mind to be able to dive into it.
I recently found the Bobiverse to be a light-hearted read in this category.
Engineer becomes von Neumann probe and has to solve quite a lot of interesting issues while bootstrapping and dealing with settling in the galactic neighbourhood
If you end up searching online for that kind of things, "hard science fiction" is the phrase that's usually used for it.
A lot of good recommendations here. Some endorsements and other recommendations:
On the flip side, I really didn't care for Three Body Problem, and though the Bobiverse books seem fun, I'm not sure I'd call them firmly hard SF.
Hard scifi by Greg Egan is a trip and you'll never be the same afterwards. Permutation City and Diaspora are my favorites.
For more modern take, Children of Time is beautifully narrated and I could listen to it all day for years and never get tired of the narrator.
For a universe that keeps on going with problem solving Vorkosigan Saga is very feel good and I think in line with a book like the Martian albeit a bit less hard though solid on its approach to deduction and wit.
Permutation City
I know he just made it up, but I'm still not sure Dust Theory is wrong.
I need to have a reread of it. The dust concept has always stuck with me.
"Now he was…dust. To an outside observer, these ten seconds had been ground up into ten thousand uncorrelated moments and scattered throughout real time - and in model time, the outside world had suffered an equivalent fate. Yet the pattern of his awareness remained perfectly intact: somehow he found himself, “assembled himself” from these scrambled fragments. He’d been taken apart like a jigsaw puzzle - but his dissection and shuffling were transparent to him. Somehow - on their own terms - the pieces remained connected.
Imagine a universe entirely without structure, without shape, without connections. A cloud of microscopic events, like fragments of space-time … except that there is no space or time. What characterizes one point in space, for one instant? Just the values of the fundamental particle fields, just a handful of numbers. Now, take away all notions of position, arrangement, order, and what’s left? A cloud of random numbers.
But if the pattern that is me could pick itself out from all the other events taking place on this planet, why shouldn’t the pattern we think of as ‘the universe’ assemble itself, find itself, in exactly the same way? If I can piece together my own coherent space and time from data scattered so widely that it might as well be part of some giant cloud of random numbers, then what makes you think that you’re not doing the very same thing?"
The first two thirds of Seveneves is really good at exactly what you describe. Once you get to the third part (you'll recognize it) just pretend the book ended before that.
I was the opposite. The first 2/3 was a slog to get through to reach the inevitable. If people enjoy doomsday scenarios it’ll work for them, thouugh. The last 1/3 was when everything got really interesting for me and ended way too soon.
Seveneves was a wild ride, and I appreciated the way its scope broadened, but I definitely wasn't expecting it.
"Quarter Share: Tales from the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper" is a good one. It's usually not at high stakes as 'The Martian", but it's a journey across a well developed science fiction galaxy with a thoughtfully detailed societies and economies. And keep an eye out for the author, Nathan Lowell, here on the Fediverse. He seems nice.
"The Long Earth" is another in that the starting premise is deceptively simple, and then every social, economic and political upheaval stems directly from the single core science fiction premise.
Neal Stephenson's Seveneves has a lot (A LOT) of orbital mechanics jargon if you're into that sort of thing. Personally, I skipped most of it.