As an example, I love the Martian, and I think a lot of older books from authors like Asimov are heavily into engineering / competence porn. Other favs in this category include the standalone novel Rendezvous with Rama to leave you wishing for more, most of the Culture series for happy utopian vibes, Schlock Mercenary for humor, Dahak series for fun mindless popcorn.
Edit: I’m so happy to have found a replacement for r/books and the rest of them.
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
Enjoyed project hail mary, but bobiverse didn’t quite do it for me. >!Atheist gets recruited by religious cult. Proceeds to go to planet of the apes to play god. I found it to be mostly ok up to that point though. !<
Religion as portrayed in this book makes the characters very one dimensional. It’s also peppered with references to popular culture, which doesn’t really do that much for me.
I’m a bit confused by this statement. The religious cult stuff takes place in like the first 15% of the first book and is then essentially dropped. What part were you ok with then? Just the 10 pages of Bob 1.0 before he got hit by a car?
There were a lot of fun aspects too though, like bob discovering stuff and making gadgets.
Wow you read a lot more into the religious theme than I did. I found it an exploration of the engineering behind almost every SciFi trope rather than playing god.
And as an atheist I found the religious characterisation entirely adequate, it is a minor part of the characters personality, and it’s only in the obnoxious ones that it becomes dominating. Which is quite close to how it is in my daily life.
But yes, the whole series is made within and to serve nerd culture, it is a long long stream of references and in-jokes at multiple levels, including the main premise. It just happens to also be intelligently written.
I wouldn’t say that there’s a major religious theme. It’s just that Bob doesn’t interact with that many characters except himself, so those interactions felt more important to the plot. Then again, I wouldn’t say that the Brazilian navy AI was a very multifaceted character either.
I’m on the third book now. It’s great nerd/competence porn. I set the 10 minute timer and put my ear buds in at night as I go to bed. I’ve usually drifted off by minute 9, but not because it’s boring or anything, it’s just good listening.
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.
It sounds like you accidentally starter with a later book because what you’ve described is a major plot story being built up for a bit.
From this thread I think you might enjoy it :)
Yeah I’ll give it another look :)