I posted this on Reddit a while ago and it sparked some really good discussion and recommendations.
I really like The Expanse - as it doesn’t just discuss the attempted terraforming of Mars and the colonisation of the Main Asteroid Belt but also
spoiler
the way that these communities decline when abundant habitable planets are discovered, where life is much easier.
So yeah, what are your best examples?
I’m currently working through Alastair Reynolds books.
House of Suns was the one I started with, and it’s still my favourite. It centers around several “families” or “houses” that travel around the galaxy, and due to the time dilation of spending 99.9% of their time zooming around at near light speed, they live through time at a different scale.
By the time they come back to some given location, thousands of years of local time have passed. Hence, they can only form a social circle with each other. Their trading partners are entire civilisations. They collect technology and knowledge over millennia into “troves”, turning them into god-like entities in relation to the greater universe.
Alastair’s other books, set in the Revelation Space universe, also explore this idea. Interstellar travellers are considered a separate faction unto themselves. The “Ultras” and are so different, even physically, that some of their members can barely be recognized to be human.
Aside from that concept, I also enjoyed the Revelation Space spinoff books, The Prefect and Elysium fire, which are set in the Yellowstone systems demarchist society, far before the events of the main books. Essentially, its a real-time democracy. As brain implant tech allowed perfect digital to mind communication, the demarchists were people who exercised a form of society where the entire population was neurally polled on any given matter. Everyone votes, non-stop, on everything. No laws set in stone. Democratic anarchy.
I don’t want to spoil anything, but suffice to say Reynolds has become a favourite. He thoroughly explores both the good and the bad of these ideas, and tells some cool character driven stories along the way.
A friend of mine asked if I’d ever read his stuff, not knowing the can of worms they’d opened. He’s my favorite living author hands down.
For a really unrelated book I think you might still enjoy from the general gist of your comment, The Worthing Chronicles is one I really enjoyed but took me a long time to come across.
I’ll add it to the list. I go through books at a pace of about two a month, and I really don’t wanna run out.
I feel that. I’m always fretting when I approach the end of my current book about what comes next after exhausting so many of the ones I’m interested in.
Another sleeper to check out is The Star Diaries by Stanislaw Lem.
I’ll have to return the favor now. I hope you haven’t read Cage of Souls by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It’s sci-fi, but the characters don’t know that. It’s like a fantasy story to them, but not the reader. They live on an aging earth, where human society has forgotten most knowledge.