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.
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.
Several books in the League of Peoples series (start with Expendable) have this. Festina Ramos is competent AF without going into Mary Sue territory.
The Sten series (Allan Cole & Chris Bunch, military-ish sci-fi) has a fantastically competent lead.
Huh, it’s not often I get series recs that I’ve never even heard of before. Thanks, will check them out!
Sten is from the late 80s, Expendable from late 90s. :). And there’s a shaggy dog story in the Sten books that’s takes… 4 books, I think, to get the punchline. LOL.
Just finished Exodus: The Archimedes Engine on audible. Space opera with a lot of world building. A bit slow to get started, but I really enjoyed it.
Argh. Peter Hamilton. Don’t all his books end with deus ex machinas? I got so annoyed at how Night’s Dawn ended that I’ve avoided all his books ever since.
I’ll agree on Night’s Dawn, but his Pandora Star series is still one of my favourite series and good competence porn. The characters aren’t stupid and actually solve problems and predict events.
“Quarter Share: Tales from the Age of the Solar Clipper” is agood 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.
I really loved the concept and worldbuilding of the Long Earth. However I felt that the books didn’t focus as much on the nitty-gritty as I’d like, instead becoming really metaphysical. I’d have loved to see how every aspect of society changed over time, but instead got a human interest story about a few people. Fun, but ultimately I felt like a lot of potential was wasted.
Solar Clipper looks like some nice cozy slice of life SF, will put that on my list for when I’m in the mood for that :)
Agreed on “The Long Earth”. It was fun, but on the light side of what the premise begs for.
I keep hoping we get more entries that explore the possibilities even further.
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
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 :)
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.
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 found it to be mostly ok up to that point though.
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?
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.
The Fountains of Paradise It’s literally an SF love letter to engineering.
Also there are two (or three?) sequels to Rendezvous with Rama.
Greg Bear’s Eon/Eternity and The Forge of God/Anvil of Stars are all engineering delight.
2001, 2010, 2051, 3001 are great classics.
There are no sequels to Rama. I wish there were, but there aren’t. Odyssey series is a classic, yeah.
Currently reading and enjoying Eon, so Greg’s my next month of reading I guess! Will check out Fountains after that.
There are no sequels to Rama.
There’s only six Dune books too ;-)
The Red Mars trilogy has some competence porn characters.
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.
Seconded. Great series, logical, minimal unobtainium.
Tom Clancy SSN.
Good light reading (historical fiction) for before bed or when you wake up at 3am due to the sound of the Herscithem outside.
Hers what?
Herscithem
From Google, 1st link: https://tinyurl.com/4xtwkcnk
Your tinyurl redirects me to https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/35465607 … not very illuminating
When I search for ‘Herscithem’, the first link is https://herschel.com/
It was a joke, because Google returned only 1 unique result for me, which was this very post.
Herschel.com is only returned if you accept Google’s suggested alternative spelling, and is obviously unrelated
Oh, whoosh :(
I don’t have an option to accept/reject alternative spellings – what I see is a message along the lines of “showing results for FUBAR; do you really want to search only for FooBar?”
Yeah, that’s Google defaulting to showing you the results for the suggested alternative. If you click yes on FooBar then you’re telling Google to stop trying to be smart and show you what you’re actually searching for.
Allow me to chime in with a science fiction favorite: A Canticle For Leibowitz By Walter M Miller. It’s a collections of three interrelated novellas set a few thousand years apart… but there are themes and one character present in all three. Compelling characters and lots of humor make this a must read.
Anyone else read it?
Yep. This is a good one. And if you like Babylon 5, watch Deconstruction of Falling Stars (S04E22) which has a nod to the book.
Thanks, I’ll put it on my list!
It’s one of my favourites.
FIAT LUX!
It’s a brilliant book, though I have yet to read the sequel. Can’t recommend it enough.
I recently read “Blindsight” by Peter Watts which was about how first contact could work with an entirely alien species. It goes deep into both the physical and social sciences involved, and was a fun journey as well.
Nice to see r/printSF is alive and well on Lemmy. 😄
While Blindsight is an amazing book, I’m not sure it’s got much in the way of competence porn. Some fantastic psychological science speculation for sure, though.
printSF
If Captain Picard can read physical books in his ready room in the 24th century, I can quite well read them in the 21st, thank you very much!
(I don’t actually begrudge people who prefer reading on Kindles, but I like the feel of real books)
Nice to see r/printSF is alive and well on Lemmy. 😄
RIGHT‽‽‽
Murderbot series has a tremendous amount of tech.
Heads up — Murderbot series can be fun, but I’d say it’s more “robocop” than hard sci fi.
I’d say it definitely counts as competence porn though, it’s got tons of high-stakes hacking and problem solving.
and the hacking portion isn’t completely ridicilous, because it’s intentionally kept rather vague, which i appreciate a LOT!
none of “i’m past the firewall!” movie dialogue bs, and mostly just neat little “hey! this system has a known exploit, lucky!” which is honestly sooo refreshing!
The Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold is like Horatio Hornblower in space. The main character has dwarfism and accidentally commandeers a mercenary fleet as a teenager.
Freaking Miles antics.
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:
- Project Hail Mary by Weir is a no brainer choice if you liked The Marian. He gets the science right.
- Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky is amazing, and the first of a trilogy, so more to read.
- The whole Expanse series, by James Corey is good and he does a good job with the science, especially the celestial mechanics.
- The Uplift series (starting with Sundiver) by David Brin is great, and Brin is will known for hard SF. It’s from the 80s.
- Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie, is great and the first of a series as well.
- Beggars in Spain, by Nancy Kress, is great, with a good science background, though it’s more genetics than engineering. Really cool story though.
- I also agree with the recommendation on Saturn’s Children, by Charles Stross. Also the first of a loose series.
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.
I haven’t read Beggars in Spain or Saturn’s Children yet, will take a look!
I’d love to hear what you think, I enjoyed both quite a lot.
Thanks! There a few that I hadn’t heard about!
Oh, certainly. In case it’s helpful, here’s a post I made last spring with notes from a year of reading - it’s pretty much all SF and fantasy. Many of the books mentioned in this thread are there. I’ve been reading about the same amount since, and will probably do another post on the anniversary of that one.
The Three Body Problem is bad. The hype for the book is a good example of “The Emporer’s New Clothes”.
It’s a little bit of a slog. There are a lot of cultural references, plot devices, characters, and ways of moving through the story that are literally foreign to the western mind. Odd injections of what feels like philosophy. At least the version I read. Once you get used to it it gets better.
I have finished the series and absolutely loved it.
Could you please explain why you consider it bad?
I found the third book very weak, albiet with some interesting ideas.
Also, made it clear that he can’t write women at all.
I found them overall fine to good, except the main character’s chapters in the final 2/3rd of Book 3 which were just kinda bleh by the end.
Book 1 was strong idea explored well.
Book 2 felt good at the time, but I think feels weaker in hindsight but was some more interesting ideas.
Most western sci-fi authors are shit at writing women. So I didn’t hold it against him. But sure, I can see how some people didn’t take to it.
To me, it was a beautiful series with loads of interesting and horrible twists and turns. The ending is sublime, to me.
Most sci-fi authors who can’t write women don’t make them the symbolism laden protagonist of their trilogy’s conclusion.
Not sure if I should give him points for effort there or not.
Despite my complaints, I do think it worth a read.
I loved it for the game theory, ideas, and what-if aspects. The characters however, were flat 2D cutouts. I can’t say how much of that was due to translation issues, if any.
I was surprised at how little I liked it given the hype.
I did enjoy the parts about the Cultural Revolution and some of the dialog from Da Shi. That’s about it.
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.
I liked the third half. But it’s quite a shift
Seveneves was a wild ride, and I appreciated the way its scope broadened, but I definitely wasn’t expecting it.
Greg Bear - EON but more maths heavy, and has a bit of politics but a very good read
Larry Niven - Ring world series (maybe not competence focused, but strong science backing)
Yep, added EON to my list based on the numerous recs here. Ringworld I’ve gone through, it’s such a classic!
Protector and sequels, too. I also liked Integral Trees, but maybe a little less so.
