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’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.
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.
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.
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.
Eon is definitely an all time favorite book of mine but Eternity is… quite a slog
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 ;-)
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?
It’s one of my favourites.
FIAT LUX!
Thanks, I’ll put it on my list!
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.
Interesting. I didn’t get into that show but perhaps I’ll give it another try.
It’s a brilliant book, though I have yet to read the sequel. Can’t recommend it enough.
Isn’t that funny — me too. I’m not sure why I keep putting it off. Perhaps because it was finished by another author… the guy who wrote “They’re Made of Meat.” His name escaped me presently.
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.
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‽‽‽
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.
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.
I liked the third half. But it’s quite a shift
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.
One of my favorites!
Freaking Miles antics.
Nathan Lowell’s Trader’s Tales From the Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper series is pure competence porn. There’s very little action or intrigue, just some guy working his way up from the bottom in interstellar travel and trade via, well, competence. Haha!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m stuck on Bobiverse too. This whole section on the Archimedes alien did me in.
there was some stuff about his drones destroying entire solar systems for raw minerals, that just seemed plain nonsensical to me?
Not sure what exactly seems nonsensical to you but it’s a well known concept that is also explained thoroughly in the books. You might want to read up on von Neumann probes.
Like I said, I possibly misunderstood or missed something. I’m familiar with the concept of Von Neumann probes, but an entire solar system to build a small handful of probes seems overkill. How big are these probes? If it turns out to have been a gazillion probes, or they’re jupiter-sized, then I guess that’s where my misunderstanding was.
Yeh, I guess you really did miss something. I’m sure the purpose of mining a solar system was not to make more simple probes.
Good to know. I’ll slot Bobiverse in once I’m done with Greg Bear
Holy shit, new bobiverse? Thanks for the knowledge.
I really wanted to love “Project Hail Mary”, but Andy Weir can’t write characters and that killed it for me for some reason
Can you elaborate on what specifically bothered you? I didn’t notice anything when I read it but it was a good while ago
It’s been a while too.
I think I felt that the dialogue was kind of flat and I was upset at how human the alien was.
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.
You just reminded me I have to get caught up with that series again so I can read the last book. I powered through the whole series before the last book was released and now I kind of forget what was going on, to jump in again.
I kind of forget what was going on
Protomolecule. Lots and lots of protomolecule.
It’s so easy to read, worth starting over. If you read fast you’ll get through it all in a couple months.
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.
Yep! Everybody here keeps mentioning Greg Egan and I’ll give him a shot. The rest I’ve read and love. Thanks!
