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.

  • brrt
    2·
    1 day ago

    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.

    • AwesomeLowlanderOP
      3·
      1 day ago

      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.

      • brrt
        2·
        14 hours ago

        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.