Science Fiction

The Expanse is a great at engineering read. Doubly so for a space opera. Lots of very legit science in the science fiction there.

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'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.

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.

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?

Murderbot series has a tremendous amount of tech.

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.

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.

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

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.

Kim Stanley-Robinson
His Mars trilogy and Science in the Capital are amazing.
He is my favorite hard science fiction writer for the blend of tech, politics, critiques of capitalism, and drama. His novels after those trilogies are good but some people find them fairly long winded and boring in parts... actually I do too, ah well.

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.

The Red Mars trilogy has some competence porn characters.

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.

https://www.goodreads.com/series/192752-bobiverse

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.

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)

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.

"Quarter Share: Tales from the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper" is a good 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.

Do you like protagonists that use their wits to beat a scenario or the hard science more?

For example a fun read that’s, in my opinion, best experienced as an audiobook is the dungeon crawler carl. It’s definitely a good example of the first type. It’s not realistic. It’s literally real life made into a D&D game (LitRPG) it is just one scenario after another of Carl just finding ways to manipulate and play with the “rules” of the messed up game.

If you’re more into the hard science than The Expanse as others have said. Or maybe even the Revelation Space series where it is future tech but relativistic time plays a part. Less of the “one person/group against all odds” but a good read nonetheless.

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!