Andy Weir's 2021 novel paired hard-science problem solving with an unlikely friendship. These picks are sorted by which of those two things they deliver, with a straight answer on what's different.
Project Hail Mary (Andy Weir, 2021) works on two levels. On the surface it is a puzzle box: an amnesiac science teacher alone on a starship, rebuilding what he knows experiment by experiment. Underneath it is a story about companionship across a gulf, between a human and something that is not human, built entirely through shared problem solving.
Most 'books like' lists only chase the first half. This one marks which books give you science-driven problem solving, which give you first contact or non-human minds, and which give you an unlikely companion.
| Book | Author · year | Problem solving | First contact / non-human mind | Unlikely companion |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Martian | Andy Weir · 2011 | Yes | No | No |
| We Are Legion (We Are Bob) | Dennis E. Taylor · 2016 | Yes | Yes | Partly |
| Children of Time | Adrian Tchaikovsky · 2015 | Partly | Yes | Partly |
| Rendezvous with Rama | Arthur C. Clarke · 1973 | Yes | Yes | No |
| Contact | Carl Sagan · 1985 | Partly | Yes | No |
| The Three-Body Problem | Cixin Liu · 2008 (English 2014) | Yes | Yes | No |
| Blindsight | Peter Watts · 2006 | Partly | Yes | No |
| All Systems Red | Martha Wells · 2017 | Partly | Yes (AI narrator) | Yes |
| Seveneves | Neal Stephenson · 2015 | Yes | No | No |
| NovaSeed: Eden Rising | Warren Pulley · 2026 | Yes | Yes (Martian life, AI record) | Yes |
| Klara and the Sun | Kazuo Ishiguro · 2021 | No | Yes (AI narrator) | Yes |
If you came to Weir through Project Hail Mary, go back to the start. One astronaut stranded on Mars, solving his way home with chemistry, botany and duct tape, narrated with the same dry humour.
How it differs: No alien companion; it is a pure survival story.
A software engineer is uploaded into a self-replicating probe and explores nearby star systems, meets alien species and makes copies of himself. The jokey, problem-solving narration is the closest tonal match to Ryland Grace.
How it differs: Science is looser, and the series sprawls.
Humanity's last ark ship meets a world where an uplift experiment went somewhere unexpected. One of the best portraits of a genuinely non-human intelligence in modern SF; it won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2016.
How it differs: Spans millennia and many viewpoints rather than one narrator.
A vast alien cylinder enters the solar system and a crew has a few weeks to explore it. Pure curiosity-driven exploration, with the physics of a rotating habitat worked through carefully.
How it differs: The aliens are never met; there is no companion.
A radio astronomer detects a signal from Vega and the world has to decide what to do with the instructions it contains. Written by a working scientist, and serious about how real science would handle first contact.
How it differs: More about institutions and belief than hands-on survival.
A Chinese physicist is drawn into first contact with a civilisation living around an unstable triple-star system. Big ideas and real physics; the trilogy escalates enormously.
How it differs: Colder in tone, and the companionship element is absent.
A crew of modified humans and a vampire commander investigate an alien presence at the edge of the solar system. The hardest, darkest take on first contact here, and an argument about whether consciousness is even useful.
How it differs: Bleak and dense; the opposite of Weir's optimism.
A security android that has hacked its own governor narrates, sarcastically, while protecting a survey team it would rather ignore. If Rocky and Grace's friendship was the hook, Murderbot's reluctant care hits the same spot.
How it differs: Novella length, and lighter on rigorous science.
After the Moon shatters, humanity has two years to put a survival population into orbit. Problem solving at civilisation scale, every orbit and resource worked through.
How it differs: Very long, with no aliens.
Carter and Alina land at Hellas Planitia on a one-way mission and find something alive in a brine pocket 85 cm below the surface, a life form older than Earth's oceans. The companionship here runs three ways: two people and SOLEN, the mission AI who keeps the record and will not lie in it. NovaSeed: Eden Rising opens a four-novel saga that follows the colony for a hundred years.
How it differs: More of a slow-burn love story and colony saga than a single-crisis thriller.
Disclosure: this site is the official home of the SOLEN series, so treat this as the publisher's own book, not an independent pick. Reading order · Read chapter one free
Literary rather than technical: an Artificial Friend narrates her time caring for a sick teenager. If the tenderness between Grace and Rocky is what stayed with you, this is about the same thing from the other side.
How it differs: No hard science at all.
A hard science fiction Mars colony saga across a hundred years, narrated in part by a mission AI. Available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback.