Books

Looper

• The Perfect Run --> Deadpool + Groundhog Day, almost literally. The MC is overpowered and hilarious, the world is a gritty cyberpunk-superhero amalgam crammed with action and fantastic character development. The whole series is good.
• Apocalypse: Regression --> World ends, MC goes back in time to save humanity from monsters. Unfortunately, his young self was a bit of an idiot, so nobody believes him. Really entertaining. Sadly, only the first two or three books are worthwhile, since the story loses momentum once he saves the day.
• Reborn: Apocalypse --> similar premise. Prose and character development are much worse, but the plot is better and more intricate. If these two authors had collaborated we’d have a real winner. Still entertaining, although the opening’s slow.

Avatar the Last Airbender is one of the greatest narrative achievements of all time. There is nothing else like it. That said, if we consider books whose young (magically empowered) protagonists are on a quest to save the world, with themes like found family and antiauthoritarianism, we find… Harry Potter! Just kidding, that’s the magical academy trope.

• Are You Even Human --> MC and friends acquire powers, which they need to save the world. Found family + adventure quest + antiauthoritarianism. All the published books are superb. The author is a master of characterization. Her prose is okay, the action scenes are excellent, and the plot is fantastic. The story only slows down in the later volumes, which get some slice-of-life elements.

Mass Effect is one of the coolest stories in sci-fi. It’s an unapologetically tropey masterpiece of action and adventure. I have read 300 sci-fi novels and I’ve never seen anything like it, except some ersatz derivatives, of course, which sucked and shall not be mentioned. That said, if we look for a team of heroes with variegated skillsets under a badass commander trying to save the galaxy from an unknown alien threat, we get…

• The Expanse --> an alien proto-molecule designed to hijack the machinery of life arrives in our solar system and causes a bunch of chaos. One commander and his team are forced to spearhead humanity’s subsequent battle for survival against the aliens.
• The Last Reaper --> the first book follows a formidable MC trying to infiltrate a prison planet. By the second and third books, the story evolves into building a team of misfits led by our overpowered hero to protect the entire galaxy from invading aliens.

Try reading The Martian by Andy Weir. Or Project Hail Mary by the same author. I think they would tickle the survival, tech, and space moods all at once.

If you're up for the classics, you could try ‘Robinson Crusoe’. Its language is rather antiquated, and apparently there are multiple long passages of musings on religion (which I must've forgotten), but at least for a month afterwards I was thinking of getting a period survival game with base building — except I wasn't playing desktop games at the time, which saved me.

Regarding tech, you'd do well with all the cyberpunk classics: William Gibson's ‘Neuromancer’ and sequels, Neal Stephenson starting with ‘Snow Crash’, everything by Cory Doctorow (usually freely accessible). Stephenson and Doctorow in particular are well-informed on actual tech and adjacent topics, and their novels and stories are often grounded in real stuff.

survival/exploration

Vaguely related but The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel was incredibly gripping right off the bat for me. And it's relatively short and easy to read which might help get you some momentum.