If what gripped you in Midshipman’s Hope was Nicholas Seafort being thrust into command of the UNS Hibernia and having to enforce unforgiving regulations to keep a crew and passengers alive, you’ll click with Honor Harrington’s assignment to Basilisk Station. Like Seafort, Honor inherits a thankless post, shoulders full authority aboard a starship, and has to make hard calls that put career, crew, and civilians on the line—culminating in her uncovering and confronting a Havenite plot around Basilisk. The same rigorous sense of duty, procedure, and command pressure that drove Seafort’s choices fuels Honor’s page-turning stand.

You watched Seafort move from midshipman to de facto captain after disaster wipes out his seniors, forcing him to make adult decisions far too soon. In Ender’s Game, Ender Wiggin is pushed up the chain at Battle School, placed in command of Dragon Army, and then confronted with “simulations” whose consequences mirror the gut-punch stakes Seafort faced delivering his passengers to safety. The intense focus on a gifted but isolated youth, the moral weight of orders, and the cost of victory echo Seafort’s coming-of-age under fire.

If Seafort’s agonizing adherence to the Naval Code—making harsh, sometimes devastating choices to keep Hibernia’s people alive—stuck with you, Use of Weapons drills even deeper into the ethics of intervention. Cheradenine Zakalwe, an operative for the Culture’s Special Circumstances, is repeatedly handed missions where the “right” choice still leaves scars. The book probes the same question Seafort faces when command means harm for the sake of duty: what price do leaders pay, and is the outcome worth the human cost?

On Hibernia, one disaster after another forces Seafort to improvise, ration, and jury-rig just to keep people breathing and the ship on course. The Martian hits that same survival nerve: Mark Watney is stranded alone after a mission failure and has to think, calculate, and innovate his way through oxygen, water, food, and communications—right down to farming potatoes and resurrecting Pathfinder—while Earth and the Hermes crew fight to bring him home. If you loved the procedural, step-by-step struggle to stave off death in space, this will scratch that itch.

Seafort’s tightly wound inner voice—his self-reproach, resolve, and isolation as he steers Hibernia through crises—finds a haunting parallel in William Mandella’s narration in The Forever War. Mandella endures grinding campaigns against the Taurans, relativistic time jumps that sever him from the life he knew, and the psychological wear of orders that never stop. The close, reflective perspective on a soldier bound by duty, even as it erodes him, mirrors what made Seafort’s journey so compelling.