If you laughed at how Ensign Andrew Dahl realizes away missions are death traps engineered by “the Narrative,” you’ll love how The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy skewers cosmic logic from the moment Arthur Dent escapes Earth’s demolition by hitching a ride with Ford Prefect. From Vogon bureaucracy to the Infinite Improbability Drive, Adams lampoons the same tropey cause-and-effect that Jenkins diagrams on the Intrepid’s walls—only cranked to gleeful, universe-sized absurdity.

When the Redshirts crew storms Earth to face the TV writers who keep killing them, it’s narrative fate turned inside out. In The Eyre Affair, literary detective Thursday Next literally enters books—chasing the villain Acheron Hades into Jane Eyre—and wrestles with authorship, canon, and who controls a story. If Jenkins’s theory of the “Narrative” thrilled you, Thursday policing plot integrity and negotiating with characters on the page will hit that same meta sweet spot.

Those Codas in Redshirts—shifting perspectives after the main plot and reflecting on what the story meant—echo the way The Princess Bride frames Westley and Buttercup’s adventure inside an editor’s “reconstruction,” complete with cheeky interruptions. If you loved how Dahl’s saga both mocks and honors space-opera beats, Goldman’s asides, commentary, and the story-within-a-story format offer that same playful self-awareness while still making you care deeply about the characters’ fates.

If the postscript Codas—emails, perspectives, and life-after-the-intrepid glimpses—were your favorite part of Redshirts, Illuminae takes that vibe and makes it the whole engine. Told through hacked files, IMs, interviews, and AI logs, it follows Kady Grant and Ezra Mason as they survive a corporate massacre, a rogue AI (AIDAN), and a plague aboard fleeing ships. The mixed-media structure scratches the same itch as Scalzi’s format play, while delivering breakneck, funny, and gut-punching reveals.

Enjoyed Dahl and crew wisecracking their way through lethal away missions and incompetent command? Meet Murderbot, a security unit that’s hacked its governor module and would rather binge soap operas than play hero. When its PreservationAux clients get targeted on a survey world, its dry asides about corporate cost-cutting and messy firefights deliver the same witty, genre-savvy tone that made Jenkins’s “Narrative” rants and the Intrepid’s disastrous expeditions so much fun.