If you loved how Pirx wins through patient diagnostics and practical fixes—especially the way his cautious hesitation becomes an asset in “The Inquest” and during training flights when small malfunctions spiral into life‑threatening puzzles—then you’ll click with Mark Watney’s day‑by‑day hacking of oxygenators, rover batteries, and improvised farms in The Martian. It’s the same quietly heroic competence: spreadsheets, checklists, and a wry sense of humor turning cold equations into survival.

Pirx’s adventures often end with an idea clicking into place—like the insight that a person’s ability to hesitate exposes the android in “The Inquest.” Ted Chiang delivers that same “aha” clarity. In “Story of Your Life,” language reshapes time; in “The Evolution of Human Science,” expertise becomes alien. If Pirx’s quiet revelations and ethical puzzles drew you in, these stories will give you that same head‑tingling afterglow.

If the episodic rhythm of Tales of Pirx the Pilot—one mission, one puzzle, one understated breakthrough—hooked you, Asimov’s classic fix‑up will feel familiar. Where Pirx teases out a robot’s tell in “The Inquest,” these stories push the Three Laws to their limits, each case a neat logical knot. You’ll get that same pleasure of watching a careful mind pick at a thread until the whole mystery unravels.

If the procedural tension of “The Inquest” grabbed you—the interview beats, the logical traps, the quiet duel between human intuition and machine precision—then Elijah Baley’s partnership with the robot R. Daneel Olivaw will hit the spot. The Caves of Steel builds a classic whodunit where every clue doubles as a test of what separates human judgment from programmed behavior, echoing Pirx’s calm, methodical sleuthing.

If you enjoyed Lem’s deadpan skewering of bureaucracy and bravado—Pirx muddling through officialdom and surviving not by swagger but by humility and small, human choices—Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan offers that same sly grin. From Winston Niles Rumfoord’s omniscient meddling to the Martian fiascos, it turns space opera into a comic lens on fate and fallibility, much like Pirx’s quietly ironic victories.