If the sulfur-cannon build-outs and airspace/logistics puzzles in Termination Shock scratched your itch for “could-we-really-do-this?” detail, you’ll love how The Martian turns Mark Watney’s survival into a master class in real engineering. Like watching the geoengineering crew troubleshoot nozzle designs and flight corridors, you’ll geek out over pressure seals, burn calculations, and improvised fixes that are as tense as they are technically grounded.

You were grabbed by the way Termination Shock dives from a Texas sulfur gun into global diplomacy—India, China, the EU, and a Dutch monarch juggling sea walls and public opinion. The Ministry for the Future offers that same sweeping climate realism: heatwave catastrophes, carbon coin incentives, and covert as well as overt geoengineering—echoing the book’s gritty look at what nations (and rogue actors) will actually do when seas rise and heat kills.

If you enjoyed the back-channel deals and reprisals that ripple out from the sulfur-cannon gambit in Termination Shock—where one unilateral move forces nations and corporations to counter—The Windup Girl throws you into a biopunk Bangkok where calorie companies, ministries, and mercenaries scheme over floods, food futures, and biosecurity. It hits that same nerve of policy meeting profit, with stakes as raw as the heat events and trade pressure you saw ripple across Stephenson’s map.

Part of the fun in Termination Shock is hopping between the Texas operation, European royal diplomacy, and South/Southeast Asian flashpoints—seeing how ground-level operators and high-level power brokers collide. Infomocracy delivers that same multi-perspective energy: campaign operatives, analysts, and fixers racing through a globally networked election, where information systems and on-the-street action intertwine much like Stephenson’s hog hunts, border incidents, and summit rooms.

If the ethical tightrope in Termination Shock—a billionaire’s unilateral geoengineering forcing the world to react—hooked you, Kill Decision puts you in similarly fraught territory. Here, swarming autonomous drones move from lab to battlefield, and a handful of players decide whether to pull a technological trigger that others can’t easily stop. It’s the same adrenaline-and-ethics cocktail as watching a private project change weather patterns and redraw red lines overnight.