If what hooked you was the meticulous, crisis-by-crisis realism of a privately funded Mars push—EVA fixes, habitat hacks, and life-support math—then you’ll love how The Martian has Mark Watney jury‑rigging everything from a water reclaimer to a rover heater, coordinating an audacious orbital rendezvous, and even resurrecting Pathfinder. It delivers the same satisfying, stepwise engineering triumphs you enjoyed in that media-saturated Mars race, with every solution grounded in real physics and chemistry.

If the straight-line drive to plant first boots on Mars—deadlines, budget battles, and a mission that has to work—was your favorite part, Voyage pushes that same tension through an alternate history where NASA commits to Mars. You’ll follow Natalie York and mission planners through bruising congressional hearings, NERVA debates, grueling astronaut training, and a perilous outbound leg that captures the same “beat the clock and the void” urgency as the prize-backed race you enjoyed.

If you liked seeing a mission unfold through rival teams and varied viewpoints—pilots, engineers, scientists, and the folks wrangling the cameras—Red Mars gives you the full panorama. You’ll move from John Boone’s public‑facing charisma to Nadia’s hardhat construction genius and Frank Chalmers’s political maneuvering, watching the first landings, base‑building, and scientific surveys play out through clashing personalities in a way that mirrors the layered perspectives of the Mars race you enjoyed.

If the media spectacle and corporate pressure of a privately bankrolled Mars dash kept you turning pages, Delta‑v channels that same velocity: billionaire Nathan Joyce recruits specialist James Tighe for a covert asteroid‑mining shot that pushes experimental spacecraft and crew endurance to the edge. From brutal cave-diver training to in‑space construction and hair‑raising course corrections, it matches the on-camera risk and rapid-fire decision making you enjoyed on the red planet.

If the granular mission architecture—the lander design tradeoffs, transfer windows, and operations cadence—was your jam, Saturn Run doubles down with a U.S.–China sprint to an alien object braking into Saturn orbit. You’ll get propulsion trade studies, trajectory math, shipbuilding under political fire, and tense ops far from home—world‑building at the systems‑engineering level that scratches the same itch as the realistic planning and surface ops in the Mars competition you liked.