@Jennifer@bookstodon The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells might be an option. It’s a story of a security cyborg in an interstellar civilization, learning to be a person and form relationships with others. It’s lighter, more comedic, but it’s hard scifi that shares the Expanse’s #hopepunk theme, of the world having bad actors in it, but most people just being good folks doing their best. And deals (lightly) with questions of sentience and personhood, like Mountain.