@Quasit From a quick skim of your past book recs, I see your expansive tastes include murder mysteries? In which case you might enjoy A.E. Marling’s Solarpunk Mysteries, starting with Murder in the Tool Library. They’re all excellent, hopeful, compelling, fun.

I see you also like a lot of classic sci-fi, including Asimov, so you might have the interest and perseverence to dive into some Kim Stanley Robinson, if you haven’t already. My favorite is the Mars Trilogy. It’ll give you hope in a grounded, if hard-fought, way.

You might also enjoy Semiosis by Sue Burke, first contact with sentient plant life on an alien planet. It’s an imaginative community-driven adventure.

And I see you rec YA sometimes, so you might like Nnedi Okorafor’s books (e.g. Zahra the Windseeker), or Jayan FR’s The Wind of Venus. Both coming of age stories, the former with lots of living tech and talking animals plus friends surviving a journey, the latter in a nicely imagined anarchist community of airships around Venus, with more classic sci-fi action in the second half.