You might enjoy Beckey Chamber's Galactic Commons series. She does a great job of creating all kinds of interesting characters and exploring them and what makes them unique.
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell is very compelling.
And I seconded it below but I'll mention it again - the Bobiverse series is excellent with amazing exploration.
Last time I was in Amsterdam the people who clean up the metro stations were on strike. I didn't know this and I was thinking, "Wow! I really expected things to be cleaner than this." It was quite a mess the whole week I was there. That said, away from the stations things seemed very well kept.
I played with a lot of basic stuff as a kid - but it was my senior year in high school that I think I hit a real pinnacle. My friends and I that spent all our time in the schools computer lab wrote a game - now it was just a simple text adventure game. It was like a choose your own adventure book - using goto statements based on choices but it was incredible. We called it "Computer Room Adventure" and it was full of amazing, witty and cutting commentary on the school and the people in it. It was cutting edge - there was a section where it didn't matter what keys you chose, we printed out a message that made it feel like you were typing it. And we made fun of Andrew a lot - and you know that guy deserved it. It was probably one of the greatest losses of our civilisation when that 5 and a quarter floppy bit it.
At my highschool - the progression was Basic on Apple IIe machines and then Pascal. I remember talking to an older friend who was already doing Pascal and he said, "There are no line numbers." I was stunned. "What?! How can you write a program without line numbers?"
My first code was written on a TRS-80 at my jr. highschool. The first work I did that had a wider audience was done at Sears on a Tandy Color Computer it went something like this:
10 Print "Sears Sucks"
20 GOTO 10
The first computer my family owned was a Commodore Vic-20 and I typed in plenty of proggies out of magazines. They were stored on cassette tapes and we bought a modem - then a phone because we needed to be able to disconnect the hand piece once we'd connected to a bbs and plug the cord into the modem. All our phones were slimline and disconnecting those dropped the call.
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell is very compelling.
And I seconded it below but I'll mention it again - the Bobiverse series is excellent with amazing exploration.