Becky Chambers deals with many of these same themes in cozier ways. In the Wayfarers series (The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet; A Closed and Common Orbit; Record of a Spaceborn Few; and The Galaxy, and the Ground Within), humanity has largely lost Earth (through climate crises, spurred on by war), but has survived. Some fled to Mars, while others (the Exodens) made their lives on generation ships known collectively as The Fleet.
The Wayfarer by Chris Doll
Exoden Culture
The Mars colonists were the first to leave the Earth, and (unsurprisingly) they were the best off economically before the full collapse of the Earthen climate and infrastructure. The Fleet only left once there was no other recourse, and it is unclear to what extent the original passengers of the Fleet were chosen in an organized way.
For centuries, until aliens made contact with both the Fleet and the Martians, there was no contact between the two remaining human contingents; thusly, both technological and cultural divisions formed, to the extent that the newly arrived aliens questioned whether they could truly be said to share a common society.
Fleet ship technology is explained in great detail through the writings of an alien (Harmagian) anthropologist studying the origins of the human diaspora. Each colony ship is formed out of a series of hexagonal housing units, which surround a central column.
Bartering was a central fixture of Exoden culture before they regained contact with the Martians and assimilated into the GC, but persisted afterwards as well.
Folks who grew up in the Fleet also tend to be suspicious of weapons, and blasters in particular. It seems pretty clear that in order to survive centuries floating alone in space, humanity had to get over its violent tendencies.
The Gaiaists
The Gaiaists are a somewhat fringe group of humans who are in most ways the space-dwellers’ answer to the Amish. They are luddites, eschewing most modern technologies and living on or in near orbit of Earth. They don’t like vaccines, and they think that if children need “extra help” to survive, then they should be left behind, adding a dash of misunderstood Darwinism to their ethos.
However, they also extol a spiritual connection to Earth, and believe that only by remaining close to it can humans retain their humanity.
The Galactic Commons (GC)
The GC is the largest organizing body within Chambers’ universe. While humanity probably would have kept limping along into perpetuity, they would not have flourished, expanded, or colonized without the help of the GC and their technologies. The GC is a collection of advanced alien species, the most prominent of which are the Harmagians (mollusk-like and both delicate and deadly), the Aeluon (scaled and somehow universally beautiful), and the Aandrisks (chill and coldblooded). The GC also includes other species like the Quelin, a buggy, crustacean-like race with an extremely rigid culture to match their hard exoskeletons; the Sianat, blue orangutan-like geniuses who have a semi-religious and semi-self-destructive relationship with a maybe-sentient bacteria they willingly infect themselves with, and the Laru, a group of gangly, long-lived marsupials who have been around the GC for even less time than the humans. The GC also has contact with non-GC member species like the Akaraks, small, arboreal nitrogen breathers. Their planet was colonized by the Hermageans centuries ago and is now uninhabitable, leaving them to live as scavengers, never able to abandon their spacesuits when not aboard their ships.
Fanart by Matt Harrison
The technologies available to the GC are largely what we’ve come to expect from contemporary science fiction. They have spacecraft that run on algae (as well as other, more cantankerous fuels), which can travel long distances to predetermined locations through fabricated wormholes. Advanced personal tablets (Scribs) are ubiquitous, and contemporaneous translation, though not the norm, is available for most spoken and written languages. There are immersive holograms, used for both education and recreation, especially on long-haul ships. While there are no food replicators that can magically materialize Earl Grey (hot), there are stasis chambers which allow foodstuffs to be stored almost indefinitely. Medicine has been made oodles easier by the almost universal use of nanobots to provide immunizations, diagnostics, and treatments. There are blasters, as well as shields to protect oneself from said blasters. Chambers spends perhaps the most time exploring what it will mean to be human after other conscious, sentient entities—both organic and inorganic—introduce themselves to us.
Modding, Genetic Manipulation, & Cloning
Many of the characters in Wayfarers are part of the modding community, a very cyberpunk-esque group of individuals who are unafraid to mix the organic with the technologic through augmentation. These augmentations can range from the relatively tame (color-changing tattoos) to the more outrageous (intentionally chopping off arms, replacing them with augments or weapons ala Barret).
“Gene tweaks” are fairly common in the world of the Wayfarers series, for both medical and cosmetic reasons. The Laroo, especially, have a penchant for the practice and can use it to fix all manner of birth defects or injuries.
However, the GC has largely banned cloning, and extant clones are variously shunned, imprisoned, or simply not granted automatic GC citizenship, based on their species.
AI & Sentience
Throughout the series, the reader meets various artificial intelligences with varying degrees of functionality, personality, and agency. The first AI the reader is introduced to is Lovelace (aka Lovey), a high-level AI that was built to inhabit a starship. It (she) has a unique personality that’s developed over years of living with and adapting to the crew of the Wayfarer. She has built upon her base programming in myriad, unreplicatable ways. She has also, it seems, fallen in love with the com tech Jenks who maintains her software—a feeling that is returned. This is complicated by the fact that legally within the GC, AIs are not considered sapient, or self-determinative.
Jenks secures Lovey an extremely illegal “body kit,” which would allow the AI to inhabit a shell that could pass for a human (or any other common species, based on preference) body. The kit allows an AI to—for most intents and purposes—be human, eating and drinking and laughing and crying. It is also, as Data puts it, fully functional. The kit processes all sorts of sensory inputs, and even has built-in mechanisms to simulate abstract concepts and feelings like deja vu. It's essentially a much more impressive iteration of BINA48.
As the series progresses, we see other AIs who are fully realized individuals—one, known as Owl, even raises a human child when they escape from a hostile planet, acting as a surrogate mother. The reader also finds plenty of AIs that are relatively simple programs with no personality and limited processing power, whose jobs are to complete simple, menial tasks. While AI brings new context, the fundamental questions about consciousness, the soul, and self-determination are the same ones that philosophers and religious figures have been struggling with for thousands of years.