/lit/ - Literature

Help me /ssfg/, you're my only hope. The science fiction genre is mostly uncharted territory for me and I have trouble finding a particular kind of book that I want to read. It's hard to know where to even start looking so please help me out here.

Basically what I'm after is a standalone book with little to none jewery and degeneracy that's about strange alien worlds, pioneering space and solving mysteries. That sounds simple but the problem is that while all of those things are prevalent in the genre they're almost always used as a backdrop for something else. I'm looking for something that focuses on those weird landscapes of distant planets, the journey to those places and what discoveries lies waiting. Preferably not too large in scale, I dislike epics about the whole of humanity.