I hadn't read a lot of scifi until after I read The Murderbot Diaries (which kind of introduced me to the contemporary scifi lit scene), but I'm currently rereading what was my favorite scifi book before I read Murderbot, and it's still in my top 10. It's a standalone novel that came out in 1988 called Hellspark, written by Janet Kagan. Martha Wells has said in one or two places that Janet Kagan is one of her scifi inspirations (and has mentioned one of Kagan's other novels, Mirabile, specifically), but I wouldn't be surprised if Wells drew some inspiration from Hellspark as well, because I was reminded of it when I read certain parts of TMBD.
Hellspark features a main character named Tocohl who is confident, pragmatic, and within the first few pages of Chapter 1 uses her fighting skills and responsive armor suit skin to take down a group of bad guys armed with knives who are kidnapping a woman who turns out to be an important character in the story. Tocohl is assisted by her extrapolative computer Maggie, who lives in Tocohl's ship but uses a remote to interact with characters on planet part of the time. Tocohl usually speaks to Maggie by subvocalizing—this book was where I first heard that term, though I didn't quite understand what it meant until I read TMBD.
The main story takes place on a planet where a survey team has gone to assess if one of the life forms there, the sprookjes, are sapient, because that will determine whether the planet can be developed by outside forces or not. But there's been a mysterious death, the planet is prone to frequent lightning storms, and the survey team are all humans from different planets, leading to cultural and language differences that add to the tension. Tocohl, however, is from a culture of traveling merchants, and she uses her understanding of the languages and the nonverbal movements of the different cultures to work through the group's communication challenges as she helps them try to determine if the sprookjes are sapient before their time runs out.
I absolutely love the cultural worldbuilding behind each of the fictional human cultures that is evident from page 1. The way Janet Kagan emphasizes the body language and movements of each culture isn't quite like anything else I've ever read outside of the class I once took on intercultural communication. If you're looking for a scifi story with a bit of mystery, intercultural dynamics, and analysis of the timeless question "how do you define, much less determine, sapience?," I'm fairly confident you will not regret picking up this book. :)
