I mean… steampunk pretends to emulate modern tech all with steam power. Not only is it so absurd that it’s funny and enjoyable, but aesthetically when bathed in art deco, it’s positively gorgeous.

But in terms of story…. Shrug, there are probably tons of sci-fi writers that have touched this kind of storytelling. I think Alan Dean Foster maybe had something like this, and/or Piers Anthony, maybe a few others I read many years ago. No recollection as to what actual books, sorry.

Larry Niven’s “Known Space” has quite a few machines, but they’re generally not the point of the story. There’s a lot more about how human and non-human species relate and interact, and how the machines affect their behaviour and choices.

The whole approach of Puppeteers (technically brilliant cowards) and Kzinti (foolishly rash but honourable risk-takers), taken against human approaches is well-written.

Of course, once you comprehend its size, the Ringworld itself overwhelms a lot of the rest of the stories 😲.

Niven’s attitude to women and sex haven’t aged well…

But the stories are pretty good. He knows how to set multiple threads on their way and bind them up together at the end, or at least leave a decent cliff-hanger for a sequel.

Children of Men would be a sci-fi without any significant technological improvements. Ender’s Game does have the Ansible, but it’s more a plot device than anything.

Probably not exactly matching your meaning, but in a round about way, Dune, post Machine Crusade –

It’s maybe not as evident without reading the series–which definitely isn’t a negative comment! I’ve enjoyed (almost) every bit of the truly shocking amount of Dune I’ve put myself through since the very early '90s, haha.

I’m, uh, mildly obsessive as well as critical of the SF I stand by, (just for myself personally!–everyone should like whatever they like!) but Frank Herbert, entirely, still remains in my top 2 favorite authors. You may enjoy all the books as a whole, if you’re looking for something less about ‘the machine’ itself, but how humans diverge from it and without it, but it’s…a lot, lol. And…well, I won’t spoil things. I just remembered it might negate my entire point. Oh, no. (ʘ‿ʘ)

Anyway! Regardless!

If you do ever get into full-ass Dune–and I’d recommend this “tip” to literally anyone–I’d definitely suggest audio books for the early works of Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson. They took a bit to get into their groove from informational to actually entertaining. The lore is honestly fantastic, beautifully done, but physically reading their earlier Dune stuff can be textbook without diagram tedious. Love 'em both for the work, but shiiiiiiiiite.

I once read a SciFi story where people lived in a way-post-scarcity world. There must have been machines somewhere, but they did not play a role worth mentioning.

• ‘The Chrysalids’ and ‘The Midwich Cuckoos’ by John Wyndham
• ‘West of Eden’ by Harry Harrison

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable for magic

The Dune universe lacks computers, which is why spice is so valuable - does that count? Still has plenty of machines, but they aren’t the story

Alan Dean Foster has a series (Humanx Commonwealth) starting with Midworld. No special machines in the first 4.

Cachelot is excellent and is about sentient space cetaceans after forming a treaty with humans.

Midworld is basically Avatar.

Nor Crystal Tears is about the Thranx side of meeting Aliens (humankind) in first contact.

Sentenced to Prism is about the concepts of non-carbon life forms.

Must books cover elements of humanity and what is humanity.

It’s called Dune

Science fiction is in it’s essence the exploration of a situation when all the confounding factors have been magicked/scienced away.

Not uncommonly it explores the requirements of the technical solution, what would the machine need to do for this to work out? And/or What happens if it doesn’t?

Take for example “Do androids dream of electric sheep” by Philip K Dick, it’s about finding androids advanced enough not to know they’re artificial and how to identify and relate to them when the only diagnostic is slow, clumsy, and suspect. It’s more an exploration of what makes a person than it’s around the marvels of The Machine™.

During the 1900s the vehicle for science to magick with had been machines, computers and AI. Remember that space travel, fission power, psychology, modern medicine were all new, hope inducing breakthroughs just this same period.

There’s also the issue that the definition of the genre came after it becoming large enough to matter. The edges between scifi, punk/cyberpunk, speculative fiction, isekai and even to fantasy are all made after the fact, meaning modern machines go into scifi, old machines go into steam-/diesel-/etc-punk. The main difference between Science, Magick, and Eldritch horror is how detailed the mechanics of the solution are described, and speak to different people.

But on the topic of the story not being centered around a machine: try the Hyperion series by Dan Simmons.

Or go the entirely other way with Ring World by Larry Niven. There’s plenty of machines-did-it in the fringes, but the central theme is to figure out what would be needed for a Ring World to exist, what would happen on it, and how would it be managed. It’s an exploration of physics more than anything - more “what is the machine” than “machines-did-it”.

And the Foundation series (Asimov) famously explore the premise “what if sociology works”, and the other details solved by throwing machines at them.

You also have The Culture (Iain Banks) series that center on/around post-scarcity society and explore that.

There’s plenty of star trek episodes that are more about philosophical and societal questions than tech.

The bicentennial man by Isaac Asimov comes to mind. Which is about a robot, but in essence it’s about the philosophical question what it means to be human.

There’s Ubik by Philip K Dick, which is about about tech, when you get down to it, but in a very unique and un-tech like way.

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keys is not about tech, but the chronicles of a brain surgery patient that became extremely smart.

Hyperion by Dan Simmons is basically just “The Canterbury Tales” in space.

There’s plenty more stories that are not really about tech. You could try searching for dystopia themes, like “Maze runner” or “the hunger games” or “I am legend” or “wayward pines”

There’s plenty of science fiction without technology playing a significant role.

Robert Silverberg’s Dying Inside was the first that came to mind; Asimov’s The Gods Themselves or Nightfall might be other examples; Olaf Stapledon’s Sirius; Clarke’s Childhood’s End has (alien) tech, but it mostly focuses on the psychological and societal effects of the contact with aliens, as does Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life (and some of the other stories collected in the same volume, Stories of Your Life and Others); Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five… lots of great science fiction works focus on aspects other than technology.

Dune.

Pretty much all of the Sci-Fi written by Ursula K. LeGuin features people more than machines. There are technologies in the stories that play a role, but the are described as vaguely as possible to support the plot. As a result, often her sci-fi stories feel more like fantasy.

Octavia Butler wrote the Xenogenesis series which features an alien “species” whose system of technology is entirely biological.