The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell comes to mind. A Jesuit priest is the only survivor of a first-contact flight to an alien world and returns horribly disfigured in mind and body and refuses to talk about what happened. We slowly learn what happened to everyone as the story unfolds. Great SF novel and not religious, although it explores religion.
We’ve been using QGIS at my company for almost 8 years at this point and I really love it. The python integration and deep plugin repository render it head and shoulders above ESRI. Although I admit for enterprise solutions many will still require the turn-key solutions esri offer.