Science fiction book club with Stacey

In the last after-show to TWIG (on the bonus channel, I believe), Stacey proposed doing a science fiction book club - hooray. Especially since I seem to have run out of good Audible content. Since it’s the talk of the week, I’ve started with Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. Anyone listening / reading along?

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I’ve got Project Hail Mary waiting to start, but got into John Birmingham’s Zero Day Code trilogy just before it came out. On second book Fail State now. What a terrible series to read during the ongoing pandemic and world situation. Recommend it for anyone who wants to read a Walking Dead type story without the walking dead.

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I’m a regular sci-fi reader and would be interested in the future but right now I’m currently already reading a couple of books.

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How about adding Hummingbird Salamander to the list?

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I finished it this morning.

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I looked for Project: Hail Mary on Audible on Friday, but I only found the English version. I expect the German version will still be several months down the line - Der Marsianer was over a year behind The Martian. (I share the account with my wife and she doesn’t speak English, so I try and keep English language books to a minimum, so I don’t end up having to buy them twice.)

I just finished the new Tom Hilenbrand, Montecrypto. Very interesting book, a mix between Suarez’s Daemon and Ready Player One, crossed with Hammet’s Sam Spade, but without the virtual reality.

He has several series on the go at the moment, a contemporary series about an ex-star cook, Xavier Kiefer, who has turned his back on the world of Michelin stars, in order to run an exclusive restaurant in Luxembourg providing local dishes from the best ingredients, but not worrying about the stress of the heut cuisine world. But he keeps stumbling on dead bodies and investigates the deaths. Amusing and a good read.

Then he has his Hollogramatica universe, set in a near future, where everything and everyone is dressed in holograms and you can download your cortex into a “Quant”, a second body, like changing your clothes for a different fashion, but you have to return to your own body regularly or you will “crash”. Something is wrong with the holograms and what is it about an old AI on a desolate island? The adventure follows a private detective, hired to find out why a Quant programmer has disappeared and a Turing detective as they uncover the mystery. The main books are Hologramatica and Qube, but there are also a couple of short stories to accompany the series, focusing on people trying to achieve near-death experiences by Quanting into bodies and trying to hold the backup into their real body until the last possible moment.

There is also a good standalone novel, Droneland, which is excellent. It covers a world of personal drones and AI. A very interesting read, not quite as dark as Suarez’s Kill Decision, but a similar theme.

I also like Karl Olafson’s Mirror, a brilliant book, in which your “2nd you”, your mirror, an AI in a smartphone like device is used to help advertise to you, but what if your mirror is more than just a mirror? A journalist notices that her mirror is acting strangely and doesn’t seem to have her best interests at heart any longer…

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Excellent collection of reading recommendations already - thanks everyone! Looking forward to what comes up next and crossing fingers for the show to come to life.

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Project Hail Mary is in my queue, currently listening to Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez

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That’s an exciting one - have fun!

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I’ve heard it about 4 times now on Audible. Daemon/Darknet about 8 times.

Mote in God’s Eye and Ringworld probably close to a dozen each, and the Dune series and LOTR each half a dozen times.

I’ve only managed Cryptonomicon all the way through once…

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Love love loving Project Hail Mary - even better than the Martian. Andy will be my guest Friday on a special Triangulation. Highly recommended.

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I just finished listening to the last of The Expanse series of books. There’s 8 of them so far. And I recently started watching the series based on the books on Amazon prime. I didn’t like the shows when I first tried to watch them a couple of years ago, but now that I know the characters, and what they are thinking and feeling, I am enjoying the shows immensely.

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Me too, only once, liked it

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Just finished it. I fully relate and have a sense of the reasons why you’d love it. I’d love to be able to develop stories on that level. Looking forward to the Triangulation episode!

My wife loves the Murderbot Diaries. Most are novellas, and one full length novel.

"On a distant planet, a team of scientists are conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied 'droid - a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module, and refers to itself (though never out loud) as “Murderbot.” "

It is not horror, but humor.

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After listening to first few minutes of interview wth Andy Weir, stopped until I finished the book. Today I started listening to interview again. Boy, am I glad I put it off. I think there were many spoilers on first half of interview. But what a great interview !!!
By the way, did you notice the Audible narrator insisted on saying point four fifteen instead of point four one five, but every other number was point x y. Drove me crazy for a while.
And talk about educational value. I had to sit with a calculator nearby through the whole book.

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Ha! I am glad that there are other people who can get wound up over details like this. :smiley:

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It always irks me and makes me want to find them and tweet at them … until I regain my senses.

Kill Decision was AWESOME. I still play Daemon and Freedom TM from time to time.

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Yes. I’ve listened to Kill Decision 3 or 4 times and Daemon and Darknet (German name for Freedom™) probably 10 times.

The same with the Millennium trilogy, about a dozen times. It is interesting how that has completely different names in each language.
Only the 2nd novel carries the same title in Swedish and English.

Män som Hatar Kvinnor - Men who hate women (the girl with the dragon tattoo / Verblendung - infatuation)
Flickan Som Lekte med Elden - The girl who played with fire (Verdammnis - perdition)
Luftslottet som sprängdes - The air castle that was blown up (the girl that kicked the hornets’ nest / Vegebung - forgiveness or absolution)

It is the same in Germany with many films. The Die Hard series is Stirb Langsam (die slowly), for example.

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