The Martian

I read "The Martian", found it an okay read and didn't bother to read this one. I'll reconsider.

If you haven't read Ted Chiang's short stories yet, do so. His first collection (Stories of Your Life and Others) was my favourite, but his more recent one (Exhalation) was also very good (the title story, Exhalation, is gorgeous). Stories of your Life is what the movie Arrival was based on and (as ever) the story was better than the movie. As far as sci-fi novels, I have pretty generic tastes for this crowd: Dune, The Dispossessed, The Martian. The Crying of Lot 49 is one of my favourite books. Not exactly sci-fi but close.

I read Kurt Vonnegut's _Player_Piano_ and really enjoyed it. It's a story about a heavily computerized society, but the computers are vacuum tube based. "We ran the calculation, replaced all the tubes and ran it again, so we're confident in the result" sort of thing. I also really enjoyed Andy Weir's _Project_Hail_Mary_, and _The_Martian_.

This year I've put myself to the challenge to read at least one book per week which I primarily could complete by reading in the middle of the night while holding our sleeping baby in my arms. It has been an interesting challenge which gave me a lot of fulfilment and has certainly changed my mind on how I view the world. This comment became quite a long read, apologies for that. Books I highly recommend: Churchill by Andrew Roberts (p:1105) A biography about one of the most interesting figures in politics and WWII. Roberts gives a very detailed description of the life of Churchill and manages to keep you interested the entire length of the book. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (p:374) In The God Delusion Dawkins gives arguments why there is no God, why we do not need a God and why religion is damaging to our society. If you are religious it might not be the book for you unless you are open to hear his arguments and line of reasoning. Dawkins will challenge your worldview. The Bomb by Fred Kaplan (p:384)…

I just started The Hobbit a couple days ago. For the last 3-4 months I've been checking out library books on the Kindle and reading as a bedtime ritual to help get me to sleep. It's been working pretty well, I rarely lay there unable to go to sleep. I just finished Devolution by Max Brooks, it was good but not really in my wheelhouse. I didn't realize when I started reading it, but he also did World War Z, which I felt the same way about, and also recently finished reading Before that I finished Artemis by Andy Weir, good but not great. Read because I had recently finished The Martian and absolutely loved it.

Agreed. I mentioned that it is 'imaginative and fun', but it is not the same style of "The Martian" which (in my opinion) had nearly perfect technical execution. I admit to having had some apprehension about a loved author's next effort (I'm looking at you, "Artemis" and "Armada"), but "Hail Mary" did not fulfill that dread for me. So... yay!

Right now I'm doing my annual re-listen to John Ringo's "maple syrup trilogy" (next I'll do my annual re-listen of The Martian, narrated by R. C. Bray not Huwill Huwheaton) https://www.goodreads.com/series/51166-troy-rising It's a really fun series, basically an alien race appears in the system and installs a gate to open up trade with the system. It has some really neat ideas in it and some good challenges they work through from fuel to interstellar war, with the primary character being your run of the mill guy with tech industry experience working in a rural community fighting his way to being fantastically wealthy and arguably the primary defender of human space. Book 1: Live Free or Die: >First Contact Was Friendly >When aliens trundled a gate to other worlds into the solar system, the world reacted with awe, hope and fear. But the first aliens to come through, the Glatun, were peaceful traders and the world breathed a sigh of relief. >Who Controls the Orbitals, Controls the World They're a good read, but the narrator makes them quite a good listen. I've actually bought other author's entire series purely because Mark Boyett has narrated them.…

1.The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time 2.Looking for Alaska 3.Blindness 4.Touching the Void: The True Story of One Man's Miraculous Survival 5.The Martian 6.Never Let Me Go

+1 for The Martian. Excellent!

Farmer in the Sky by Robert Heinlein [1] The Complete Robot by Isaac Asimov [2] The Wrong Unit [3] wasn't a bad little humorous tale. Pretty much anything by Timothy Zahn (sans Star Wars novelisations) [4] or Robert Sawyer [5] floats my boat. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North [6] Barsk: The Elephants’ Graveyard by Lawrence M. Schoen [7] made me care about sentient elephants. Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi [8] is very funny. Audiobook version narrated by Wil Wheaton. Of ones already mentioned: The Bobiverse was surprisingly good (including the audiobook version). The Expanse is good. With regards to Dune, there are some like myself who only ever liked the first book in the series. (Also there is a good audiobook version out there.) The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and sequels are great world building and characters, although the plots seem to meander about with not too much purpose. The Martian is great. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50851.Farmer_in_the_Sky [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50091.The_Complete_Robot [3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30959279-the-wrong-unit [4] https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/12479.Timothy_Zahn…

Fahrenheit 451 Animal Farm The Gene: An Intimate History The Martian Currently reading Sapiens: A brief history of humankind. I would recommend all these books, if you're interested in the subjects they are written about.

Jared Diamond - "Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed" (non-fiction) Iván Repila - "The Boy Who Stole Attila’s Horse": short intense novel about 2 boys who are trapped in a well Margaret Atwood - "The handmaid's tale" Khaled Hosseini - "The kite runner" Agatha Christie - "The murder of Roger Ackroyd" (very surprising plot) Andy Weir - "The Martian" Charles Dickens - "David Copperfield" Clare Mackintosh - "I let you go" Carlos Ruiz Zafón - "The Shadow of the Wind" M.R. Carey - "The girl with all the gifts"

"The Martian" is really good book, and I loved the movie. I am looking forward to Andy Weir's new book. But ... I wouldn't put "The Martian" in the scifi AI category.

Andy Weir's "The Martian" is my favourite book. I've read it about 5 times, and I've never read a book twice before. The movie was a decent adaptation, but it's not near the quality that the book was.

It's half novel, half related series of 9 short stories, but Accelerando is great. The Martian by Andy Weir (movie based on it) was quite good. Daemon I think also qualifies, though it's SF dressed up as a thriller. Oh, Blood Music by Greg Bear probably counts? Except maybe the ending? Tempted to mention The Diamond Age, but not sure that qualifies as "Hard", though closer than some other Stephenson maybe...

The Martian I love it. It's about doing the impossible, one step at a time

I'll agree with everyone saying The Martian and add The Neanderthal Parralax (Trilogy) by Robert J Sawyer

I'll second someone else's recommendation for The Martian, that was just a really fun read you can just burn through because it is so enjoyable. If you want another really fun read, Ready Player One was fantastic. I've also enjoyed the Old Man's War saga, there are 6 books but you can skip book 4 since it is a retelling of book 3 from the POV of another character. This is a space saga and I really like the universe he created. In the hard sci-fi genre, I really enjoyed The Forever War. And for just pure world building fantasy, the Game of Thrones books (The song of Ice and Fire series) are some of the best written books I've ever read.

The Martian (Andy Wier)?

+1 (+2?) for Deep Work and Ready Player One. Read both this year, and both are excellent. Also really liked The Martian.

+1 for The Martian - fantastic book!

I read a lot of Science Fiction for fun. These are a few of my favorites that I've given to other people: 1. Vacuum Diagrams by Stephen Baxter. When I think of epic hard science fiction, the Xeelee Sequence books spring to mind. With a story line that spans millions of years (and a few dozen books), this collection of short stories is a good introduction to one of the best and most underrated sci-fi series out there. Baxter's Manifold trilogy (Manifold: Space, Manifold: Time and Manifold: Origin) are also fantastic. 2. Foundation by Isaac Asimov. The whole Foundation series is wonderful, but this book is a landmark of sci-fi that should be on any fan's bookcase. 3. The Martian by Andy Weir. This book is what I've been giving the last couple years to people who don't think they like sci-fi. Everyone I've given it to has loved it. 4. Rama by Arthur C. Clarke. Another hard sci-fi staple. The rest of the Rama books he "co-wrote" with Gentry Lee are decent but become more space opera than hard sci-fi. I enjoyed them but many sci-fi fans find them polarizing.…

Oh boy, you fucked up now. Here are the books I read this past year that I felt were "Good", starting from the most recent : To Kill A Mocking Bird (Insanely good) True Grit (Insanely good) The Little Friend (Good) Priceless (Very good, about art theft) The Secret History (Insanely good) Ready Player One (Good, nerdy) Shadow Divers (Very good, history nerd book) Diary of Anne Frank (Very good) Unbroken (Very good, way better than the movie) With The Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (Very good) Seveneves (good, but I'm a Stephenson fanboy) The Martian (Very good, but just watch the movie). I read a bunch of other stuff, but that's what I found really "good" this past year.

Absolutely amazing, changed the way I look at the society, will re-read: - George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying Loved: - Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns - Andy Weir, The Martian - Neal Stephenson, Seveneves - Greg Egan, Teranesia Liked: - Arthur C. Clarke, 3001: The Final Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke, 2061: Odyssey Three - Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Laws - Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out - Jonathan Slack, Stem Cells: A Very Short Introduction - John Scalzi, Fuzzy Nation (bought the audiobook for Wil Wheaton's narration) - Ray Monk, Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center - Alastair Reynolds, Revelation Space - David C. Cassidy, Beyond Uncertainty: Heisenberg, Quantum Physics, and the Bomb Found full of BS, did not finish: - Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power Textbooks: - order of 10^3 pages of Open University textbooks - Klauber, Student Friendly Quantum Field Theory - Feynman & Hibbs, Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals - Wald, General Relativity (5 chapters) - Peskin & Schroeder, An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory (5 chapters)…

My full list of books, including reviews, is here: https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2015 From that list, my favorite ones were: The Four Steps to the Epiphany: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/827338560 Made to Stick: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/897777811 How to Measure Anything: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/698402984 The Non-Designer's Design Book: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1170518622 Masters of Doom: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/899580915 The Martian: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1136330196 The Mistborn Trilogy: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1388373037

While fairly engaging until the end, the characters in the book were pretty shallow and the story itself wasn't really that special. "Amazing" is extremely heavy praise for what is a decent airport sci-fi page turner.

you found The Martian bland ?! That's...I am...speechless. It is an amazing book. The characters are superbly fleshed out and Andy Weir's humour is par excellence. The calculations were not tedious at all. LOL - if you stuck on Mars, calculations are you best friend. I think the author has actually dumbed it down quite a lot TBH.

I've read 33 books so I'm not going to publish the list here, but i blogged about it: http://blog.habrador.com/2015/12/books-ive-read-in-2015.html The books I liked the most were: - The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - On Intelligence - The Martian - The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution - Einstein: His Life and Universe - Alan Turing: The Enigma - Neuroscience for Dummies - Thunder Run - (which is about the battle of Baghdad in 2003)

I read The Martian, Snow Crash, and Ready Player One over the course of a month or two. All three of those books have their flaws but I enjoy the style and page turning nature of them a lot.

The Martian by Andy Weir (Fiction)

The Martian - Andy Weir I'm not an avid reader, but the way this book was written (mostly journal style) and the humor just pulled me in. Glad I'm almost done reading it before the movie comes out and spoils anything.

Currently I'm trudging through GEB[1]. Last month I read: - The Dip (super short read and has a few good points but overall I didn't really like it)[2] - Going Clear (great book, terrible formatting, but a great book)[3] - The Martian (short read, very entertaining and well researched)[4] 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach 2. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/the_dip/ 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_Clear 4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_%28Weir_novel%29

"Off to be the wizard" is pretty light and fun. "John dies at the end" was fun, not really sci-fi, more buffy the vampire slayer esque. "Existence" by David Brin made me want to puke it had so many good ideas. A tiny bit dated, but very smart. "The Martian" I expect you've read it. Good romp, easy to read. Reminded me of a Michael Crichton. "World War Z" was good.

Second that, reading this right now what a great book!

Anything by Iain M. Banks. Start with "The Player of Games" and "Consider Phlebas". Anything by Vernor S. Vinge especially "Zones of Thought" series. "Daemon", "Freedom(tm)", "Kill Decision" and "Influx" by Daniel Suarez. "The Martian" by Andy Weir. Anything by Neal Stephenson, especially "Reamde: A Novel" and "Cryptonomicon". Anything by Hannu Rajaniemi, especially "The Fractal Prince".

Just read 'The Martian'. I wouldn't even call it science fiction, its just science. A fictional but technical and realistic how-to guide on surviving Mars.

I'm about a quarter of the way through "The Martian" by Andy Weir. It's good, geeky fun so far. Some of the dialog is clunky but the main character is interesting and fun. I also read "11/22/63" by Stephen King. An interesting twist on time travel with the usual King propulsiveness. Recommended for King fans like me who may not have read him in awhile. "Geek Sublime" by Vikram Chandra is a surprising mix of "my career in writing" with computation lessons and history. I took a break from it to read The Martian but it's extremely interesting. He's one of my favorite writers and I'm glad he's got something out that might expose him to a different audience.

I've added it to my list of books to inspire my kids. So if they ever come to me and say, "Dad, what is chemistry good for?" I can just give them The Martian and say, "read this and you'll know"

Just read The Martian recently. It was recommended to me as extremely detail-oriented. It is extremely detail-oriented. :-) Fun and engrossing if you like super-hard science fiction. (I sure seemed to, although I glossed over a few of the details in the middle.) I was going to say that Kerbal Space Program fans would probably like it, but actually now I really want to say that NetHack fans would probably like it. (What is the effect of breaking a +6 wand of oxygen scrubbing? What happens if you dip a cursed ring of radiothermal generation into a blessed potion of liquid nitrogen? How much nutrition can you get from a partly eaten food ration?)

I started The Martian by Andy Weir about 3 days ago and I'm really enjoying it. It's a really entertaining book that I highly recommend! Last week I finished The Paradox of Choice and Zero Day. I enjoyed both of them, although I don't think I'll be reading any of the sequels to Zero Day. Before that I went through The Maze Runner trilogy, those were entertaining reads. Some other books I've read recently that I can remember off the top of my head are the Divergent series of books (eh), How Will You Measure Your Life by Clayton Christensen (great read), Ready Player One (loved, loved, loved this book), Starters (didn't bother reading any more in the series) and Moon walking With Einstein (I enjoyed it).

I just finish "The Martian: A Novel" by Andy Weir and I really enjoyed it.