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The Dead Mountaineer's Inn is also good. A classic whodunnit with a twist.
I found it not as good, and somewhat predictable. Its quirky humour didn't work on me, that's probably why I didn't like it as much.
These are all painfully mid reads. (The alien in Hail Mary is about as alien as a rival fraternity brother.) If you want real alien aliens, read Blindsight (Peter Watts).
Project Hail Mary is more... warm and fuzzy, but then one doesn't read Peter Watts for warm and fuzzy...
One of "you may never heard of" sci-fi books I can recommend is The City & the City by China Miéville. Perhaps not traditional science fiction, but so original and strange, it's beautiful.
One of "you may never heard of" sci-fi books I can recommend is The City & the City by China Miéville. Perhaps not traditional science fiction, but so original and strange, it's beautiful.
I dislike both this and Miéville's Embassytown since in my opinion both set out to mislead me and then do a reveal which amounts "I misled you about what's really going on" and while that works for a stand up comic beat (e.g. Taylor Tomlinson "he cheated on me ... in my head") I don't want to read a whole novel this way. Perdido Street Station and Kraken I really enjoyed, but I almost threw the book across the room f…
These are all painfully mid reads. (The alien in Hail Mary is about as alien as a rival fraternity brother.) If you want real alien aliens, read Blindsight (Peter Watts).
These are all painfully mid reads. (The alien in Hail Mary is about as alien as a rival fraternity brother.) If you want real alien aliens, read Blindsight (Peter Watts).
Thanks! I really like it when authors shock my neurons with ideas they never even came close to entertain. Alien aliens are always rare in sci-fi books. Although I really struggled with the octopodes in Children of Ruin, so I'm not sure if I'm ready yet. Can someone please suggest books with novel, really alien forms of life, social structures, etc.?
Spider Robinson's "Callahan's Crosstime Saloon" series had a story towards the end that blew my tiny little teenaged mind back in the 90's.
Octavia Butler, of course. Xenogenesis.
The problem with Project Hail Mary is that the audio book is good but the book is not. First read the book and then listen to the audio book and you know what I mean.
I also found the film of The Martian way better than the book. I got so sick of reading about concentrations of gases and stuff in painful detail. So yeah, good story, but not so good writing. If Project Hail Mary is anything like that then I'll give it a miss.
Weir tries to make the story more interesting by adding an extra mystery to solve (the main character wakes up with amnesia and has to piece together where he is and what he has to do), but to me it really didn't work.
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Beware, you'll also get Vampires in space, which is so silly, it kills the book.
They're a better depiction of Vampires than most, with Watts doing everything he could to make them biologically plausible (that can only go so far). That being said, I found the way they were "shackled" to be ridiculous. If you've got superintelligent and superstrong predatory hominids running around, you have no reason to have them physically free even if you put the medical safeguards in place. Break their spines…
These are all painfully mid reads. (The alien in Hail Mary is about as alien as a rival fraternity brother.) If you want real alien aliens, read Blindsight (Peter Watts).