Project Hail Mary
Andy Weir, 2021
A science teacher wakes on a spacecraft with no memory of how he got there and a solar system to save.
Science fiction: books to read
These books share a streak of problem-solving under pressure and a dry, human humor that keeps the stakes bearable. In «The Martian», an astronaut stranded on Mars has to science his way out one improvised fix at a time, and in «Project Hail Mary» a man wakes with no memory on a ship far from Earth and works out loud to find a way home. If you like watching clever people think their way through impossible situations, this is the shelf for you.
A page that shows it
A knock at the door, twelve light-years from home.
Knock-knock-knockNo, that’s not creepy at all. Being in a spaceship twelve light-years from home and having someone knock on the door is totally normal. -
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams, 1979
The Earth is demolished for a bypass, and a man in his dressing gown must hitch across a galaxy run on bad bureaucracy and good towels.
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Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut Jr., 1969
A soldier unstuck from time, an invented planet, and a three-word shrug for every death the twentieth century could hand him.
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The Martian
Andy Weir, 2011
An astronaut stranded on Mars must science his way out, one log entry and improvised fix at a time; a survival thriller with gallows humor.
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The Road
Cormac McCarthy, 2006
A father and son walk south through a burned America with a shopping cart, a pistol and the rule to keep going.
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Sunrise on the Reaping
Suzanne Collins, 2025
Before he was District 12's ruined victor, Haymitch Abernathy was a boy with a girl, a family, and a reaping. The 50th Hunger Games, from the inside.
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Watchmen
Alan Moore, 1986
A murder mystery among retired superheroes becomes a cold look at power, memory, and what it costs to save a city that may not deserve it.
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A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess, 1962
A teenage gang leader who loves violence and Beethoven tells his story in his own invented slang, until the state offers to cure him of choosing.
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I, Robot
Isaac Asimov, 1950
Nine linked stories in which robots obey the Three Laws perfectly and still cause trouble, because the humans around them do not.
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The Maze Runner
James Dashner, 2009
A boy wakes with no memory in a moving lift, among boys who have built a life beside a shifting maze. The rules are simple; the questions aren't.
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Ender's Game
Orson Scott Card, 1985
A gifted child is recruited to a space battle school where the games are real and the adults never explain the rules.
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Flowers for Algernon
Daniel Keyes, 1966
A man whose mind is transformed by surgery discovers that intelligence has a price, and that feeling may be the harder science.
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Breakfast of Champions
Kurt Vonnegut, 1973
A little-read science-fiction hack, a car dealer coming apart, and a narrator who walks into his own book to tell them both the truth.
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Morning Star
Pierce Brown, 2016
A captive hero, a brutal hierarchy, and the cost of turning pain into purpose in the Red Rising saga.
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Insurgent
Veronica Roth, 2012
In a city divided into five virtues, a young woman hunted for being all five must decide what she will sacrifice to stop a war.
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Allegiant
Veronica Roth, 2013
In a fractured city, Tris and Tobias face what loyalty costs when courage stops looking heroic and becomes the work of getting through a day.
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The Circle
Dave Eggers, 2013
Mae joins the world's most admired tech company, where total transparency is the mission, and discovers what being fully seen costs.
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The 5th wave (The 5th Wave #1)
Richard Yancey, 2010
After an alien invasion radically changes Earth, one survivor must navigate a new world ruled by primal instinct, absolute distrust, and the ghosts of who she used to be.
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The Hunger Games Trilogy (Hunger Games / Catching Fire / Mockingjay)
Suzanne Collins, 2008
A girl volunteers for a televised death match to save her sister, then quietly turns the cameras into a weapon.
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Ready Player One
Ernest Cline, 2011
A teenager in a collapsing near-future hunts for a fortune hidden inside a vast virtual world, where knowing 1980s pop culture is the only edge.
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The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
Suzanne Collins, 2020
Before he was President Snow, he was a boy with nothing but ambition and a song.
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Cinder
Marissa Meyer, 2012
Cinderella as a cyborg mechanic in a crowded future Beijing, where a prince brings her a broken android and the city is quietly afraid.
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Red Rising
Pierce Brown, 2014
A sixteen-year-old Helldiver in the helium mines under Mars, fastest hands in his clan, decides the order of things can be broken.
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Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005
A carer looks back on her English boarding-school childhood and the two friends she has loved since, in a world whose rules she never thinks to question.
A taste of the feed
The year the obituaries and the news bulletins became the same page.
Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles away from the home I live in all year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes. Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes. And everyday my government gives me a count of corpses created by the military service in Vietnam. So it goes. My father died many years ago now — of natural causes. So it goes. He was a sweet man. He was a gun nut, too. He left me his guns. They rust.
Slaughterhouse-Five · Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The moment a suit breach becomes a race against your own escaping air.
Our main communications dish, which relayed signals from the Hab to Hermes, acted like a parachute, getting torn from its foundation and carried with the torrent. Along the way, it crashed through the reception antenna array. Then one of those long thin antennae slammed into me end-first. It tore through my suit like a bullet through butter, and I felt the worst pain of my life as it ripped open my side. I vaguely remember having the wind knocked out of me (pulled out of me, really) and my ears popping painfully as the pressure of my suit escaped.
The Martian · Andy Weir
What survives of a people after the roads between them are closed
Her people were great travelers once, going from district to district to perform their music. Tam Amber remembers it, as he was about my age when the war ended and the Peacekeepers rounded up the Covey, killing all the adults and confining the kids to our district.
Sunrise on the Reaping · Suzanne Collins
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