KSP Forums Book Club

[Hyperspace Industries]

I just started reading Deon Meyer's "onsigbaar" (invisible), I'll tell you, it's the first afrikaans book (that wasn't translated from another language), I've enjoyed in, well, as long as I can remember! It's a spy related book (apparently) the best analogy I can think of is it's like the Jack Ryan series, but not in the cold war.

My dad gave me his copy of it after I once again stated that it would be awesome if someone wrote a good afrikaans book, unlike the romances and emotion-filled trash fests we get forced to read in school. (This grade's afrikaans book in school is about someone wanting to paint his best friend dancing before that friend dies of aids, ugh!)

[MKI]

I can't believe I've missed this thread. I've been grinding through a number of Sci-Fi Novels the last year+ of the pandemic. I'm no where near as much as my "high-school summer peak" of grinding entire series, but I gotta work now haha.

My latest read was more of a palette cleanser from finishing up Dune, which took a few months. 

 

I just finished reading Recursion by Blake Crouch, it was an interesting read with some interesting ideas. It took me a while to actually understand its sci-fi mechanics, which are hard to talk about with spoiling the book. However, it does mix in a number of concepts and has good "fun" with them.

 

I'm now debating if I continue on with the rest of the Dune series, or read something else that doesn't require as much commitment haha. 

[AtomicTech]

I started reading Artemis by Andy Weir!

[jimmymcgoochie]

Currently starting book 7 of 9 in the Expanse series. Since it appears there will only be 6 series of the TV show I’m pretty clear how that’s going to end, however there are enough differences between the two that it’ll be interesting to see how it all pans out. It also seems that there will be a lot of unanswered questions since there are three whole books left…

[adsii1970]

53 minutes ago, Craigcouture said:

Suggest me some books from which I could start my way to the stars

They are older ones, but I would suggest Cosmos and Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan. These are my go-to books when I want to read something not-work-related.

More recent books would include:

• The Case for Space and The Case for Mars both by Robert Zubrin
• The Mars Project by Von Braun (also an older title)
• Mining the Sky by John S. Lewis
• The High Road by Ben Bova

There's more I have on my shelf, but I'm grading online assignments and those are the first book recommendations to pop into my head. I hope those help. Oh, and those are non-fiction, which is what I mostly read.

 

 

[Admiral Fluffy]

I’ve been reading “A short history of nearly everything”.

Its pretty good!

[RKunze]

To get the thread back on the SciFi track, but stay with @Craigcoutures theme of "bringing me to the stars", here are some of my favorites (in no particular order):

• The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C Clarke (about building a space elevator)
• Tank Farm Dynamo by David Brin (short story, link goes directly to the story on Brins website so no spoilers here)
• The Martian by Andi Weir (although that one is more about getting back home from the stars - and I just realized that the whole plot of The Martian is extremely Kerbal. Guess I won't be able to read it again without imagining Mark WatneyKerman with green skin and big cylindrical head )

[Admiral Fluffy]

15 hours ago, RKunze said:

• The Martian by Andy Weir (although that one is more about getting back home from the stars - and I just realized that the whole plot of The Martian is extremely Kerbal. Guess I won't be able to read it again without imagining Mark WatneyKerman with green skin and big cylindrical head )

Thats a good one. 2001 a space odyssey is also pretty good, but the ending is confusing.

[StrandedonEarth]

19 hours ago, Craigcouture said:

Suggest me some books from which I could start my way to the stars

Thank.

You mean fiction or non-fiction?

[Chemp]

21 hours ago, Craigcouture said:

Suggest me some books from which I could start my way to the stars

To start your way to the stars, you need to get off Earth first.

Ignition! by John D. Clark might be a good place to start. I found it a very entertaining read.

[StrandedonEarth]

55 minutes ago, Chemp said:

To start your way to the stars, you need to get off Earth first.

Ignition! by John D. Clark might be a good place to start. I found it a very entertaining read.

That’s a paraphrase of what I was about to say….

The next step to the stars is in LEO, so I suggest “Dragonfly: NASA and the Crisis Aboard Mir”; a 1999 book by Bryan Burrough about the Russian Mir space station and the cosmonauts and astronauts who served aboard. 

Edited March 15, 2022 by StrandedonEarth

[Gargamel]

On 3/14/2022 at 6:19 PM, Admiral Fluffy said:

I’ve been reading “A short history of nearly everything”.

Its pretty good!

Just finished that audiobook.    Good choice. 

[jimmymcgoochie]

I pre-ordered the collection of Expanse short stories a couple of months ago and it just arrived yesterday. Sheds some new light on several events in the “proper” books, and also begs the obvious question of why the ‘Strange Dogs’ part was included in the sixth series of the TV show when it doesn’t seem to fit that timeline and as far as I know they’re not going to add the last three books to the series.

[Gargamel]

On 3/16/2022 at 5:14 AM, jimmymcgoochie said:

I pre-ordered the collection of Expanse short stories a couple of months ago and it just arrived yesterday. Sheds some new light on several events in the “proper” books, and also begs the obvious question of why the ‘Strange Dogs’ part was included in the sixth series of the TV show when it doesn’t seem to fit that timeline and as far as I know they’re not going to add the last three books to the series.

"The Churn" really makes the 5th? season all that much deeper and richer.   There's a lot of personal interplay with the two characters so much better than can be shown in an episode or two. 

[Shpaget]

I suppose this is as good a place as any to ask this. My memory is a bit fuzzy on this one, but I'm looking for an SF novel/short story that possibly starts out with a ram scooper ship skimming Earth's atmosphere to replenish the LEO space station's air supply. The setting is, IIRC, post apocalyptic/fall of civilization so the space station is in dire need of air, but can't rely on resupply missions from Earth. The skimmer ship crew (one or maybe two individuals) were born on the station, have lost most of their muscle mass and can not walk by themselves, once the eventually crash land, because the ram scooper is an old piece of junk... something something about landings and walking away from them. The crew is then rescued by a local underground space fan club while the government agents (???) search for them. Apparently there is some feud between Earthlings and space station dwellers.

Does this ring a bell? My guess is it was written by one of the big three, but really have no clue. Any guesses?

Edited March 28, 2022 by Shpaget

[StrandedonEarth]

14 minutes ago, Shpaget said:

I suppose this is as good a place as any to ask this. My memory is a bit fuzzy on this one, but I'm looking for an SF novel/short story that possibly starts out with a ram scooper ship skimming Earth's atmosphere to replenish the LEO space station's air supply. The setting is, IIRC, post apocalyptic/fall of civilization so the space station is in dire need of air, but can't rely on resupply missions from Earth. The skimmer ship crew (one or maybe two individuals) were born on the station, have lost most of their muscle mass and can not walk by themselves, once the eventually crash land, because the ram scooper is an old piece of junk... something something about landings and walking away from them. The crew is then rescued by a local underground space fan club while the government agents (???) search for them. Apparently there is some feud between Earthlings and space station dwellers.

Does this ring a bell? My guess is it was written by one of the big three, but really have no clue. Any guesses?

“Put wings on a brisk and I can fly it!”

I’m positive this is the book:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_Angels_(Niven,_Pournelle,_and_Flynn_novel)
 

Definitely a fun read and a great tribute to sci-fi fandom

[Admiral Fluffy]

30 minutes ago, Shpaget said:

a ram scooper ship skimming Earth's atmosphere to replenish the LEO space station's air supply.

Yeah, I think @StrandedonEarth was right.

Quote

Astronauts from the orbital society fly a modified scramjet, redesigned to harvest nitrogen from the Earth's atmosphere.

That seems like what you described.

[Shpaget]

That's it! You people are awesome.

[Pthigrivi]

Late to this thread. Best reads in the sci-fi/fantasy stacks of the last few years:

Black Leopard, Red Wolf - Marion James, basically LOTR or King Killer if if was set in Africa and way crazier. 

An Unkindness of Ghosts - Rivers Solomon, Generation ship w/ some solid social commentary

A Deadly Education and The Last Graduate - Naomi Novik, just the best written, tightest set of books about teenagers in a magical death school imaginable. 

[StrandedonEarth]

Another set of books I enjoyed was Wilbur Smith's Ancient Egypt series. River God,  only has a hint of divine intervention, Warlock gets a bit mystical, and The Quest is steeped in the occult. There was another that I found underwhelming, but the three I named were hard to put down..

[MKI]

I'm 60% through the 2nd Dune book, Dune Messiah.

I might honestly stop or at least continue to the third book to hopefully finish "the arc" I assume the three books make. The Dune series isn't really my favorite so far. Its too political and religious and less hard sci-fi.

I can see why its popular, but it isn't really for me.

 

That said, The Expanse might be the series I'll pick up next as it sounds like good fun. Or another one-off book, so I wont be bogged by down another series haha

 

[StrandedonEarth]

1 hour ago, MKI said:

I'm 60% through the 2nd Dune book, Dune Messiah.

 

Yeah, Dune was good, the rest of the books are for fanatics. Maybe I finished the second one, but I doubt it. Lost interest. 

Timothy Zahn’s “Heir to the Empire” trilogy is quite good, if you like Star Wars. Although it’s no longer canon and is now “Legends”. It would have made a much better sequel trilogy. 

[Gargamel]

3 hours ago, MKI said:

That said, The Expanse might be the series I'll pick up next as it sounds like good fun.

It's an excellent series.

 

I just finished the Dark Tower series for the 4th time, this time on Audiobook.  ~160 hours.   Such an amazing story. 

[MKI]

3 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:

Although it’s no longer canon and is now “Legends”. It would have made a much better sequel trilogy. 

This can still happen, and AFAIK it probably will happen as part of the Star Wars shows. 

 

1 hour ago, Gargamel said:

Dark Tower series for the 4th time,

This is another series I have on my list, BUT due to the length it's another commitment. I've read Steven King on the past a few times, but never a series.

 

[StrandedonEarth]

1 hour ago, Gargamel said:

just finished the Dark Tower series for the 4th time, this time on Audiobook.  ~160 hours.   Such an amazing story. 

Nice. I wonder how many times I’ve read that. I certainly read the first three roughly a zillion times, the fourth a bunch, but the last three? Four times each at least, I think, but not many more than that. But  I think I only did a full read through of all seven back-to-back once.  And btw, there is an eighth, written after the conclusion, set as an interlude between 4 and 5. 

11 minutes ago, MKI said:

This is another series I have on my list, BUT due to the length it's another commitment. I've read Steven King on the past a few times, but never a series

Definitely worth the read, even if the painkillers seemed to be doing some of the writing. Another good SK one is “The Green Mile”, first written as a serial (chapter books) and later published as a single novel.