Moon joy seems to be a real thing right now. After watching NASA send a team of astronauts to the moon last week, it seems like the perfect time to share some sci-fi books. A few I read and loved, others are on my own summer reading list.
My favourite of the below is Project Hail Mary, which was such an immersive read. I loved how clever it was, showing all the science of astrophysics in detail without being too complicated for the reader. The characters and plot twist were brilliant as well. And the one I’m most excited to read is In Ascension, which my husband tells me is one of his favourite novels in years.
Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
Blurb:
‘Are you happy in your life?’
Those are the last words Jason Dessen hears before the masked abductor knocks him unconscious.
Before he awakes to find himself strapped to a gurney, surrounded by strangers in hazmat suits.
Before the man he’s never met smiles down at him and says, ‘Welcome back.’
In this world he’s woken up to, Jason’s life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife. His son was never born. And Jason is not an ordinary college physics professor, but a celebrated genius who has achieved something remarkable. Something impossible.
In this other life, Jason has created a box. Transport into infinite alternate universes – every possible outcome of his life, one behind each door. In this other life, Jason chose a door. And he stole the life he wanted.
If Jason Dessen wants his life back, he will have to find it among infinite possibilities. And he will have to battle a terrifying, seemingly unbeatable foe: himself.
In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
Blurb:
Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, travelling the globe to study ancient organisms. When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of the earth’s first life forms – what she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings.
Her discovery leads Leigh to the Mojave desert and an ambitious new space agency. Drawn deeper into the agency’s work, she learns that the Atlantic trench is only one of several related phenomena from across the world, each piece linking up to suggest a pattern beyond human understanding. Leigh knows that to continue working with the agency will mean leaving behind her declining mother and her younger sister, and faces an impossible choice: to remain with her family, or to embark on a journey across the breadth of the cosmos.
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
Blurb:
Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission – and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish.
Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.
All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.
His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it’s up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery-and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.
And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he’s got to do it all alone.
Or does he?
The Martian by Andy Weir
Blurb:
I’m stranded on Mars.
I have no way to communicate with Earth.
I’m in a habitat designed to last 31 days.
If the oxygenator breaks down, I’ll suffocate. If the water reclaimer breaks down, I’ll die of thirst. If the hab breaches, I’ll just kind of explode. If none of those things happen, I’ll eventually run out of food and starve to death.
So yeah. I’m screwed.
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
Blurb:
A civil servant is offered a lucrative job in a mysterious new government ministry gathering ‘expats’ from across history to test whether time-travel is feasible.
Her role is to work as a ‘bridge’: living with, supporting and monitoring expat ‘1847’ – Commander Graham Gore, a former Victorian polar explorer. Gore, an adventurer by trade, soon adjusts to this bizarre new world of washing machines, feminism and Spotify; and during a long, sultry summer the pair move from awkwardness to friendship to something more.
But as the true shape of the project that brought them together begins to emerge, Gore and the bridge are forced to confront their past choices and imagined futures. Can love triumph over the histories that have shaped them? And how do you defy that history when it is living in your house?
What’s your favourite sci-fi book? Let me know in the comments. I’m also on Instagram, Twitter and threads – @bookwormgirl_24
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