Posted by bwb 10 hours ago
They start as a "The Martian" cribbed story, but the development arc takes in better places. It was less geek/efficiency porn and more character development and required less strain on my suspension of disbelief overall.
A nitpick about the third recommandation with "robots modeled on Karel Čapek’s designs". I suppose that they have not read Čapek’s novels. His robots were not pure machines, they were made from a biological substrate. In a way, they were closer to golems than to what we're now calling robots.
If you want to read really different and lesser known novels, Karel Čapek’s are a good choice. I did not enjoy "R.O.R." much except for his surprising concept of robots, but I highly recommend "War with the newts".
If you want to share your 3 fav reads of the year, you can do that here -> https://shepherd.com/bboy/my-3-fav-reads
You get a cool page like this -> https://shepherd.com/bboy/2024/f/bwb
Plus, it goes into our "best books of 2024" voting -> https://shepherd.com/bboy/2024
I am slowly getting more into place on this website, I have been working on it for 3.5 years now.
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.
These books aren't anything that will change your life, but they're well written and a lot of fun.
Have you read any Peter Hamilton? He is another fav of mine.
The same author also wrote the silo series. He tends to push his books out in small portions but it's effectively a trilogy. The series on Apple TV for that is actually pretty good. I reread the books after completing season 1 a few months ago.