Reading List: science fiction

I want to get around to some heavier literature on my reading list. What a doorstopper. It’s the Three-Body trilogy – “Trisolaris” in German – in a single volume: 1,740 pages. The book weighs quite a bit. This was the book that ultimately accompanied me through my surgery. I came to it through the Netflix series and my

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It was one of the books I took with me to hospital last year. I didn’t actually get round to reading it until after rehab, though: Project Hail Mary. The film does the book justice in many respects. It shows that a five-armed (or five-legged?) “rock creature” can be more interesting than entire Marvel universes. Still,

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If you read a lot, you always get the feeling that you have basically never had a new thought in your entire life. A truly fresh thought, I mean. Somebody has always had that thought before you and written it down, too. With eight billion people on the planet, it’s hard to have such a thought anyway, when so many brain

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I’ll admit it right away: I bought this book for one reason only. I had seen the film Arrival and liked it immediately. The film is based on Ted Chiang’s novella “Story of Your Life”, which is part of the German collection Die Hölle ist die Abwesenheit Gottes (“Hell Is the Absence of God”). When I learned that, I natur

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There is science fiction like “Armageddon” or, if you insist, “The Core”, which is occasionally somewhat entertaining but has about as much to do with science as the Pope has to do with artificial contraception. And there is science fiction that doesn’t make every halfway science-minded brain attempt a suicidal leap ou

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This book is a bit problematic. It’s one I only read after I had seen the film adaptation: Robert Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers”. The book is often counted among the important novels of science fiction, and you can see its significance for military science fiction. Even so, I find it decidedly questionable and difficul

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