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Comment by bdunks | Hacker News Reader

It was nice seeing my 2025 reading list represented.

I started the year reading the first five books of the Foundation Series (book #1 on the list). A must read for anyone who hasn’t read it. I couldn’t believe how well it held up 70+ years later(!!)

I just finished the 3 Body Problem trilogy, and think it’s appropriate book #2 (The Dark Forest) is on the list as it’s probably the best — but all three are great.

I’m now ready Project Hail Mary. It’s been a long time since I read the Martian,but Andy Weir’s writing style is fast paced and practically a screenplay already. It’s obvious from the first chapter why it was picked up for a movie.

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> Andy Weir’s writing style is fast paced and practically a screenplay already

Oh thanks for the warning. I was avoiding him based on a hunch. Now I know I was right.

If anyone else is weird like me and likes books to not read like a movie screenplay, same goes for The Expanse.

For what it's worth, I found (the start of the first book of) the Expanse to be this in a bad way, but the Martian to be this in a good way. I can definitely see why some people would find The Martian annoying too, but it feels more like a passion project than a TV pitch.

I loathe movie adaptations and never watch them, but the source material The Martian was a very good read in my 12th grade.

I like hard SciFi with no aliens and plausible rules.

I don't like scifi or fantasy, hard or not, that turns into a technical manual. Which is another thing I heard of in connection to Weir. Brandon Sanderson's fantasy series with all those metals is another example. I managed to finish like 3 books but I simply skipped all the d&d manual like descriptions of metal usage.

FWIW there are actually 4 books in the Three-Body Problem "trilogy". The Redemption of Time was written by a fan who felt the series didn't provide closure and was recognized as canon by Cixin Liu.

Woah, what an unexpected surprise!

I highly recommend the book; it definitely completes the series well.

I finished foundation this year too. I really didn’t like how he ended it. Fun fact I learned from reading Foundation’s Edge is that he didn’t want to write Edge or Foundation and Earth.

Gnome Press owned the original series and he didn’t get any royalties for them. In 1961, his current publisher Doubleday acquired them and for 20 years he told them no to writing more Foundation books. In 1981 Doubleday said they would pay him 10 times his normal rate and that is when he wrote Foundation’s Edge.

This was all printed in the front of my copy of Foundation and Earth. Titled as “The Story Behind the Foundation”.

Funny coincidence, these are the exact sci-fi books I read this and previous year, in the exact order I read them (I read some non-sci-fi books in between to not get overwhelmed). I finished Project Hail Mary literally one hour ago. All the books were great, but Remembrance of Earth's Past series was literally life-changing, truly a masterpiece.

I'm guessing you plan to read Dune next? ;) I plan to start with it during Christmas break.

Asimov was a brilliant mind, but I'm not sure the Foundation series holds up very well since chaos theory become established (it is 40+ years since I read the books though, so I could be remembering wrongly).

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