The Martian

LOG ENTRY: SOL 6

I’m pretty much fucked. That’s my considered opinion. Fucked. Six days into what should be one of the greatest two months of my life, and it’s turned into a nightmare. I don’t even know who’ll read this. I guess someone will find it eventually. Maybe a hundred years from now. For the record…I didn’t die on Sol 6. Certainly the rest of the crew thought I did, and I can’t blame them. Maybe there’ll be a day of national mourning for me, and my Wikipedia page will say, “Mark Watney is the only human being to have died on Mars.”

Author- Andy Weir
Publisher-New York: Crown 2014.

Annotation: the winner of both Goodreads Choice Awards: 2014 and
Great American Read 2018, this fast pace, often funny and sometimes confronting first novel from Andy Weir focuses on mark Watney. a crew member of the first manned mission to Mars. after a dust storm on the red planet forces his crew to escape back to the shuttle, he is left behind thought dead. now the sole inhabitant on the hostile planet his story of incredible, imposable survival begins.






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The foundation

Chapter One
HARI SELDON-. . . born in the 11,988th year of the Galactic Era; died 12,069. The dates are more commonly given in terms of the current Foundational Era as -79 to the year 1 F.E. Born to middle-class parents on Helicon, Arcturus sector (where his father, in a legend of doubtful authenticity, was a tobacco grower in the hydroponic plants of the planet), he early showed amazing ability in mathematics. Anecdotes concerning his ability are innumerable, and some are contradictory. At the age of two, he is said to have . . . 

. . . Undoubtedly his greatest contributions were in the field of psychohistory. Seldon found the field little more than a set of vague axioms; he left it a profound statistical science. . . . 

. . . The best existing authority we have for the details of his life is the biography written by Gaal Dornick who, as a young man, met Seldon two years before the great mathematician's death. The story of the meeting . . .


ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA* 

Author- Isaac Asimov
Publisher- New York: Bantam Books 2004.

From one of the titans of science fiction comes the millennia-spanning foundation. the first of the expansive trilogy that has some of the most ambitious world-building since Tolkien and most thought-provoking work since Tolstoy.

After a band of psychologists (the science of predicting the future) come to the realisation that the galactic empire is in decline and will fall apart in the near future leading to thousands of years of war and regression, they set out with psychohistorian Hari Seldon as their leader to create a colony and preserve the accumulated knowledge of humankind.

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old mans war

“I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife's grave. Then I joined the army.

Visiting Kathy's grave was the less dramatic of the two.” 

Author- John Scalzi

Publisher- New York: Tor Books 2005

Annotations- old man's war was Scalzi's first novel earning him a Hugo nomination for best novel  in 2006 and introduced his sardonic wit and humour to the world, old man's war follows John Perry who upon his 75th birthday says goodbye to his deceased wife, joins the colonial defence force and leaves the planet. what follows is a fast-paced, action backed surprisingly funny adventure that sees John and his band of friends through there first tour of duty as earth's premier fighting force and all the physical and mental torment that involves.

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Hitchhiker's guide to the universe

“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”

Author- Douglas Adams
publisher- New York: Harmony Books 1980, c1979.

Annotations- A book that starts where most are afraid to end, we begin with the destruction of the earth and things pick up speed from there, the Author Douglas Adams oft considered one of the 21st century's great satirists takes us through an absurd, fast passed, slide splittingly funny look at a universe where humanity is not even a blip on the radar, earth only warrants a two word description in the culmination of all knowledge and humans aren't even rate in the top two spots for smartest creatures on earth.

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Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America's Race to the Moon

During the five decades following Alan Shepard's first launch in 1961, NASA's enormous accomplishments were respected and admired the world over. those responsible for the agencies success followed a simple axiom "good is the enemy of great."

Authors- Alan Shepard,  Deke Slayton, Jay Barbree, Howard Benedict
Publisher- New York: Simon & Schuster 2007

Annotation:  this book tells the never before told stories behind one of humanities greatest accomplishments the Apollo space program and how we got from Alan Shepard to the first steps of Neil Armstrong. all from one of the best people to tell it, Alan Shepard, a Memoir of sorts from the second person ever in space and the first American.

an intense drama playing out when everything is put on the line for science. 

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Red rising

The first thing you should know about me is I am my father’s son. And when they came for him, I did as he asked. I did not cry. Not when the Society televised the arrest. Not when the Golds tried him. Not when the Grays hanged him. Mother hit me for that. My brother Kieran was supposed to be the stoic one. He was the elder, I the younger. I was supposed to cry. Instead, Kieran bawled like a girl when Little Eo tucked a haemanthus into Father’s left workboot and ran back to her own father’s side. My sister Leanna murmured a lament beside me. I just watched and thought it a shame that he died dancing but without his dancing shoes.

On Mars there is not much gravity. So you have to pull the feet to break the neck. They let the loved ones do it.

Author- Pierce Brown
Publisher- New York: Ballantine Books 2014.

annotations- the debut novel from Pierce Brown that started the red rising trilogy, winner of Goodreads Choice Awards: 2014, a fast-paced, thrilling, journey into an expansive dystopian Sci-Fi fantasy world that flows from earths moon to the far edge of the solar system. our story follows Darrow after the execution of his wife throws himself into a revolutionary cell which aims to infiltrate the ruling Gold a genetically enhanced bloodthirsty
warrior class that rules over the solar system with an Iron fist.

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A short history of nearly everything

                                                                              NO MATTER HOW hard you try you will never be able to grasp just how tiny, how spatially unassuming, is a proton. It is just way too small.

A proton is an infinitesimal part of an atom, which is itself of course an insubstantial thing. Protons are so small that a little dib of ink like the dot on this i can hold something in the region of 500,000,000,000 of them, rather more than the number of seconds contained in half a million years. So protons are exceedingly microscopic, to say the very least.

Now imagine if you can (and of course you can't) shrinking one of those protons down to a billionth of its normal size into a space so small that it would make a proton look enormous. Now pack into that tiny, tiny space about an ounce of matter. Excellent. You are ready to start a universe.                                                                                                                             


Author- Bill Bryson
Publisher- New York: Broadway Books 2003 

a light-hearted look at the history of everything. starting at the big band Author Bill Bryson takes us through an unconventional history lesson from the definitive start of everything and weaving through the biggest events and achievements in the scientific world through conversations with some of the worlds best mathematicians and scientist Bryson brings the history of everything to life.

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2001 a space odyssey

The drought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended. Here on the Equator, in the continent which would one day be known as Africa, the battle for existence had reached a new climax of ferocity, and the victor was not yet in sight. In this barren and desiccated land, only the small or the swift or the fierce could flourish, or even hope to survive.

author- Arther c Clark
publisher- New York: New American Library c1968

annotations-  from the award-winning author of childhoods end and Rendezvous with Rama comes the inspiration for one of the 20th centuries most groundbreaking film, 2001: a space odyssey. the story starts with a discovery on the moon that humanity has been dreading and hoping for since it first looked into the night sky. the possibility that we may not be alone in the universe sparks a manned mission into the outer reaches of the solar system, but in the deep reaches of space, with a crew of two and an AI named HAL disaster is brewing. a thought-provoking read, descriptively written, with a strong plot and                                                                   great world-building. a true classic.
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The Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. "THE CALL OF CTHULHU"

Author- H. P. Lovecraft
Publisher- New York: Race Point Publishing, a division of Book Sales, Inc. [2014]

From the author of The Call of Cthulhu, History of the Necronomicon and Reanimator. This complete collection contains the authors novel, four novellas, and fifty-three short stories.
the origin of Lovecraftian horror itself, inspiring countless films, novels, boardgames. one of the few works to inspire an entire genre of fiction and one of the rawest looks at the mind-breaking terror of the unknown, a look at what lies beyond. This collection swings from deep space, to prehistory, to the depths of the minds of man, to outside our dimension, then into the unsettling house down the street, the unknown can truly be anywhere. 

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Stranger in a strange land

Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith.

Author- Robert A. Heinlein
publisher- New York: Putnam 1961

From the multi Hugo award-winning author of the moon is a hard mistress and puppetmaster comes the story of the first human citizen of Mars. his odyssey of travelling back to earth and navigating everything that entails. from accidental fortune, becoming the head of a new religion, to a carnival magician we follow Valentine Michael Smith as he sets out on a one-man odyssey across America becoming a one-man microscope for western civilisation and the uncomfortableness of having to account for that system to an outsider.

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