Author: Sleepypete

Hello again !

Advent Day 2 sees my favourite character from The Last Jedi appear :

Kelly Marie Tran put a lot into that character and really brought Rose to life. Hopefully the Rose character will get lots of screen time in the 9th film, that character is fun.

Books today ? A slightly deviant right to left.

First up is David Weber’s Path of the Fury … I have very little memory of this book ! From reading the Wiki entry, I think I’ve read it but can’t remember it. (Could have read it during Concussion Number 1 where my memory became rather damaged) It’s another space scifi book set in another independent universe, separate from the Honorverse which David Weber is known for most. A retired commando wants revenge and a supernatural entity is very keen to help her out. They then find an AI enhanced super ship and set out for mayhem.

I think I have read this one …. think I may have to add it to the list to read again at some point ! David Weber’s books are usually pretty good and draw you into their tale. His Honorverse was excellent but kinda outgrew past the fun space battle drama and started getting infected by boring politics and other make it up as you go along espionage stuff.

I’m sure there will be a few more David Weber books getting featured this month …..

Next up is Waterdeep by Richard Awlinson. The author’s name is a pseudonym for 3 authors, with Troy Denning penning this entry in the series. It’s the third in the original Avatar trilogy set in the Dungeons and Dragons Forgotten Realms campaign world.

It’s quite a rich world and this book takes its characters on a tour of the Realms. The gods have fallen from the skies and have been incarnated as avatars upon the Realms. They are still powerful but can be killed …. and a number of them do find their end in this series with catastrophic results.

This series is a defining addition to the Forgotten Realms lore, with descriptions of quite a wide swathe of locations and important characters plus the changing of the pantheon of gods looking over the world. Many characters that become key are introduced in this series like Midnight, Ciric and Kelemvor.

It’s a great finish to the series and (with the other two, Shadowdale and Tantras) is a highly recommended read for anyone interested in or playing in the D&D Forgotten Realms setting. Not quite as good as the R.A. Salvatore Drizzt novels …. but still pretty good and enjoyable.

Last and best …. an ancient classic.

It’s The Time Machine by HG Wells.
(Post edit note – yep. It’s Around the World in 80 Days and I was sure it was a different book ! I know one of the books I’ll be talking about tomorrow !)

You know the story here …. an inventor has created a machine that lets him go backwards or forwards in time. He finds himself going far into the future, past the world wars, past an apocalyptic war that buries him and his machine and eventually stops at a far distant future with the Eloi and Morlocks. The Eloi have an idyllic as gatherers, the Morlocks are terrifying creatures living underground.

Our inventor falls in love with one of the Eloi … who disappears into the realm of the Morlocks. Can our inventor save the lady ?

One of THE classic books, a foundation piece for modern scifi. A book that has to be read if only to experience one of the great authors and it’s actually a good, fun read as well.

Oh and my copy has an extra bit at the back, a short story that is an educational piece where a gentleman idly wishes that the world would stop because it’s getting too much for him. An entity agrees … and makes it happen. The world stops turning … but everything on the world doesn’t. Cue mayhem and destruction !

So there we go :

Path of the Fury – another decent book from the very prolific David Weber;
Waterdeep by Troy Denning – essential for any player or DM using the Forgotten Realms setting.
The Time Machine – a timeless classic.

Advent is here !

And I have a Lego Advent Calendar again. More Lego is tempting me too even though I still have the Ladies of NASA set to build. It’s a sales and retiring products thing … What’s in the box for today ?

A speeder to kick it off this year.

This year, I’m going to do the picturing upstairs in my main room. (This has very little to do with a “No More Room For Lego” problem).

And who set my keyboard back to English US ! Darn Microsoft fiddling where they shouldn’t be.

This year, I think I’m going to run a theme of books. I.e. instead of showing a bare wall behind the increasing swarm of Lego, how about a few random books. Oh and 4d sneaking in from the side too, can’t keep that one out of pictures.

First up is The Icarus Hunt by Timothy Zahn. He’s an excellent author who I first found via the old Star Wars Expanded Universe books. In fact, his books were so good that his Grand Admiral Thrawn character survived the great purge of the Expanded Universe with Thrawn making his way back via the Star Wars Rebels series.

Having read a few more of his books, I’d say …. mostly brilliant, occasional dips. Probably like most authors as prolific as Timothy Zahn probably. Here’s a link to is extensive bibliography. The Icarus Hunt is a book I read a number of years ago, it’s about a madcap chase across the galaxy by a crew full of characters in a ship that has a cargo that the aliens running the commerce in the galaxy definitely don’t want to have reaching its destination.

What could it be ? I must read this one again as I remember it as being one of his better books. Timothy Zahn plays well in other people’s universes and is pretty good at his own worldbuilding too. His technologically advanced Cobra warriors make far more sense than the Halo Spartans that essentially photocopied his ideas.

Next up is Battlestar Galactica : Resurrection by Richard Hatch, which I really need to read … it has escaped my attention so far. This one is set in the original Galactica universe where the humans were running from the aftermath of a disastrous end to the war with the partially cybernetic Cylons.

I liked the original Battlestar series hugely more than the remake. The remake had great ideas with the warfare among the stars but after a while, it became painfully apparent that they had been making up the backstory as they went along and after the New Caprica escape episode, the whole thread kinda fell apart for me as they went for dramatic episodes with very little sense behind them.

Last up is David Weber’s March Upcountry.

This one sees the Crown Prince being ambushed and forced to land on what Warhammer 40k would call a Death World.

As in, everything on the planet is out to kill, dismember and eat you and not necessarily in that order. The Crown Prince and his party land halfway around the planet from the only star port and their mission is to get themselves and their incredibly limited supplies around to that planet and escape.

David Weber is a wonderful world builder with his book series and I have enjoyed a huge number of his books. This one didn’t really gel with me when I read it. Possibly that was another state of mind issue ? Maybe. My mental state has gone through various nosedives over the last 15 years or so and that can be reflected in the impressions I take away from what I experience.

(I’m ok at the moment, although I need to go back to Expanse book 7)

But yeah ! David Weber. I fully expect I’ll be pulling out a few more of his books to show off in future advent posts …. And I reckon I’ll be bringing out a few of his to re-read again.

To tomorrow ! And more Advent and Books.

December is almost here ! Which means Star Wars Lego Advent Calendar again ….

Looking forward to that. But … here’s a little teaser.

Can you tell what it is yet ? A smaller kit this time and yep, there’s a preview in the background.

A humble beginning.

A sturdy centre building up.

A central ball, nearly complete.

Engines at the back.

Suddenly TIE Fighter !

And a different angle. There’s a sudden jump to the end because you attach one wing at a time and it’s a bit lopsided with just the one wing.

A good counterpart to the older little XWing that I have.

There we go. An enjoyable quick build, both of them.

Did I mention Steam sales ? It’s the first one of the season, following the Black Friday mania. It’s a good time for acquiring games, with a couple of Steam sales plus I’ll be contributing to the Yogscast Jingle Jam as well which comes with games. It’ll be odd choosing when I give the contribution because the main channel and most of the people there have migrated to a style which …. I’m definitely not a fan of. Just means I don’t watch them and instead watch the people I enjoy (their links are in the right hand column). There is that charity (and many games/soundtracks) thing though.

The acquisitions this time around have been Skyrim Special Edition, which has given me an excuse for another restart and because it has all of the DLCs, I can mod the hell out of it ….

This is the new Bashara, which is going to be built as a heavily armoured tank with a big bashing thing. The character model is very definitely enhanced there, plus the rest of the textures have been upgraded too.

Skyrim Special Edition (plus mods) is above, this one is from a still modded but a bit less ordinary Skyrim.

I haven’t actually got to the city of Whiterun there yet, so no comparative looks. But it should look a lot better with the mods.

What else ?
Glass Masquerade is a lovely little puzzle game which I’ve been trying out in short doses.
Slay the Spire is a card based adventure game, not tried yet.
Bomber Crew is a WW2 bomber game. I’d hesitate to call it a simulation.
Space Pirates and Zombies 2 is a space strategy combat game.
And I’ve saved a little bit of the vouchers that the old team at work got me so I can put them towards the Stellaris DLC coming in a couple of weeks.

More to come in the Jingle Jam ! Probably …. more to come in the Steam Xmas sale. I’ve also got my eye on a game called Starsector, which is another space strategy game. Gotta finish the ones I have my head in at the moment though, which means :

Adventuring in Skyrim …. and continuing the campaign of Space Viking Racing in Motorsport Manager. My mob just got promoted to the top league and there’s a lot of catching up to do.

I did the traveling thing last weekend.

Good to see the mum and sister and one of the Double D boys again. Thoroughly enjoyed that bit of the weekend.

Me bringing the bluray up and us watching a couple of films on the Saturday is becoming a tradition too. This weekend it was Star Wars The Last Jedi and the first Fantastic Beasts film. I’m fearing for Star Wars now … I still enjoy watching The Last Jedi, mostly due to watching Rey’s emergence and definitely for the fun character which is Rose. But it really feels like they are scraping the bottom of a creativity barrel in Star Wars now. Solo was a mixed bag of good and contrived bad and Last Jedi was going down the Alien Covenant / Prometheus path in what it was doing to the established This Is Star Wars stuff.

On the other hand, I thought Fantastic Beasts was an amazing film on first watching and that feeling continued through to the second watching. It has a delightful humour running through the film, Eddie Redmayne’s performance is inspired and it has a nice little mystery plot waiting to burst out as soon as the introductions are done. The sequel should be fantastic.

I did, of course, pick up loot.

The marshmallows are lush, the brownie was gorgeous and the Creme Egg (yes that is an Easter Egg) is cursed in that it is still in my mum’s fridge.

I am regretting my life choices though. I left this in the shop :

And the shop is now 200 miles away.

A good trip. I’m looking forward to downtime next weekend though, ahead of a switch in what job I’m doing which will see me immediately have a couple of days out of the office next week.

Yes. They are letting me out of the office again ….

But that’s work and it isn’t marshmallows.

They are definitely tasty. And too good to scoff down in one session. I have a couple at a time, savour them and then the remainder go into that tin with a fairly well sealable lid to keep them fresh.

Oh … trips future also includes me being highly likely to head up to Chester for a meet up of the Roll4it crew. I already avidly follow what they’re up to, especially Maggie Krohn, FuzzyFreaks and Enter Elysium (links over on the right hand column !). They’ve brought a good bunch of people together who make very watchable content and it’d be good to say hi. And then maybe visit something touristy around the Chester area the next day.

Indeed one phrase I never thought I’d hear myself say again is “AWESOME Love you Maggie” (some readers will know why !) yet that is one phrase that came out today. I like doing those photo edits for people and other assorted doodle level of thing. I don’t have much talent as an artist but I do like making ideas come to fruition through photo editing. It’s awesome when the creations get a happy reaction from the people they’re intended for. That makes it so much more worth it making the Thing.

Here are a couple of the latest :

The credit has to go to the original artists as all I did was do a couple of recolours on the Mag Gran on the left and I gave the one on the right a wink.

Yet these did not just get a “That’s great Sleepy, love it !”, the Mag Gran is now one of her chosen emotes and the Mag Wink became the icon for her Discord server for about 5 minutes (the icon is now a festive UFO).

Seeing the creations actually put to use makes me very happy.

I was going to talk about gaming too …. Maybe another day because there’s a lot in that list. It’s the first day of another Steam sale and I already have a couple of games in the basket :

Bomber Crew – a cartoonish simulator of a WW2 bomber and its crew. (link to Enter Elysium playlist)
Glass Masquerade – a glass mosaic puzzle game which looked amazing when Katherine Of Sky (link to playlist) showed it off.

And then there’s Skyrim …. which I might acquire on Special Edition for £15. I’m also considering resetting my Elite pilot again back to zero. That’s the pattern I had way back in the original Elite, where I’d get to Dangerous or Deadly, get bored and start again. I find it more fun to build up and consistently change things than to grind through doing exactly the same routines.

There is that thing though with the games where sometimes, the game is more fun to watch someone else play than it is to play it yourself. Games like Blood Bowl, which is on the wishlist …

More about the gaming soon ! And the Lego. I owe you a couple of Lego posts, I still have the Ladies of NASA kits to build and then there’s Star Wars Advent approaching ….

Cya soon.

Cheers !

Happy Birthday!

Birthday again earlier in the week !

Yes I am even older now.

I’ve been kinda neglecting this place lately …. I’m one of those people who can blast through things up to a certain point but when I get a chance to relax, the energy will go and I’ll be in recovery mode. So everything’s been going into work at the moment and then I need to crash out later.

And I’m definitely tending to the crashing out rather than feeling like posting things.

I’m behind on posts like :

2x Lego builds
Yesterday’s ship visit.

Ok, here’s a pic from yesterday :

Pretty ship is shiny. She’s the SS Great Britain, a revolutionary steam sailing ship that rewrote the book on how ships are powered by being the first propeller driven ship. I had an enjoyable wandering around this lovely ship. But that’s for another post …..

We had a work meet up in town, which was very enjoyable and I also tried out the Christmas Market in town last Friday.

Yep. Christmas is coming …. A sausage-inna-bun was devoured and I’ve been making my way through the special fudge that appeared from the market. I’ve also been getting quietly addicted to Kola Kubes again. I’m looking to check out the Cardiff and Bath Xmas markets this year.

There is no Happy Cookie Place again this year ! NOOOO ! Hopefully cookies will appear at Cardiff or Bath.

There was a Flake Break meet up last weekend, which was good fun. I was a bit nonplussed by the tribute band though, he was enthusiastic but with him covering Olly Mars and Bruno Murs, I don’t know either of them. It was great to meet up with people again, first time I’ve seen them since the last one 5 years ago … and I was suffering from a concussion then which was affecting me more than I realised.

Birthday Tuesday ! I acquired the cakes on Monday and was highly enjoying exhorting people passing my desk to raid the cakes. I was in a better position this year to do that. And then yesterday involved wandering around the great ship until I felt the crash starting to creep up on me.

I’m also enjoying the women’s cricket world cup. There are more close games now in the women’s game as the lesser nations are catching up to England, India, Aussie and South Africa. At the moment, it’s New Zealand vs Pakistan and it’s looking like New Zealand’s bowlers will quite comfortably see them through to a win. 5 wickets down already ….

Not much gaming happening, as a combination of that crashing out plus a poorly wrist. Lots of gaming being watched and enjoyed though.

Looking forward to the Xmas break. Especially as following it will be :

Soon.

I appear to be struggling for subjects again, which is a little odd because there are two Lego builds waiting to be posted.

Sometime. Soon.

Or something ate the ideas when I wasn’t looking. Maybe.

I did read something today though which made me think back to why I was looking to retire my old Macbook and replace it with something newer. It was an overly techie story about people installing Linux on their Macbooks, apparently the security on the newer Macs don’t let you do that. The daft question from me is : Why would any sane person want to do that ? I get the “Because I can” reason … but still. Apple hardware is excellent but you can get non Apple laptops that are better and cheaper to put Linux on. Linux on Apple hardware feels like a special kind of heresy.

Yep.

Anyway – the story made me remember some of the reasons why I stepped away from Apple. The big one is their attitude to customers. It feels as though you don’t buy your Apple kit, you lease it until such a time as they see fit to disable it or disable features that you depended on.

For me, I couldn’t go past iTunes 10.7 because it has a feature I use exclusively for my music listening. The iTunes DJ feature was replaced by a totally inadequate feature in iTunes 11. Because Apple then decided to make newer iOS versions not talk to iTunes 10.7, I had to retire my iPhone as a phone because I couldn’t keep it secure. Trust me on : you don’t want your phone to have security holes.

There was also the thing where I couldn’t use a USB wifi widget (to get around partly broken wifi on the laptop) because Apple disabled the support for third party widgets as well. And I think there were a few other issues as well. I haven’t actually turned on the Macbook since getting its replacement, not even to copy the pictures and other documents over. Oops.

That’s enough whinging about the tech though.

Sleeping better at the moment, which might be due to increased tiredness. The acid that was troubling me has been more controllable, although I need to delete the tendency to attack my legs. They’re not quite healed yet but they are much closer. There is that conditioned tendency to do more damage though. Sometimes we are our own worst enemies.

I had donuts earlier. The aftermath involved someone telling me I’d had too many donuts. I can’t remember what I’d said now to invoke that. It may well have involved ruff jokes.

Donuts earlier, quite possibly popcorn in a few minutes after I hit the post button.

No gaming today though. My wrist doesn’t like me very much at the moment so it’ll be watching gaming while leafing through Persepolis Rising. That’s book 7 of The Expanse while I take a little break from the British Stargate story.

Oh – birthday soon ! Not long to go. I’ll be acquiring things. Edible things mostly. But we shall see what we find as well. I’ll be raiding the Bristol Xmas market on Friday afternoon …

Oh wait. I think I just said a taboo word.

HAPPY COOKIE PLACE RETURNS IN A COUPLE OF DAYS !!!!

I hope. See ya !

Feels a little weird at the moment.

Before laptop, I’d look up the laptop and tech prices if I got bored and wanted to look something up. Like if it were a slow news day and I’d run out of interesting things to read.

Now that I have the laptop, there’s not really much point in me looking for tech. Indeed, when you buy anything computerish, it’s a good idea to NOT look at anything tech for at least 6 months because the price has inevitably dropped and you’ll make yourself depressed thinking that you could have saved a little cash if you’d waited.

The trick is to wait until there are discounts and buy at that point. Because if you buy discounted, it’ll take even longer for the price to drop below what you paid.

With regards my laptop, it’s still there at Scan for £680 which is £80 above what I paid. (Link to Scan). It’s good when your discount is still a great discount even a couple of months after the event. The other item was a 250GB SSD from Crucial via Novatech, which is now £5 more than what I paid (Novatech link).

Haha, I’m used to things being the other way around there and things getting cheaper/better. The way it usually works is that you change the spec and end up spending about the same amount of money.

How about a homebrew machine though ? I used to amuse myself by making a daft wish list of the more expensive items to see what the possibilities were. Let’s see how much a video editing and producing rig would cost :

Processor : AMD Threadripper 32 core – £1706. (Yep. This is a daft one)
Whereas the laptop with an i5-7300HQ chip renders in just under 3x the run time, this would probably render much faster than run time. That means less downtime between videos as well as higher quality going into the render.
Motherboard : Asrock Fatality X399 board for £445. The processor has to fit into a specific socket on the motherboard, which drives what you choose. And Asrock made the board that has glued Pumpkin together for 7 years now so I’d be happy to stick with them.
Memory : 32GB DDR4-28800 rated at 3.6GHz. This is driven by the processor, which demands at least 3GHz. Corsair memory is blacklisted so Kingston win this one. 32GB is £401.
Graphics : There are new 2080 cards out now and this is the daft machine so …. Gigabyte 2080Ti card for £1200.

Pretty much all of the above would have me going NOPENOPENOPENOPE in a machine I’d build for myself but … this is a silly one. Indeed, the processor and graphics card on their own cost more than the £800 ish that I’d be looking to lay out.

You need stuff to make that hardware go, so here comes the :
Power supply : Corsair make good power supplies (although I’ve had one go pop on Pumpkin) and there’s a 1000W fully modular Gold rated one for £170. This machine has a couple of graphics cards and I’ll add a few hard discs soon, so you need a beefy power supply to keep those happy. If the machine is running close to maximum capacity, something will go Pop and might take another component with it.
This demands a shiny case with bags of room so : Riotoro full tower for £110.
You need to keep it cool (and apparently AMD Threadripper chips need a special cooler) : £75 for an air cooler. I’m not an advocate of water cooling in the domestic environment, although in other environments ? Ok.

Storage ?
Normal hard discs : let’s have a pair of Western Digital (another one that’s done well in Pumpkin) 8TB drives. These would be in a RAID pair with the data copied to both, so if one drive breaks … you still have your data. An 8TB drive is £235 each, so add on £470.
SSD fast hard discs : another pair but this time from Crucial (more trust from Pumpkin). 2x 2TB drives for £331 each.
Oh and a bluray drive for £25.

Peripherals ? Gotta have those.
Keyboard – I love my mechanical keyboard. Indeed I feel a bit spoiled by it when I move back to conventional membrane keyboards. The current offering is a Steelseries M750 for £130. Mine is a Steelseries M800 which (through discounts and vouchers) cost me £30.
Mouse – I’m calling Logitech for this one with £35 for an M500.
Monitor – I like my AOC monitor so a couple of 24″ ones please. Why not bigger ? Big is nice but if the monitor is too big, I can’t see the sides when I’m in tunnel vision mode in a game. £232 each for a 25″ G2590PX. Looks like my G2577 has been discontinued (it’s a couple of years old).

One thing about monitors …. it might well be worth sticking to 1080p for the gaming monitor and then the working monitor can be any size. It’s probably not worth creating videos above 1080p because who’s going to watch them at that resolution ? And while going above 1080p is nice for image editing, I’ve found that it’s actually a pain for gaming.

How much is all that ?

Processor and other engine bits : £3702
Box and cooling : £355
Storage : £1157
Peripherals : £629
Add on Windows for £80 and you have a grand total of £5,923. OUCH ! Enough even to inspire the old :

Haha, I think those kitties are from the days when I could spec up a £10,000+ PC fairly easily by going to SCSI devices which are now pretty much extinct.

A Pumpkin Mk2 would be significantly cheaper if I did one tomorrow.
Engine bits : AMD Ryzen 5 2600 (£157) in an Asus B450 AM4 motherboard (£98) which would be fed by 16GB of DDR4-2400 costing £127 and I’d reuse my relatively recent nVidia 1060 for £190.
Case, power and cooling : A nothing special case by BitFenix for £27, Corsair 650W Bronze power supply for £72 and a cpu cooler with 2x 120mm fans (big fans run slower and quieter, this is good) for £40.
Storage would be a 250GB SSD by Corsair in either SATA or M2 variety (depends on motherboard, M2 is preferred) for £55 and a single 3TB drive for £86
I’d be buying Windows again but I wouldn’t refresh keyboard, monitor or mouse.

All together ? £932 to upgrade to a Pumpkin Mk2 (less £190 for the graphics card). I could also reuse my case and power supply and quite possibly the cooler too but … Better to have shiny and new and undusted there.

I’m not going to upgrade Pumpkin this year. It’s actually handling a heavily modded Skyrim very smoothly, with Skyrim being the game I’m playing at the moment that demands more performance.

You buy your PC stuff for a purpose at the end of the day. You could get the ultimate but … if you’re not going to use the performance then it’s a waste of money that could have gone on lots of Lego. Lego is shiny. I’d rather have a mid range PC and a laptop (AND LEGO) than just an exotic PC that I wouldn’t actually use to capacity.

Oh and look out for discounts too … Buy when you want to, instead of when the shops want you to !

PS Missed off speakers, I’m using a set that cost me about £40 that are good. Also video editing software, when I make videos I use Magix Vegas which was acquired via a discount on the Steam store. I’d recommend it, although look at the newer versions that support the graphics card being able to boost the rendering performance.

I love my scifi. I really do. It’s the genre I tend to go to most of all.

(There’s usually a “but” here isn’t there …. not today !)

Book 28 is The Martian. I’ve already read this book a few times and it’s a testament to how good I think it is that I keep going back to enjoy it again. This time, I reversed the order and watched the film before reading the book.

They are essentially the same story, although some of the scenes occur out of order and there are scenes that are in the book but not film and vice versa.

It’s a consequence of a film having between 2 hours and 3 hours to tell its story. A book like the Martian is more like 8 to 10 hours. There’s a lot more scope in there to explain and just add more content.

One huge criticism I have of the film, after reading the book, is that elements of it just don’t make sense. The trek in the rover is the biggest example here. 100+ days cooped up in that rover ? Won’t work. Plus where does the extra kit go. The life support equipment. Where does it go ? It’s touched on in the movie but so much is glossed over.

Other scenes are added into the movie which are either just plain bad (the explanation of the slingshot) or are unnecessary (the metaphorical “let’s kill Sean Bean’s character again”). I did think that the movie’s Watney teaching scene at the end was an excellent addition though, I’ll say more about that in a bit.

What is The Martian ?

The book opens with astronaut and botanist, Mark Watney, writing his log on Mars, a sol or so after being left behind during an emergency evacuation and stranded on our neighbour planet. It’s an inhospitable place, with barely any atmosphere and extreme cold. All he has to survive with are the rations left behind, the equipment in place and his wits. The communications with Earth are cut off and it will take 2 years for any assistance to arrive.

The book swaps between the point of view of Watney, as he writes about his escapades in his log, the mission controllers and administrators back at NASA, the rest of his crew and a selection of other places. But it’s mostly about Watney.

He’s a likeable character with his most important resource being his brain. He’ll look up answers and figure things out through science before getting stuck in to sort out the issues he’s facing. From food, to life support, to communications, to driving a few thousand miles across a desolate planet, away from his base of security.

There is a lot of humour in the book and it takes the time to explain what’s going on in terms that I hope everyone reading can understand. I’m cheating there because I’m an engineering graduate with interest in the other sciences on show in the book and I’ve been reading fiction about space since I was a kid, so I probably understood the engineering and technology a bit quicker than most. With the language and prose in this book though, I don’t think anyone will be left behind by it.

And the science bits are wrapped up in that humour that runs all the way through the book. You can figure out what’s going on before the reveals, which just makes it all the better.

There is some unnecessary drama plopped into the story but … if the author didn’t do that, you’d have an Arthur C Clarke lecture. (Legendary author … but I found his books to be a bit lectury) And the drama causing scenes are very plausible.

As a scifi story goes, this is utterly rock solid in its plotline, the technology and science on show. This is in contrast to a story like Interstellar, where it has an amazing storyline but the technology, science and stuff around that plotline is so bad it’s insulting to the space geek. The Martian has an excellent story, supported by accurate science and the characters are varied and charming.

I loved this book. I’ve already read it a few times and I enjoyed reading it this last time just as much as the first.

Highly recommended.