LOVED the Project Hail Mary movie? READ THESE NEXT!

And he has another book, Artemis, which maybe didn't hit the heights of the other two, but might be worth your time, as well.

It's pacey, there's some real jeopardy, and the characters are pretty good, too. So, I think if you enjoyed the problem-solving aspects of Project Hail Mary, then this one could work very well for you, too.

I really like the enormous scale of this book. There's an old-fashioned car chase scene, but with spaceships traveling at 99% of the speed of light, a chase that covers enormous distances, something like 60,000 light years.

And if you haven't already read the book, then I think that's worth your time, even if you've seen the movie.

From the outset, Mars is portrayed as harsh, beautiful, and utterly unforgiving. Every stage of exploration and settlement is grounded in meticulous scientific detail.

I really like the interactions between the friends, between Travis and his cousin Jubal. And I like that John Varley was also careful to imagine not just the benefits of Jubal's invention, but also the potential misuses and what might need to be in place to prevent that.

I really love the nerdy detail that Stephenson goes into, the realistic science and engineering in the race against time to build out the International Space Station. It all seems quite plausible to me. And actually, this is one of my favorite science fiction books, and I'm very happy to recommend it to you.

At its heart, Shroud is a tale of overcoming this difficulty, of making ourselves understood to an intelligent alien of completely different biology, whose brains work completely differently to ours, and with a completely different perspective and evolutionary history. It's really fascinating stuff.

This is cozy science fiction, and as a 50-something guy, fairly grumpy most of the time, I was actually really surprised at how much I enjoyed it. And I think you'll be hard-pressed not to be a little more joyful when you finish reading it.

Plus, he wrote The Martian, which later became the Matt Damon movie. And that book's really good, too.

There follows a deeply uncomfortable journey, and when the humans get where they're going, no one can or will tell them the rules. They're simply told that their continued survival depends on being useful to the K'tharrk war effort.