Ball Lightning

Ball Lightning (球状闪电 - Qiúzhuàng shǎndiàn) by Liu Cixin is a hard science fiction novel that loosely leads up to the author's later Three-Body Problem trilogy. Liu apparently wrote Ball Lightning while thinking he was about to die to liver cancer he was misdiagnosed with. That kind of explains the heavily philosophical prologue and I suppose the book's ending, which I didn't like all that much due to it leaning so much on metaphysical quantum nonsense.

Echopraxia

In 2014, Peter Watts released Echopraxia, a continuation to his thought-provoking 2006 novel Blindsight. Echopraxia is a sidequel: it takes place largely concurrently with Blindsight. (And apparently Watts wrote a lot of it while surviving a flesh-eating disease on his leg!)

Project Hail Mary

It's such an optimistic thought that humanity could ever be capable of interstellar travel. A tremendous amount of energy would be needed to be harnessed for a spaceship to reach a feasible velocity for so vast distances. Science fiction novels like presenting different ways to accomplish this, with varying degrees of plausibility. In Andy Weir's third published novel, Project Hail Mary (2021), the solution is quite an imaginative one, quite the fantasy for the required technological leap. It is also the problem that raises the need for interstellar travel: the Sun is dimming.

Blindsight

I was browsing internet forums for science fiction book recommendations, for what I should keep an eye out. Blindsight by Peter Watts appeared in few lists. One person described it as like watching Alien for the first time. That definitely piqued my interest but after reading the book, I wouldn't compare it to Alien exactly. It does have a first contact with an extraterrestrial life form, and I suppose it can be a bit creepy, but that's about it. Alien is horror in a futuristic setting whereas Blindsight is hard science fiction -- really hard science fiction.

The Martian & Artemis

I've wanted to see Ridley Scott's film The Martian for a while but I've never spotted it on any streaming service I've had a subscription on. (Finland had the world's third most lacking Netflix selection some time ago and that probably has not improved.) Then I stumbled upon an even better thing: the Andy Weir novel the movie is based on. I also read Weir's later novel, Artemis, right after it.