How it started

I think there’s hardly a person left who didn’t hear about 3I/ATLAS. Third interstellar object that has visited us and is currently moving through Solar System on its way towards Jupiter Hill radius.

This interstellar object is unlike any comet known to us so far. With its anomalies, that some of them have not been explained, it sparks imagination of observers. For it could be an artificial object visiting us from afar.

I am interested in astronomy, space exploration in general and Solar System exploration in particular. So, I tend to follow what’s new in this area. As soon as I heard about 3I/ATLAS I knew I needed to check what Avi Loeb had to say on the subject, for I knew he had provided an interesting hypothesis about Oumuamua being a light sail object of a potential artificial origin.

Lo and behold, back in the summer of 2025 Avi wrote a paper where he mentioned that 3I/ATALS could be a spacecraft that could release probes, but most importantly, he mentioned Dark Forest theory. I was curious what that dark forest was about and this way I found out about The Dark Forest book in the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy written by Chinese science fiction writer Liu Cixin.

I ordered the first book in a series on September 9th, 2025. It turned out that the book was very interesting to say the least. I think the trilogy is the best hard science fiction that I ever read. Maybe, I didn’t read a lot of sci-fi.

I forgot to mentioned that before reading the book I started to watch Netflix series that was based on the trilogy. I liked first few episodes a lot. But the book is much more better, and they changed almost everything in the series, which I found dubious. There is a Chinese movie adaptation of The Three-Body problem book which is quite faithful to the book content, but that series is a little bit boring because of this.

Well, having finished reading the trilogy I was curious whether other books of Liu Cixin were that good and bought Ball Lightning on Sep 29th, 2025. That book was interesting, but underwhelming in comparison to The Three-Bod Problem. I should mentioned that the book was written before the trilogy, though. Recently, he hasn’t written new sci-fi novels that could compare to the trilogy. I watched a couple of interviews with Liu Cixin and he mentioned that it’s difficult to write something significant after the trilogy.

The hard sci-fi books above were very influential, so I used Copilot Chat to search for similar books. In the end, I found Revelation Space series by Alastair Reynolds and on Oct 28th, 2025 I got Revelation Space book. This series was quite different in comparison to Three-Body Problem, but still it was very captivating reading. I ended up reading all the books in the series including the recent forth one Inhibitor Phase that I got on Dec 10th, 2025. I read a number of his other books since then.

Next, I figured out that buying books was quite expensive and discovered that borrowing books from a local library was free and it had most of the books by Alastair Reynolds and other sci-fi authors.

So, after reading 11 books by Reynolds, which I will list later in the post, I thought I needed to find something similar again. Watching a YouTuber that talks about sci-fi books he reads I found out about Spin by Robert Charles Wilson. I, actually, bought that book on Jan 1st, 2026, since library didn’t have it. I liked that book a lot. It is different in many ways in comparison to Three-Body Problem and books by Reynolds. It has a number of very interesting hard sci-fi ideas which you can discover by reading the book.

Then I checked what other books he wrote, and as a consequence read his The Chronoliths novel, which I borrowed in January 2025 from the library.

Well, what should I read next? I re-watched recently Contact movie which was based on the Contact novel by Carl Sagan. Well, I needed to read it too. So, I borrowed it from the library and finished recently.

Now, in February 2026 I am reading The Revelation Space Collection Volume 1 and 2, which is a collection of sci-fi stories happening in the Revelation Space Universe that Alastair Reynolds written throughout the years starting from 1990 and until 2021.

I also ordered Ring by Stephen Baxter on Feb 7th, 2026 and I have a book of stories by Ted Chiang Exhalation and a novel Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky on hold in the library.

Statistics

To summarize from Sep 9th 2025 until February 8th, 2026 which is a period of five months I’ve read 18 books.

Each book on average had 500 pages which makes it 18 * 500 = 9,000 pages. Or 9000 / 5 = 1800 pages a month, or 60 pages a day:

1. The Three-Body Problem
2. The Dark Forest
3. Death’s End
4. Ball Lightning
5. Revelation Space
6. Redemption Ark
7. Absolution Gap
8. Inhibitor Phase
9. Chasm City
10. Aurora Rising
11. Elysium Fire
12. Machine Vendetta
13. House of Suns
14. Pushing Ice
15. Eversion
16. Spin
17. The Chronoliths
18. Contact

What’s next?

As, I’ve mentioned I am reading The Revelation Space Collection Volume 1 and 2, and next Ring by Stephen Baxter, Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Stay tuned.