Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of the Supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society.

With me, science journalist Izzy Clark, astrophysicist Dr Becky Smethurst and the Society's deputy director, Dr Robert Massey.

We're a little bit exhausted for the summer of live events and questions that have been fielded to everybody,

so we thought we'd do a bonus space book club episode instead.

There is, what could really be described as an epic book out at the minute.

It's another from photographer Andy Saunders, if you remember, did the Apollo remastered book,

which just, oh, it's's incredible and he's now turned his

attention to the Gemini and Mercury missions so producer Richard interviewed him so that

interview is coming up soon but first what has everyone been reading we haven't done one of

these for ages so I'm I'm reading a city on Mars which is by Kelly and Zach Wiener Smith, and they're both

Americans who've written about the feasibility of sending people to Mars.

And it's really well researched, but also quite funny book about whether it's a great idea

for us all to up sticks for the Red Planet.

And the spoiler is probably not which has earned them

some i think unjustified controversy for saying it some people are really not happy with them for

this but for me it's a you know it's a really good reason to look after the planet we live on rather

than just imagining we just start from scratch somewhere else and i met kelly a few months ago at this

event at the raw society she's a really nice person she's also very interesting. So I'm not surprised that the book is so good. So do check

that out. If you want a sort of a different view of whether we should, you know, spread out

across the solar system tomorrow. I think it's a nice challenge to that.

Nice. Well, I have to admit that I haven't really been reading any nonfiction. I've been reading a lot of escapism fiction, which I think I'm entitled to at the moment, so that's fine. But I actually didn't even read this. I listened to the audiobook, and to be honest, I would recommend everybody listens to this audio book, because it was incredible, but it was Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. Now I know this has been out for a while, so I am a little bit late to the

party, but oh my gosh, I have not been able to stop thinking about this book since finishing it.

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