Category Report
Which books are shaping research, discovery, and scientific understanding this year, as mentioned across leading science podcasts.
Biggest mover: A City on Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through? by Kelly Weinersmith, Zach Weinersmith #4, rising 391 places.
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir was the top newcomer at #1. In total 344 books had their debut mentions.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas drove the most book chatter, with 14% of this years book mentions.
Across 2026, conversations about books in science- and ideas-focused podcasts clustered around a few clear priorities: space futures, first contact, and the broader meaning of the universe and our place in it. Andy Weir’s dominance, with Project Hail Mary standing out far above everything else, reflects how a major film release can turn technically grounded science fiction into a shared reference point for discussions of real missions, energy physics, and astronautics. Alongside Weir, titles by Tyson, Hawking, Carroll, Sagan, and Cixin Liu show a continued appetite for works that bridge hard science with big-picture questions about life, consciousness, and alien civilizations. Meanwhile, A City on Mars and The Normals point to a parallel concern with governance and ethics—how we regulate human experimentation and how seriously we’ve thought through the social, legal, and biological realities of becoming a multiworld species.
Project Hail Mary
Andy Weir
15
mentions
The Martian
Andy Weir
10
mentions
Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter
Neil deGrasse Tyson
5
mentions
A City on Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through?
Kelly Weinersmith, Zach Weinersmith
3
mentions
A Brief History of Time
Stephen Hawking
3
mentions
The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself
Sean Carroll
3
mentions
Three Body Problem Series
Cixin Liu, Ken Liu, Joel Martinsen
3
mentions
Cosmos
Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, Neil deGrasse Tyson
3
mentions
Artemis
Andy Weir
3
mentions
The Normals: A People’s History of Modern America in Five Human Experiments
Laura Stark
3
mentions
Project Hail Mary to #1.
Significant outlier with 12.1x as many mentions as the average book.
Project Hail Mary to #1.
Highest ranking new entry to the chart.
Up 391 places from #395 last year.
Animal Farm to #437.
Down from #1 last year
Animal Farm to #437.
No mentions after ranking #1 last year.
How to Save the Amazon: A journalist’s fatal quest for answers to #430.
No mentions after ranking #2 last year.
The shows that surfaced the most book mentions this year.
Mentions recorded per 30-day window (past 8 months)
How many of the mentions were for the top 10 books.
The podcasts included in this report are curated by MavenSignal to represent the trusted voices in this category.
We ingest public RSS feeds, analyze each episode, extract book mentions with AI, and validate with humans. The resulting data is normalized and deduplicated, building the canonical signal for the MavenSignal platform. Every insight and ranking is drawn from that verified layer.
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