Spoiler-free:
- This book grew on me a LOT. For the first ~200 pages I was thinking “this is a fun read, but kinda mid as a sci-fi novel.” After finishing, I think it’s quite a good sci-fi novel, though still not among my favorites.
- Reading this book made me feel like I was listening to a series of thinly veiled middle school science lectures, from physics, to microbiology, to evolution, to chemistry (which makes perfect sense in-fiction, because the main character is a middle school science teacher). This is my first Andy Weir book, but from what I hear, this is “his whole thing.”
- The narration and production for the audiobook version are superb. I’m extremely picky about narrators, which means I end up listening to very few audiobooks. This is one of my favorites.
Spoiler-ful
- At first I really hated the retrograde-amnesia plot device. When it was introduced I kept thinking, “I’m gonna be mad if they don’t explain or contextualize this later,” because it felt so unbelievably cliché. Good news: they did contextualize it later.
- Speaking of cliché, much of the the first half of the book felt like a paint-by-numbers first-contact story, like Arrival but somehow even more derivative. But as it went on, I loved how Weir explored the integration of the two species’ divergent technological development paths. E.g. it was fascinating to consider how a species might achieve interstellar travel without having previously discovered concepts like radiation or relativity.
- The relationship between Rocky and Grace was so fucking cute. But, for a book that was making such a huge effort to be about Real Science, the ease with which they developed a rapport felt a bit contrived. E.g. the fact that they were perfectly able to grok each other’s sense of humor.