A Fan's Playground

Well this is perhaps the most Andy Weir book it is possible for a book to be. I've only read Weir's debut, The Martian, and this is basically exactly that again but different, tbh. Lone scientist stranded in space who must science the shit out of things to save the day, shallow one-note characterization, and a narrative that is clearly enormously excited by the minute details of how the science things work.

And like, I love that for Weir, that he's found and succeeded in his niche so well, and I'm charmed by how much he loves science, but.....I do really wish he were at all better at writing people. I enjoyed The Martian a great deal, but the kind of book Weir writes feels to me like the kind of book I only have interest in reading one of. I wouldn't have even bothered to pick this up if it weren't for the Hugos.

But also, even though this book is the same kind of thing again, I think it's not as much to his strengths as The Martian!

Half the book takes place in flashbacks to the time when the main character is on earth and preparing for the crisis along with a bunch of other people, and I was just SO impatient in those sections tbh, because we already know where it leads (him going to space), and all it does is allow for more talking about science but without the same level of like, urgency and interest? Plus extra focus on interpersonal dynamics, between his various one-note characters, which I found boring and occasionally all the way to uncomfortable. And I really dislike the general narrative vibe of "oh well when it's an emergency it's helpful for someone to act like a dictator about it so this is good actually" with respect to the leader of the project, Stratt, so I kind of hated every scene she showed up in, which was most of them in the flashbacks.

And the sections of the book that take place in the "present" of the main character involve alien first contact and let me just say that Weir is not a man who understands the difficulties with cross-cultural (cross-SPECIES!) communication, and how very complicated language and translation can be! He and the alien just quickly and easily knock up a computer-translation software between them after figuring out what words in english translate to what words in the eridian language and then communicate with remarkable ease after only a few days of this effort, including very high-level abstract concepts. They even seem to have compatible senses of humour, to a degree. That is a whole bunch of wishful thinking, my guy!!! (And it also makes me wonder what else he's drastically oversimplifying to the point of hilarity in the various other science things he talks about, tbh. Or is it just that he thinks soft sciences aren't real sciences and he doesn't need to do the same degree of research into them?? Sigh.)

Also this is just an extremely petty personal thing but I don't like that Weir chose to use "astrophage" as both the plural and the singular. You have one astrophage or two astrophage or a lot of astrophage. And yes, english has some words that do that with pluralization, but they're irregular nouns, and it's weird to do that with a brand new invented noun, and it threw me off every time he referred to a whole lot of astrophage as such. (Also he capitalized astrophage on every usage which I feel even pettier about. Disagree with that choice!!)

And look. Look. I recognize that the science is what Weir is ultimately here for, so that's where he focuses most of his energy -- but I don't actually read novels to be given science lessons, and most of the time when his characters expounded on some scientific concept for paragraphs or pages, I just skipped over the lessons to get to why the thing they were talking about mattered. Because the specific detailed explanations DON'T matter to the story being told!

So all in all, this is a book that is aimed at an audience who has VERY different priorities in their fiction reading than I do, and I mostly alternated between being bored and annoyed. Weir does have a rather moreish narrative voice though, and made me want to find out how the book would end, so I was carried along through my boredom and annoyance with more ease than one might expect. And in the end the book did get me in my feels a bit. The power of friendship means a lot to me, what can I say!

So. Not the worst book, but I really didn't enjoy it overall.

Gosh June was a good month for me, quality-of-book wise. The below four are all really great, as were most of the others I read earlier this month! A big contrast with May, which was nearly all books I was pretty meh about.

( The Emperor's Soul, by Brandon Sanderson )

( The Martian, by Andy Weir )

( Warbreaker, by Brandon Sanderson )

( The Book of Small, by Emily Carr )