What is a microbe was eating the sun and the only solution was many many light years away?
4.5/5
I found this book a fairly enjoyable read. I don’t have too many qualms with the science involved but I did find the generalized expertise of the primary character a bit far-fetched. I’d grant that a middle school science teacher might have some more obscure general knowledge than most but at times I found the character smugness about facts grating.
The general premise is interesting and provides extra-terrestial doom in a more organic way. No space-faring alien race come for our many resources. Just the result of nature’s insistence that life struggle. In this case, in the form of a sun-eating microbe.
I think the book really picked up with the introduction of the second main character and I found their interactions with together interesting. I do think the alien character’s ability to engineer things with a seemingly exotic not beliveable material xenonite, a bit of a deus ex machina. It would have been more interesting if there was things that Rocky couldn’t build that they would have to workaround.
Nonetheless, the book was to me of similar quality to The Martian. The stakes of this book were more interesting (saving humanity, not just survivng) and the twist of how the character ends up on the mission comes a little too late to have much emotional weight.