“Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and Earth itself will perish. Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it. All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company. His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it’s up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery—and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species. And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he’s got to do it all alone. Or does he?”
For the most part, I enjoyed this novel, which plays out like a bunch of science experiments, with a wacky buddy comedy and first contact thrown in for good measure. Andy Weir is a wonderfully nerdy man and Ryland (which really just as variation of his Mark Watney character from The Martian) is man-shaped nerdy science textbook in an astronaut suit.
But he is Watney, which means Weir has the limited ability to create main a character that we’ve not seen before (perhaps why I’ve not read his second novel Artemis?). But this is the problem in a lot of successful media titles, as the publishers want something new, but what they really want is a variation of the first successful book.
I think the book would’ve been better if told in third person, because with the added flashbacks, the conceit of the book probably would’ve worked better. The way it’s arranged is designed to reveal things to the reader as they happen, but it’s clear that despite all the doom and gloom of an extinction level event on Earth, Grace was to survive.
I have other issues with the book –the death of the other two astronauts is just too convenient, which made me wonder if Weir cannot create a workable plot and characterization with two additional people to write for. And while the science sounds sound, it becomes so technical that I found myself skipping over the babble.
Overall this book was fun even it got carried away with the scientific details.
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