If you like it, you might enjoy a book called Seveneves. The first sentence involves the moon blowing up, and the rest of the book is about the consequences of that. Quite good, imo.
I really enjoyed the first "part" of Seveneves. I felt the second part went a bit off the rails and was almost _too_ out there for me (at least as it compared to the first part. Love Neil Stephenson though (Cryptonomicon was amazing and Diamond Age / Snow Crash hold a special place in my heart).
I’ve heard this sentiment a lot from people who’ve read it.
I think he wrote himself into a tight spot though, and I’m happy with the result. Part of me thinks the second act could’ve been broken down into maybe like 0-1000, 1000-5000, and then the final act could’ve been essentially as it was, stripped down a bit. It felt to me like he crammed a little too much worldbuilding into it and couldn’t draw on the resourcefulness and resilience of humanity that dominates the first act. But it makes sense in context, because they’re not in such dire straits in the second half, and are approaching the whole issue from complex standpoints of religion and meaning and societal archetypes.
I surely couldn’t have done better, I know that much.
I thought both books were entirely too generous in their depictions of humanity's ability to coordinate for enormous, earth-saving efforts. I have a feeling that a real extinction level crisis would be much more like Don't Look Up or Greenland(extra optimistic ending scenes not included) than we'd care to admit. Bureaucratic incompetency and political infighting leading to a tragic and preventable end in both cases presented in the books.
I think this happens a lot to Stephenson. He's great at creating worlds, and that's the genius of his writing. Then what happens in those worlds is sometimes underwhelming.
The answer to the (paraphrased) question "how long do you expect that to last?" is so subtly delivered and unexpected and unhyped, and beautifully sets up the rest of the first (of two) section of the book.
I had to read the small passage through a couple of times to make sure I had the right context.
Also read, and loved, and had emotional reactions to Project Hail Mary. Highly recommend.
I liked Project Hail Mary (and Artemis, and The Martian) but I thought it was a little too heavy in the programmer narrative style. I won’t spoil anything in case someone reads this comment who hasn’t read it, but a large section involving establishing a communication protocol really wore me down from the story.
The big revelation about how he got there also felt nearly translucent in how obvious it was when it was revealed.
I hope he writes a couple more books though, if I can ever get some grandkids outta my kids, Weir’s books will be in their collection for sure.
We Are Legion (We Are Bob) - Yes, the name is terrible, but the book series is actually quite good if you like hard sci-fi. It has that "written-by-an-ex-software-dev" vibe that is so popular around here.
I love the Bob series, but I'd recommend against it if you don't have a high tolerance for characters who are supposed to be extremely intelligent missing blindingly obvious solutions to problems.
The book flipped between 'missing the obvious' and 'that was way too easy and lazy writing'. It had some hard-fi, but most reviewers seem to give the author too much credit and ignore the poor plot
You get the constant impression he either didn't have an editor or had an editor with no power to force changes. Especially near the end of the third book where you can tell he's gotten tired of his Big Bad Guys and just decides to end them in half a dozen pages.
Yeah but in real life you could grab somebody and yell "Oh my god, stop moping about how scared you are of explosives and just put a goddamn steel blade on your flying murder-drones so they're not one-use-only."
Critical Drinker made me realize a couple years ago that I'm not crazy and movies really are generally unwatchable these days, with a handful of exceptions, many of which he points out.
Maybe because it's less terrible. Some time I had a very surprising experience: I was shopping for a book and found it at bookdepository.com. It was nice experience: predictable price with no marketplace sellers or exchange rate shenanigans, shipping costs visible up front, and cheaper than Amazon. The surprise? Amazon owns it.
It is always nice to drop links to something other than the local monopolist that pops up on the top of search results. Like the original publisher, Wikipedia, or default to a search on bookshop.org
I would have linked to its wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Hail_Mary
which covers the whole book, upcoming movie, pretty well. Exciting story.
But completely unrelated to the recurring polar vortex. No sun-eating microbes, just H and He.
I always just assumed it was simply because it was a last-ditch effort.
But I just Googled it, and someone on Reddit pointed out: "Hail Mary full of Grace."
Groan... Actually makes me like the book a little less than I already did. (Edit: Which I know is against the grain here, as evidenced by the downvotes for not liking the book.)