ANDY WEIR
★★★★✰
The book starts off well enough, a man wakes up connected to various tubes to every orifice in his body with no memory of who he is; and also finds two dead people in the room connected to similar tubes. Through ingenious experiments he deduces that he is on a spaceship and tries to recollect who he is and what he is doing there.
Interesting premise.
And then we are slapped with the clichés. He is Dr. Ryland Grace, an eighth-grade science teacher who was once a researcher making lofty claims on alien life, and was eventually pushed out of research and academia due to internal politics. Now he has to save the world from an alien single celled organism because nobody else in the world is capable of researching these bacteria except a washed-out researcher teaching eighth grade.
Overlooking such a typical Hollywood (Bollywood?) clichéd premise, the book deals with an excellent topic – alien life! And this alien life turns out to be a type of bacteria that is eating the sun up. The science in the book is quite interesting. The book gets better and better as we reach the crux of the story. The ethical and speculative dynamics have been very well-developed and interestingly put forward.
This story, while gripping and interesting, feel like it has been written ready to be adapted into a movie (turns out it actually has!). The characters all read as if they are meant to be diverse with exaggerated personalities which are mostly one dimensional in nature. The Russian loves vodka, the head of the project has a ruthlessly single-minded focus, and so on for almost every human character.
But overlooking all that, we are given a great story with excellent scope. If a sequel were to be written, I would read it!
Sai Tejas 