• 42 Posts
  • 139 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle

  • After being mostly disappointed by Artemis and The Martian I was quite wary of this one. Perhaps my expectations were more reasonable this time around, but I think it was also a better book. Considering how those other books were trying their hardest to stay within a reasonable level of scientific accuracy and plausibility I was completely surprised that there turned out to be an alien in this one. An intelligent sentient species no less. He also just kind of showed up out of nowhere and I was in disbelief that that was the direction the story was going for a bit.

    Like someone else mentioned I did find the book to be a bit too much “for all ages” kind of thing. Like it was intentionally written so that it could some day be a PG movie for both kids and adults. There is nothing wrong with this of course it is just not my usual thing. I did find it a bit eye rolling at times how great this supposed average teacher was at any kind of science and alien communication. Rocky was clearly the best character in my opinion. If he wasn’t there to offset the whole lone savior idea like The Martian I don’t think I would have enjoyed this book.

    The science bits were a bit too sciencey and not enough fictiony for my tastes, but I don’t think it is Weir’s style to try and make up his own fictional science. Almost all of the science was just real science and math. I think the only thing that was pretty much entirely made up was the idea that something like astrophage and its neutrino harvesting amoeba could exist. I did like the details given for everything Ryland and Rocky were doing.

    I kind of wish he actually managed to get back to Earth. It felt like a bit of a cop out for us to never fully see the impact to Earth. We know that at least somebody survived, but I wanted to see the scale of the damage. Anyway I liked this book more than I expected and I’ll more than likely read whatever book Weir publishes next.

















  • Infancy. There is no guarantee it will catch on.

    Edit: I find it strange that this image is implying that as soon as you stop implementing features you start dying. This is how you get needless bloat and turning solid software into something its original design never intended. A lot of software companies fall prey to this plan of endless expansion which eventually turns off the primary userbase of their software.

    Lemmy doesn’t need infinite features to continue surviving, but we definitely aren’t there yet.


  • That all sounds pretty cool. I could have sworn they mentioned all those devices they were producing were “personal aura” devices thus being a shield, but that could have just been Day not being aware of what they were. Perhaps the technology of a personal aura but used differently can become a teleporting device.

    It’s also possible Hari didn’t even need to sneak anything to Demerzel. I think merely mentioning that the prime radiant is right there and that she could understand it was enough for her to be curious. I can’t recall if she actually took it? I suppose they could have snuck it out with her.