I have descended from my ivory tower and read a fiction book that was written in the 2000s…and I had such a fun time doing it! Andy Weir weaves science into his stories so well, and I loved the relationship between Grace and Rocky. Finally, as far as tropes go, humans and aliens trying to teach each other their respective languages is one of my favorites.
Opposing opinions about the writing aside (personally didn’t like how they treated translating alien language), I haven’t heard anyone talk about how incredibly traumatic Grace’s experience >!would seem to Rocky. Dude went to sleep with absolutely no one watching and woke up with the rest of his crew dead. His crew also dying in their sleep. Like the number one horror that could befall someone because they all slept unattended.!<
This is still an anthropomorphic view of death and loss. Rocky had to experience his crew passing in real time. Whether that or a different occurrence, we still don’t know how his “culture” would view death.
Can you go more into the language thing? Would you rather something closer to Arrival? How would you do it?
Yes, rather it more like Arrival and recognize the complexities of not just understanding an alien language, but culture and cognitive framework etc. Recognizing, that yeah, as a romping sci fi adventure, this is probably not the book for that, but that’s what you get for introducing aliens and not setting up a star trek hand wave commonality about it. It’s not a fully big deal in that context, just unfortunately on top of everything else (the world somewhat working together to fight an existential threat, ha, very funny), kind of broke my suspension of disbelief in a camel back broken straw way. It’s very much less a controversy for people if they just accept this book the way they accept drill rig astronauts from Armageddon, just enjoy the ride.
I wish the story had explained why Grace’s crew died. I kept waiting for it to be some big twist or reveal but it’s just accepted as “they both died for no reason.”
Also, I feel like there was an abandoned plot point or something for Dubois and Shapiro dying in the explosion.
I thought the explanation was that the mission was so rushed that the ship and automated systems failed to keep them alive during sleep/stasis.
I think for plot/writing reasons (similar to The Martian), Grace’s crew died. I wish there was a bigger deal made about the mysterious sleep deaths too, mostly because story-wise it’s a great character beat/world-building piece for Rocky as it’d be horrifying for him in context.
The explosion deaths are also pretty convenient to leave Grace on his own, show that stupid crazy terrible things happen as per the style of disaster stories, and more to show the contrast between actually very competent ideal candidates and Grace himself (again setting up his predicament).