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.
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.