Ryland Grace sta viaggiando a bordo della Hail Mary, una minuscola navicella spaziale lanciata nelle profondità dello spazio, unico sopravvissuto di una missione disperata per salvare l’umanità. Se fallisce i misteriosi organismi che si nutrono dell’energia solare, gli astrofagi, porteranno la Terra verso una nuova era glaciale, rendendola inabitabile. Ha pochissimo tempo per neutralizzare il nemico e il destino della specie dipende unicamente da lui. O forse non è solo?
eBook, 480 pages
I had fun reading this and ripped through it, which is basically what I needed for post-holiday slump. Now I have a good reading habit and can read better stuff with more focus, yay. Fun story and enjoyed the science and comfortingly rhythmic problem-solving, and the alien stuff was cool. But ultimately I can't say I thought it was good.
I'm not a math nerd, but if I were, this would have been more like 4 stars. I am, however, other kinds of nerd and I found the non-math parts of the book to be absolutely bonkers, but not in the joyful way. Weir has given us a protagonist with zero backstory. And I don't mean his amnesia. He ends up remembering how he got on the ship, but apparently those few months were all there was to his life. There's no family, no friends, no flings, no hobbies, no likes or dislikes--and mind you, the book is almost 500 pages in length. When he does finally make a friend, he doesn't even notice that it's the first friend he's ever had. There's no emotional interiority to this guy at all. He's just there to solve puzzles. This is truly science fantasy, not science fiction. There's nothing believable about the …
I'm not a math nerd, but if I were, this would have been more like 4 stars. I am, however, other kinds of nerd and I found the non-math parts of the book to be absolutely bonkers, but not in the joyful way. Weir has given us a protagonist with zero backstory. And I don't mean his amnesia. He ends up remembering how he got on the ship, but apparently those few months were all there was to his life. There's no family, no friends, no flings, no hobbies, no likes or dislikes--and mind you, the book is almost 500 pages in length. When he does finally make a friend, he doesn't even notice that it's the first friend he's ever had. There's no emotional interiority to this guy at all. He's just there to solve puzzles. This is truly science fantasy, not science fiction. There's nothing believable about the majority of science in this, the character isn't believable, and yet I read to the end. Rocky truly saves this book from being impossible, but despite him, I can't recommend this one.
Definitely a worth while read. I'm glad he did not get back to Earth. It's better left to the reader what happened after saving Rocky.
