The movie is coming out in 2026.
I originally thought I wouldn’t read any more sci-fi about astronauts and aliens, but since it was a gift, I read it—and it was very readable.
The book’s content is super easy to spoil, but the movie trailer has already spoiled quite a bit, so this article will discuss the following content and parts that don’t affect plot progression:
- Humans encounter aliens
- Humans need to solve problems in outer space
- Humans need to mobilize Earth’s entire resources to complete a plan
At first glance, this is an already exhausted topic—how many novels and movies about humans meeting aliens have there been throughout history? Why read another one in 2020? After finishing it, you really feel Andy Weir truly mobilized all of Earth’s resources to save this genre.
This isn’t a book you’d describe as “full of imagination”—rather, readers marvel at how much the author “thought things through.” The book doesn’t introduce many new sci-fi concepts, but each concept solidly influences the others, making the author’s sci-fi world feel tangible.
The sci-fi black box is thinner than a cell membrane. In the novel, the various challenges the protagonist faces are all like science and engineering problems. The seemingly arbitrary numbers thrown around in the book—length, mass, time, temperature, etc.—readers can calculate them all using formulas (unless it mentions the protagonist needs to calculate for a long time with spreadsheets). Readers can also challenge themselves to figure out the reasons before the author explains. People label this type of sci-fi as “hard sci-fi.”
Some say after drinking good pure tea, you can’t stomach bubble tea anymore. My tea appreciation hasn’t reached that level. But after finishing this book and thinking back to aliens I’ve seen before, I can’t stand them anymore. Aliens won’t suddenly appear over New York opening portals, America won’t casually shoot two nuclear missiles then say “oh no, they have shields”—such depictions are too lazy.
Where do humans and aliens meet? How do they communicate after meeting? Will it be like “The Three-Body Problem” where they must kill each other on sight? Or like “Arrival” where they gesticulate trying to teach aliens English? This book’s answers are much more reasonable, with both IQ and EQ online.
The novel was published in 2021, so probably written in 2019-2020. There was no ChatGPT explosion yet. The novel cleverly avoids too much computer technology, not needing to make empty capability estimates.
The protagonist’s superior gets enormous authorization from world leaders, able to ignore any procedures and oversight mechanisms to do anything desired. But faces accountability after the spaceship launches. Is this the author’s ideal Earth response mechanism? The author doesn’t detail these cooperation mechanisms much—the social science black box is very thick. Facing Earth’s potential social impact, the superior recruits a bunch of natural scientists and climatologists but no historians, economists, or political experts. Social science students want to hold the author accountable a bit.
The author places the protagonist’s science team on China’s aircraft carrier and Russia’s base. When writing, the Russia-Ukraine war hadn’t started yet—I wonder if the author thinks cooperating with authoritarian alliances is acceptable or inevitable when Earth faces major crisis? Will Hollywood movies follow this setting?