Notes for our book club:
- Main character seems to leave burritos everywhere. In a book about him lacking food, this bugged me.
- Rocky is an interesting negative relief of the main character. Rocky is confident, Grace is not. Rocky is brave, Grace is reluctant. Rocky has little sense of individuality, Grace does. Grace has an ability to come up with creative solutions, but Rocky doesn't?
- Xenonite too convenient? Is anything else too convenient?
- Do you think Rocky threw his crewmates out into space like Grace did? Why?
- The book is like baseball. There's no time limit. It's just events and then events. It creates tensions by setting up situations and then presenting you with interesting solutions. The tension comes from the fact that you're not sure how he's going to succeed. It seems like Grace should make more mistakes than he actually does, and in a way there's also tension there. It seems somewhat unbelievable that he doesn't make more mistakes.
- The ending sort of disregards the relationship between Grace and Earth, and makes the book more about Grace's relationship with himself -- but in the end neither ending really seems to hit hard because the book was mostly about Grace's relationship with the problem being presented. Once the problem is solved and Rocky is saved, there's no reason for there to be more book.
- I like the structure of the book -- it doesn't make sense to reveal things about the character without the amnesia. It drives the flashback sequences.
- The environmentalist, Leclerc, seems a bit canned.
- The book is about countries uniting, and allows the plot to be MOSTLY about grace and his relationship with the truth. I like that it shows how simple our current problems are; we are humans but we don't see each other as the same. Rocky doesn't have this problem.
- It's interesting that most of the book seems plausible except for astrophage and xenonite. It makes it seem like we're actually really close to interstellar travel. Exciting!
