Matthew's Journal

This is one of those books that's a real page-turner, and you want to keep reading, but if you stop and think about it too much you go "hang on a minute...". Also, a bit "one smart man is all you need". It's hard to say much more without serious spoilers; we start with the narrator waking up with no idea where he is nor any recollection of how he came to be there.

It transpires he's sent from Earth to try and save the world from a major solar-dimming event. He meets an alien who has been likewise sent to try and address the same threat to their own solar system.

I enjoy the main character's love of science, and joy in finding out new things. While a lot of the outline of the plot was pretty predictable (not least structurally - we know something is going to happen to the primary and backup scientist, for example), there were some good twists.

But it is very "one smart (white) man can save the world", and (in contrast to A Desolation called Peace) I found the ease of communicating with the alien unconvincing. There were other bits of plot that I didn't quite buy either: the lack of checklists for any operations, which are surely standard? non-consensually drugging Grace with a drug that will conveniently allow him to wake up having forgotten he was drugged (which seemed like a stretch to make the flashback plot work; as well as in-universe a terrible idea); there's a lot of silly mistakes or time spent figuring things out that would surely have been clearly documented; how do you have robots without anything resembling computers? why not use the hull robot instead of all those risky EVAs? what's with the stupid gendering of the alien? How come no-one thinks of vitamin deficiencies before Grace gets sick? and so on.

If you can try hard to suspend your disbelief and get swept along by it, though, you'll have a heck of a ride.