Started: 2/25/18
Finished: 3/4/18
I really like Neal Stephenson, but this was NOT a good novel. It’s more of a technical manual about space stations and surviving in space and STOP TEACHING ME ABOUT SPACE. When he was telling the actual story, with actual characters, I was riveted, but that was no more than half the book. On the one hand, I appreciate the real science, but the way he did it took away from the story, and I need my fiction to be about STORY. There is a paragraph near the end of the book that makes me actually angry, where, after giving me every technical detail about surviving in space, he dismisses the same details about surviving in a mine as unimportant and unnecessary to the story. IT’S THE SAME EXACT THING, GOD DAMN IT.