So I overall liked the book but the author’s attitude toward space exploration feels very dated. It was written in 1999.
But jeez, the main protagonist, Reid Malenfant, is such an Elon Musk stand-in it’s laughable. Usual brilliant billionaire tropes abound with typical attitude towards government bureaucracy, specifically NASA. So apparently the only reason we haven’t started mining asteroids and colonizing the moon yet is because… red tape??? This brilliant misunderstood billionaire comes along, slaps a few moth-balled rockets together and voil la, space program! Easy, right?
Maybe it would have side-tracked the pacing too much but honestly there’s no test flights, no program development, and practically no scientists. He seems to use the same guy, a marine biologist, to solve every technical problem from genetically engineering super-squid to detecting neutrinos. Don’t think they have a phD for both… And just as Musk would think the fate of the whole universe depends on his brilliant project to reach an asteroid. It really IS all about him!
This probably doesn’t do the book full justice. I DID kind of like it. A ton of it just didn’t age well given how our current private space flight dystopia has developed.
by divemastermatt