I loved the book as entertainment. It's brisk, engaging and though at least one reply here mentioned terrible writing, I disagree. Weir has a certain overly strident, cheery style that some might not like, and fair enough, but it is what it is: validly his specific style, and not all that bad for narrative flow as long as it doesn't rub you the wrong way.
The story is also just sentimental enough in an unusual enough way that I fell into it enough to be moved where it counts.
If you want to read it for anything resembling hard science concepts though, forget about it maybe. Weir lays on just enough of his usual technical babble to give a richer scifi feel to the book, but much of the core events are hand-waved into existence well away from anything resembling realism. That's okay though, because realism isn't really the point of the book anyhow.
In "The Martian" I thought the technical stuff was closer to touching on realistic details, since it was about a comparatively simple Mars mission gone wrong. Here though, we're talking about using near-current technology -with a clever plot device for an exotic fuel source- being used to zip around nearby star systems at just a hair under the speed of light, and most of that is complete, utter fantasy in disguise.
I'll give this to Weir though, he's damn imaginative at crafting a lot of very plausible sounding, deeply detailed technical talk, despite it mostly being completely invented.
The story is also just sentimental enough in an unusual enough way that I fell into it enough to be moved where it counts.
If you want to read it for anything resembling hard science concepts though, forget about it maybe. Weir lays on just enough of his usual technical babble to give a richer scifi feel to the book, but much of the core events are hand-waved into existence well away from anything resembling realism. That's okay though, because realism isn't really the point of the book anyhow.
In "The Martian" I thought the technical stuff was closer to touching on realistic details, since it was about a comparatively simple Mars mission gone wrong. Here though, we're talking about using near-current technology -with a clever plot device for an exotic fuel source- being used to zip around nearby star systems at just a hair under the speed of light, and most of that is complete, utter fantasy in disguise.
I'll give this to Weir though, he's damn imaginative at crafting a lot of very plausible sounding, deeply detailed technical talk, despite it mostly being completely invented.