By Andy Weir.
Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission – and if he fails, humanity and the Earth itself will perish.
Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.
All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.
His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, he realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Alone on this tiny ship that’s been cobbled together by every government and space agency on the planet and hurled into the depths of space, it’s up to him to conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.
And thanks to an unexpected ally, he just might have a chance.
What do you think humans’ first interaction with alien life will look like? What would the aliens look like? How would we communicate? What are the cultural etiquettes we’d have to cater for? Would they understand sarcasm? Could they breathe our air? Do they communicate, see, hear the way we do?
These are just of the questions that get answered in this book.
The protagonist, Dr Ryland Grace, must save mankind from our dying Sun when he meets ‘Rocky’, as Grace calls him, an alien, who is on a journey to save his (or her – we never know) own planet from a similar fate.
No spoilers, but it’s a funny, entertaining, educational story.
They’ve since released a movie:
