We are two weeks into the month of September now. I think this might be a reasonable amount of time for some readers to have completed this book if they started early this month. At least I finished it last week. I'll leave this thread pinned for the rest of the month and next weekend I'll create the poll for the next book of the month. That poll will end on the last day of the month and the cycle will continue.
Feel free to include as many spoilers as you want in your comments as the post itself is marked as containing spoilers.
I'm hoping someone else could get started or else I will have to. 😅
Jazz Hands ♫ ♪ ♪ ♬
The science was all over the place. It's like the author know things exist, but doesn't grasp high-school level science. And yet, he has to insist on putting numbers and citing things all over the book.
Really, nobody between the smartest people on Earth anticipated that they would find a predator? The idea that a food network is what keeps the population of most species stable isn't even high-school level, we teach it to younger children. That's way to much contempt to the book characters and to the reader. And also, could the author skip a single chapter without pretending that mitochondria is some kind of primordial organelle? Everybody knows the thing multiplies in an atmosphere, and yet nobody at all imagined the all-purpose lab needed an atmospheric sampler? And also, was there no physicist on the team or low temperature freezers were out of stock?
The book starts as a very good one. Enticing to read. But by the time it gets to the climax those things have accumulated so much that it isn't interesting anymore.
Yup, lack of advanced science concepts and an accumulation of errors despite a pretension to working problems for the audience.
Even some basic geography errors - early in the book, he claims that the sample had to be landed in Saskatchewan for a high latitude to match the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Baikonur is at 45 N latitude, about the same as the border between North and South Dakota. Everywhere in Saskatchewan is North of the 49th parallel and south of 60. Sigh.