I was really interested in the premise, but there were several points where it felt like the author was just stalling and wasting the reader's time. All these specialists get recruited for this mission... and the training goes on for a long time... then the main characters are suddenly dismissed, being told they've washed out of the program. Then they all get jobs for various other space companies (cue another several chapters of story development)... until it's revealed that all of the other space companies are shell companies for the billionaire who hired them in the first place. And then we have another few chapters of explaining why that subterfuge was necessary. This book, about mining a near-earth asteroid, doesn't even get the space mission underway until halfway through the book.



But if I thought the first part of the book was tedious, the second half was worse. You know how a lot of movies make being an astronaut seem cool as hell? Not this book. No, it details every single mundane detail of what a four-year space mining operation would be like. Ooh, let's spend some time talking about calibrating the breathable air... and then can we talk some more about the process of distilling raw asteroid material into usable resources? How about some more about the types of meal packs they brought with them... or how they repaired a small problem in a complicated electrical system... we get it, already. These are super smart people dealing with complex problems that could kill them at any minute. There's no dramatic tension, just a series of scenes. "And then, two weeks after that crisis, this other one happened..."



While all the space stuff is going on, there's some sort of political/financial drama playing out on earth where the billionaire who funded this whole expedition basically did it illegally and didn't tell anyone about it, so the space mining team discovers they're up there illegally with no sanction and no support. Long story short, the billionaire kills himself when his house of cards comes falling down, all his creditors try to take over the mission and try to kill everyone on board (ostensibly to not have any witnesses but that was another random detour), but a few of them make it home against all odds anyway and are now rich and famous for everything they've accomplished.

Then the book ends with them going, "Let's go back into space and do it again, now that we know what to expect!"



I loved the author's Daemon series and will try some of his other books as well, but this one wasn't the best and I won't be reading the second in the series. It felt more like the author was just really, really proud of all the research he did for this book and cared more about showcasing his knowledge about space missions than for telling a compelling narrative with characters we care about.

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Created Mar 24, 2024 at 11:23pm • Submit your own review...