made me cry in a Screwfix car park

not fantasy. I know. no map. I am allowed one a year.

so a bloke wakes up on a spaceship with amnesia and two dead crewmates and has to work out what is going on, and the first fifty pages are him doing science to establish where he is, and I understand that if you do not like this kind of thing that is the worst sentence in the world. I love this kind of thing. give me a competent person with a problem and some equipment and I am happy for eight hours.

Rocky. ok. I am going to talk about Rocky and I will not spoil what Rocky is beyond what you get in the blurb, but the entire middle of this book is two people who cannot see or hear each other in any normal sense working out a shared language from nothing, and it is done with actual rigour, and it is also the warmest thing I have read in years. every time they got a new word I made a noise.

the flaws are real and I am not going to pretend. the flashbacks are the weakest part, the villain of those sections is a cartoon, and everyone in this book talks in exactly the same voice, which is the author's voice, which is a chirpy man explaining something to you. if you did not like that in his Mars one you will not like it here.

also the science is doing a lot of hand waving in places while being extremely detailed in others, which is a strange rhythm. it is very rigorous about heat transfer and then just decides some things.

and yes, I know, everybody says it is his Mars book but with a friend in it. and it is! but that undersells the thing badly. the Mars one was a puzzle box with a funny man inside it. this is a puzzle box with a relationship inside it, and the relationship is the entire reason the puzzles land, because you are not watching someone solve a problem any more, you are watching two people who cannot even agree on what a second is decide to trust each other about it. Priyesh finished it in a single day and texted me at six in the morning about the astrophage, which in our group chat is about as high as praise goes.

but here is what actually happened. I listened to a chunk of the back half on audio at 1.4x while I was out getting bits for the bathroom, and I got to the ending, and I sat in the van in the Screwfix car park for a good ten minutes not going in. Ray Porter does something in the last chapter and I had to stop. thirty one years old, in a car park, crying at a book about a man and a rock.

my group chat has not let this go and honestly they are correct to bring it up.

eight. not a great novel. a great time. those are different and I know which one I needed that week.