Project Hail Mary (Andy Weir, 2021)

Book club selection per Lon, session held March 22.

Entertaining yes.

I generally struggle to find much value in science fiction but liked this well enough.

Kind of fun to muse about what alien life might be like - common building block roots? Evolution dictated by planet’s environment? This book shows a version where the aliens are similar to humans (other than what the environment required). This part was interesting to me.

Otherwise so much like the Martian - which isn’t a terrible thing - sciency problems keep cropping up, sciency solutions are come up by our hero, no matter what.  Rocky as an ongoing “deus ex machina” - plot device to surmount the insurmountable.

The “save the planet” rhetoric got tiresome.  Not plausible that the various nations would work together like this.

I rather liked the ending.  Made sense that he would settle there, didn’t see a teaching job coming.

Kind of surprised at the overt Roman Catholicism with the “Hail Mary” name, I thought that was out of fashion.

Even better - perhaps my favorite touch - the archangel Gabriel’s full greeting is “Hail Mary full of grace” - think of the hero’s name.

Quick read, just fine. Movie coming out. 

The Perfectionists (Simon Winchester, 2018)

I probably didn't understand a lot of this, but the book had a lot of ideas about the advance of technology that were fascinating.

The idea in the early part of the book of inventing machine tools, ie a machine to make perfect machines. John Wilkinson. 1776. A machine to make precise cannons.  Interchangeable parts. 

John Harrison clock discussed (for longitude) - but not in this category (of a machine to make machines). 

Page 71, the pulley blocks and the factory to build them, resonates with the Revolutionary War book (Rick Atkinson's) discussing the British Navy and its requirements. 

Unhappy, displaced workers, still happening to this day. These were skilled folks and well paid, caught up in technological change.

Military needs and opportunities a driver of technology, as so often throughout history (two examples above).  US manufacturers of guns in 19th century - could repair a gun on the fly with an interchangeable part.

Recency of these advances. The world lived without them for millennia.  Not now.

Chapter on cars was less interesting to me (contrasting Rolls Royce and Ford). Rolls-Royce with much handcrafted work, Ford becomes automated. Measuring tools make huge jumps.

The airplane chapter is pretty terrifying - a lot can go wrong, with serious consequences even if just a little big wrong.

Hubble - fixing the lens. 

One of the final chapters addressed my old client - ASM Lithography - taking tolerances and scale to the literally unbelievable. ASM International with a brief, if inaccurate, mention.

Kind of disjointed but very interesting. 

An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and An Epic (Daniel Mendelsohn, 2017)

I like Mendelsohn's writing and was looking forward to this - framing the story around Homer's Odyssey seemed like a great idea.  

But I quit about 20% of the way into the book - the father-son stuff just didn't work for me.  Doubt I'll give it another try.