Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach

mild spoiler about the cause of the main conflict - no details

I love the idea of this book - terraforming, time travel, science, hostile environment - it's all the things I'm interested in. But what annoys me to no end is that the main conflict is caused by a scientist failing to follow basic procedure.

Now I know some people won't care about this stuff and will consequently enjoy this novella way more than I have. But I'm tired of reading stories about top tier, hand-picked, veteran scientists who somehow disregard orders on a whim - even though that will most likely compromise their research. This simply isn't realistic and doesn't happen nearly enough in real life to be the main cause of conflict in so many books. Yes, human error is normal, but when the most basic “come back, put on the gloves” types of orders get ignored only because the story needs a conflict, that's just laziness on the writers part.

As a side note, I had the same problem with Planetfall (not a spoiler) where half the conflict stemmed from people magically not agreeing upon basics before going to space to form a colony. Things like “if someone attacks us, do we kill them or stun them?” are agreed upon BEFORE the mission. (If you like this novella you should read Planetfall too).

Other than that, Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach is pretty cool, though I think it would benefit from another 100 pages or so. There's a lot of scientific jargon and concepts in here that just don't have the time to fully sink in. More pages would also add more depth to the main character's inner dialogue, which would make her relationship with Kiki even better.

But other than all of that, I did like it, it has a good backbone and I'd read a sequel.