Ratings10
Average rating3.8
"A tense and thrilling sci-fi adventure of space exploration and first contact, perfect for fans of The Martian, Arrival, and Interstellar. Sally Jansen was NASA's leading astronaut, until a mission to Mars ended in disaster. Haunted by her failure, she now lives in semiretirement, convinced her days in space are over. She's wrong. A large alien object has entered the solar system and is now poised above the Earth. It has made no attempt to communicate and has ignored all incoming transmissions. With no other living astronauts to turn to, NASA wants Jansen to lead an expedition to the object. For all the dangers of the mission, it's the shot at redemption she always longed for. But as the object slowly begins to reveal its terrifying secrets, what began as a journey to make First Contact becomes a desperate struggle for survival...and one thing becomes horribly clear: the future of humanity lies in Jansen's hands"--
Reviews with the most likes.
Neither NASA nor SpaceX will be overly happy with this one. This is another real-ish solar system space survival story in the vein of Andy Weir's The Martian or Lisa A. Nichols' Vessel. In terms of techno-jargon, it sits somewhere in between those two, with more jargon early in the book before the book takes a less technical turn towards the back half. Stylistically, this is a mockumentary type tale with both a storyline and documentary elements interwoven and uses various event names for the headings of the chapters rather than chapter numbers. Overall a solid effort and very much recommended. I'll be looking for more from Mr. Wellington in the future, that's for sure.
TL;DR
I really enjoyed this book, definitely recommend to read it if you want a horror/thriller scifi story. There wasn't anything that annoyed or bothered me about it. Story was great, characters were interesting, the alien object was amazing. I have nothing bad to say about this book, go read it!
My Scoring System
I have five things I look for in a book, if the book checks all five it's a 5/5 stars book, if it checks none it's a 1/5 stars and everything else is a combination:
✓ - Main Story: I liked the idea of this mysterious space object that we encounter, almost the entire story is inside this thing so that's great because it's the best part of the book.
✓ - Side Stories (if it applies): A little bit of backstory with out main protagonist but nothing to bothersome. Not super interesing either.
✓ - Characters: Great characters all around, enjoyed all of them. There wasn't anyone who I found annoying or rolled my eyes when they were talking.
✓ - Setting/Ambiance: The tension and feeling of being inside the object was amazing and terrifying. I really liked the ambiance and it's a very strong point of the book.
✓ - Ending: Good ending as well to round up the entire book, I'm glad it didn't flop it.
Extensive Review
Okay here is where I usually start to talk about things that annoyed me or didn't make sense. For this book this section is going to be very short because I haven't found anything to put here. Maybe that at some points of the book it was hard to understand who was talking because it jumps from one character to another abruptly and I had to go back a few lines and read it again a bit more slowly to understand who's inner mind are we listening to now.
I liked all the characters in this story, I'm surprised because there is always one that is just annoying or one that you hate for various reasons. In this story I thought they were great. Even when they do some extreme things, since you hear their thoughts you understand why they did it and it can be understandable.
The science to me seemed well researched, I was looking up things that I didn't understand and it was on point to what the characters were saying or explaining. Maybe some one who more of an expert can detect some mistakes but to what little knowledge I have it made sense.
I'm not talking about the alien object because I think it's better to know nothing about it and just experience it while reading, it was my favorite part of the book and I'd say is pretty much 80% of where the story happens which is good. The other 20% is the backstory of our main protagonist and the travel to get to the alien object.
This was my first "first contact" type of story and I will be reading more of them now. The score might go down as I will compare it to other works but as of right now I will give it five stars because I really enjoyed it and I will recommend it to anyone who wants to read a scifi story.