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5�� (audio also while reading)
“That other hatch in the lab—the one that leads farther up—that must be important. This is like being in a video game. Explore the area until you find a locked door, then look for the key. But instead of searching bookshelves and garbage cans, I have to search my mind. Because the ‘key�� is my own name.��

So�� what seems to be the problem then. His own name? Um, yeah. He doesn’t remember it. Not only that, he woke up in a bed in a craft in goodness-knows-where with two corpses in the other two beds. What the?

Our hero (this is a quest, after all, so I can call him a hero) has occasional instinctive flashes of memory, kind of like muscle memory. It’s also like when you can’t think of a word, but then a phrase pops into your mind, and there’s the word. If he knew he was on a spaceship named the Hail Mary, he might have gone on to say “full of grace��, and there it is! His name is Ryland Grace.

As he recalls things, Grace takes us back to his time teaching high school science and gradually works forward to the mission and the problems on earth that he seems to have been sent out to solve. It’s quite a while before he (and we) learn the actual circumstances that found him on board, and I think it’s just as well.

Grace narrates the story, which I read and simultaneously listened to on audio. The writing is good, of course, but Rob Porter’s narration is outrageously good. I mean really good. He has exactly the right tones of optimism and despair as well as the voices and manner of the other characters on earth, as well as the onboard computer (it speaks sometimes), and another distinctive chiming voice.

Grace gets into the control room and is pleased to find that he understands what he’s looking at, by which I mean he can read the many screens and understand what the readings are. What he can’t believe is what they’re telling him.

“That’s a little over two days. Over ten times faster than the rotation should be. This star I’m looking at �� it’s not the sun. I’m in a different solar system.
. . .
Okay. I think it’s time I took a long gosh-darned look at these screens! How am I in another solar system?! That doesn’t even make sense! What star is that, anyway?! Oh my God, I am so going to die! I hyperventilate for a while. I remember what I tell my students: If you’re upset, take a deep breath, let it out, and count to ten. It dramatically reduced the number of tantrums in my classroom.��

He remembers that some little ‘things�� are attracted by light, eating the sun, and the sun is dimming, destining earth for a dark ending. It seems as if a similar thing is happening a long, long, long way away, but that star, Tau Ceti, seems to be unaffected and scientists on Earth want to find out why, hoping to save our sun and the planet.

So Ryland Grace wakes up with only the computer and automated robot arms for company. The food is good (he likes the breakfast burritos), and the medical care is excellent, often taking place while he’s asleep. He wakes up with fresh bandages as needed.

He got a burn injury at one point and asked for painkillers. The ‘arms�� hand him two pills and a cup of water. He goes back to work instead of resting, and pays the price.

“It’s been less than an hour, but the painkillers aren’t doing the job anymore.

‘Computer! Painkillers!��

‘Additional dose available in three hours and four minutes.��

I frown. ‘Computer: What is the current time?��

‘Seven-fifteen P.M., Moscow Standard Time.��

‘Computer: Set time to eleven P.M. Moscow Standard Time.��

‘Clock set complete.��

‘Computer: painkillers.��

The arms hand me a package of pills and a bag of water. I gobble them down. What a stupid system. Astronauts trusted to save the world but not to monitor their painkiller doses? Stupid.��

I particularly enjoyed that, because I’ve done the same thing myself to game a system that was going to cause something I had to expire on a certain day, so I changed the date on the computer and went offline for a while. That was a long time ago, though. Not sure it would work now.

His arm continues to hurt, but at least he still has it.

“I climb down the ladder. My arm hurts. But less than it has. I’ve been changing the bandages every day—or rather, Dr. Lamai’s medical marvel machine has been doing it. There’s definitely scarring all over the skin. I’m going to have an ugly arm and shoulder for the rest of my life. But I think the deeper layers of skin must have survived. If they hadn’t, I probably would have died of gangrene by now. Or Lamai’s machine would have amputated my arm when I wasn’t looking.��

I don’t want to give anything else away. Some other readers have shared more than I’m willing to. I was just so happily surprised by how he managed everything he encountered that I seemed to let all the science and engineering wash over me, whether or not I understood it. It was enough that I thought he understood it, more or less �� sometimes less, admittedly �� and that it worked, usually.

The audio really is extra-good, but I do like having the text to follow and quote from. I have yet to figure out how to review the audio without counting it as a separate book.