Killian

This was a heavy read at the beginning, I found myself having to revise certain chapters just to understand what was really going on, but it got a lot easier to parse as I got used to the style of McCarthy's prose. It's really hard to look at other media about the "wild west" now without thinking it's romanticized, I've never seen such a brutal take on it before reading this.

My favourite aspect of the whole book was the judge as this slow-burn antagonist, I really like how he overshadows Glanton as the true evil, an actual representation of the devil. I also thought the conflict near the end was poignant, with the kid not developing into this embodiment of war that the judge had expected him to be, not that he became a pacifist but he kind of shook off the gratuitous killing that he had participated in almost all his life.

At first I thought this was a somewhat optimistic rebuttal that went against the judge's view of the world (and I think McCarthy's as well), but after thinking about it and re-reading the epilogue, I believe the book is actually trying to say that that a person's primal desire for warfare is just laying dormant beneath the facade of law and order we've built for ourselves. It's buried under various checks and balances keeping it at bay, but in areas of the world where those are eroded or non-existent, people do truly awful things to each other as if by their very nature. I feel like "The Road" ended on a similar note, where on the surface it seemed a little hopeful (with the child finding a new family to travel with), but the horrors of that world remained, they didn't exactly go away and the world was still doomed all the same.

This was one of the most enjoyable reads I've had in a while, it kept me gripped from beginning to end. The story structure may appear a little rigid, it seems to follow a pattern of: Problem -> Solution -> Complication -> Resolution, which should look familiar to those who have read "The Martian". With that said, I cannot deny how effective it is as a storytelling tool for keeping the reader engaged. The author manages to keep the stakes of each chapter high enough that you can only see the problem in front of you, as if masking this simple yet effective storytelling pattern.

I feel like the author did a good job balancing the "real" science with the sci-fi elements when it came to the plot. While it still demands some suspension of disbelief on the reader's part, the book does it's best to make everything "make sense" within the fiction. It also does this without overloading the reader with pointless jargon, Weir does a good job at telling the reader only what they need to know instead of getting into the weeds about everything.

As someone who normally does not like flashbacks as a narrative tool, I thought the use of them in this book was quite clever. They typically follow a very tense moment aboard the Hail Mary, allowing some breathing room between crises, although some of the flashbacks end up being quite tense in their own right which can shake things up a bit.

This is such an easy and gripping read that I highly recommend this to anyone even remotely interested in sci-fi, espeecially if you're a fan of Weir's previous work like "The Martian".