Akiva Reads

by Connie Willis

4/5 stars because the end worked for me, just barely, and I'm charmed right now, this might go down to 3 stars later. The worldbuilding and its mysteries that are untangled over the course of the book are fucking beautiful. Some of the satire is very questionable, though (poking fun at government bureaucracy is one thing, but the stereotypes applied to the indigenous sentient guide are pretty yikes and insufficiently subverted for my tastes), and I always get surprised how deeply and unshakably heterosexual Willis' outlook is.

Update: Extremely fucking Akiva that I thought about this for 12 hours and realized that (major plot spoiler, seriously, don't read this because the plot is the best part and worth experiencing unspoiled) it doesn't make sense to find oil on an alien planet because Earth fossil fuel reserves are a product of a very specific sequence of events: 1. carbon based plant life, 2. fungus that can consume and break down some of the more durable parts of said plant life doesn't develop until much later, so 3. we have a buried stockpile, nicely compressed, and with not much of the stored energy already consumed and digested into simpler chemistry. The rest of the geology is spot on though as far as I can tell---I don't know much about it but I knew exactly what was happening as soon as F. started using geology technobabble, which was gratifying!