Science Fiction

Genuinely the premise of “survival audition show but it’s for mecha pilots” is so specifically up my alley that it feels like this book was written for me personally!! I had a really good time with this book overall, but I am also an unabashed fan of Park Seolyeon so that didn’t surprise me.

In Project V we follow Wooram, a South Korean mech engineer and pilot, as she joins the running to be the pilot of Korea’s first ever large mecha known as V. She’s the runner up of a global robot olympiad, a talented engineering student at university, and by all metrics has what it takes to be V’s pilot… the only catch is that they only want men to audition for the role. This forces Wooram to adopt her brother Boram’s identity when she applies for the survival show, and puts her in a precarious position the further she advances. Little does she know that there’s something even more dangerous awaiting her.

As someone who is not particularly science-minded myself, I sometimes find myself steering away from hard sci-fi because I’m worried about not understanding it. My godmother encouraged me to read this book ahead of the movie coming out, and although I was initially a little reluctant, I’m really glad that I did — and that my worries about not being science-y enough to understand the book were unfounded!

This was my first Andy Weir book so I’m not sure how well this conclusion carries across his other works, but at least within this book I felt that although the science was well-founded and seemed realistic enough (to my untrained eye, anyway) it was also explained in such a way that it was easy to understand. I didn’t feel like the explanations went completely over my head — I was able to follow the logic and the explanations and more or less understand why a plan would or wouldn’t work. Maybe this is in part because the narrator is a science teacher and he’s explaining things to people who aren’t scientists themselves… Whatever the reason, it super helped!