He is a fastidious and interesting writer. I nonetheless found both these novels disappointing. They seem to be porn for engineers. Like all porn, the lead character is a cardboard cutout with monomaniacal motivation. (It seems revealing that both books place the protagonist in a position of complete social isolation.)

This was a more serious flaw in Project Hailmary, in which first contact - a profound event - is treated as a lone man’s engineering puzzle. The book is a good argument for sending poets, or at least properly thoughtful scientists, to meet our first aliens.