To be fair, it's probably more reasonable to judge it in the stream of epistolary / didactic literature than purely narrative. I remember Defoe's Crusoe and Sto

To be fair, it's probably more reasonable to judge it in the stream of epistolary / didactic literature than purely narrative. I remember Defoe's Crusoe and Stoker's Dracula not having particularly inspiring characters by modern standards either. It is curious about the divergence between engineers and non-engineers. If he ever writes another novel in the same vein, it'd be interesting to collaborate with another author and have a richly-characterized political story on Earth contrasted by a more "engineerly-characterized" space story. (Keep meaning to watch film, have not gotten to)