Red Szell

And yes, I mean, it's machine learning.

It's too...

bodies, two organic bodies, machine learning.

And I loved the way that he kind of flipped the whole AI machine learning into humans and aliens having to learn each other's language.

It was very, very clever.

Oh, well, throw that one at me, why don't you, Jacob?

Astrophage is an interstellar, I believe, single-cell organism that has travelled across space and...

It feeds off the power of stars, such as our sun.

So think about space algae basically coming along and eating up all the goodness, all the energy that is produced by a planet's sun.

And...

It is incredibly good at reproducing and it is incredibly greedy.

So it's hanging around, I think, Venus in our solar system in this book and it is feeding off the energy of the sun and that is...

basically causing the sun to die and by association causing the earth to die because it's not getting the goodness, the warmth, the heat of the sun's rays helping plants to photosynthesize and human beings to grow their crops and life.

Well, at least we're not dealing with global warming anymore.

Well, no, and actually there is a beautiful little sidebar in the book where,

where, minor spoiler alert, climate scientists are forced to try and replicate global warming to give the Earth a chance to survive long enough

for the Hail Mary, the spaceship that Ryland Grace is travelling in, to get to its destination and hopefully find a way of eliminating Astrophage.

Because it just drops you right into the middle of the action, along with Ryland, who is going, what the hell is going on?

I loved it because I was lucky enough to go and see Alien when it first came out.

I was a young kid and my dad smuggled me into the cinema.