Su Sch

Given that Andy Weir's whole schtick is weaving lots of science into solving life threatening problems, it's really infuriating that Weir has made his protagonist some super-genius microbiologist/molecular biologist who doesn't know squat about basic cell biology. There are other things about the book I could criticize, but sort of forgive - things like learning a whole new alien language in a couple days, overly long and repetitive narration, wisecracks that really aren't clever or funny... But putting mitochondria in his alien villain, and our heroic super-genius microbiologist doesn't even go "Hmm, that's weird"? Inexcusable! This just violates so much basic biology that any bright high school student should know, and it's not even essential to the plot. A completely unnecessary plot point that shows up repeatedly for apparently no reason other than to show that Weir doesn't know high school biology, and is too arrogant to consult a single actual microbiologist before writing a book centered on a super-genius microbiologist's attempt to use his knowledge of microbiology to save humanity.