lightreads

Project Hail Mary

3/5. Dude wakes up with amnesia on – it turns out – a spaceship, in the company of a very dumb computer and the bodies of his crewmates. He has a mission to save humanity, if only he can figure out what it is.

I had mixed reactions to this one. The book comes in phases:

Phase 1: Amnesiac hijinks in which our protagonist wakes up and immediately does the obvious thing: a lot of math. Basically he's like I'm not sure I remember my name – let me work out the amount of gravity I'm under right now by hand. It's extremely Andy Weir, you guys. Pretty compelling, actually.

Phase 2: Long stretch of alien buddy interstellar science bros. Also very readable, buuuuuut. You can tell a lot about someone by what they bother to get right and what they completely fudge. Andy Weir really cares about getting the math right, but can't be bothered to know the first thing about learning a new language, let alone an entirely alien language. Those sections are completely absurd (the communication barrier is basically overcome in a couple of days, it's a joke). The culture-building is similarly shoddy. The protagonist thinks at one point how it's not so weird that alien writing goes right-to-left and thus is relatively comprehensible because after all, there's only four directions to write in … … … My dude. There are more directions to write in reflected in Earth writing systems. Good god.

So I was into the alien buddies interstellar science bros, but it really doesn't sit well with me when a dude goes all out on the math and fucks up the humanities so badly. I am reminded of when a friend of mine, a very accomplished woman with a hard sciences Ph.D., tried to explain the trolly problem to me because she'd seen it on The Good place. And those of us at the table with an assortment of other degrees were like "….yes? is this news? didn't you have this like seven times in college and grad school?" And nope. Nope she hadn't. Christ. What the fuck are we doing in science education? This is why scientists do so so so badly when trying to invent ethical frameworks from scratch. And, not coincidentally, why they fuck up so badly when they think they can write about learning to communicate across a language barrier as if all you need to do is assign set values to shared nouns and off you go, all set.

Phase 3: Where all the shit goes wrong sequentially and it's very The Martian. Also interesting, but made me go hmm. See, the protagonist has no history and no family and no community. Even after he gets his memory back, I don't think it even occurs to him to think of family once. Weird did this in The Martian, too, where someone literally never thinks of a single person they care about on Earth in circumstances where they really really should. And I was like eyeroll, here he goes again with this. But then, to his credit, he does do something with that. The end of this book is almost an interesting story about a guy who is deeply alienated from all of humanity, and the choices you make in that circumstance when you are lightyears from home. Almost. But he doesn't pull it off because I'm not sure he was really shooting for that. I'm not sure he knew what he was doing with that at all.

So anyway. On balance, an enjoyable space thriller. But, like, brace yourself for the part where he thinks the entirety of the Library of Congress can go on a single hard drive (JFC, what, child. Read a book).

The Martian by Andy Weir

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Through a freak set of circumstances, an astronaut is abandoned on Mars when the rest of his NASA crew departs. Now he has to survive.

Ahaha, okay.

Things this book doesn't care about: Doing the omniscient POV well; doing epistolary well; giving characters anything more complex than the most obvious, primary-colored emotions; the actual psychological experience of being left alone on Mars to die.

Things this book cares about: How to extract hydrogen and create your own water molecules from scratch OMG.

This was a lot of fun, and compulsively readable in places. But let's get real here: I can see exactly why this book was self-published for lack of an agent, and simultaneously why Crown later acquired it (though I am baffled as to why, during the editing process, they didn't sit Weir down and have a long, firm talk with him about how jaw-droppingly terrible the last few paragraphs of the book are. Seriously, they're seventh-grade essay about the nature of mankind bad. It's like telling someone their fly is unzipped – it's embarrassing, but someone has to do it). Anyway, this is a cool space survival piece with loving (and fascinating!) descriptions of growing potatoes on Mars and orbital mechanics calculations sprinkled with occasional quips, and really disinterested or just incompetent everything else.

Basically, I really dug this. But I actually bet myself halfway through that this was going to be made into a movie, and yep, I was right. Starring Matt Damon and directed by Ridley Scott, which, uh-huh. And I just . . . look. Being able to spot a book that a major studio is going to snap up for adaptation? That isn't actually a compliment. That usually means the book is a good adrenaline vehicle with only cut-outs of human beings in it, where the emotional arc – such as it is – can go comfortably down in one small swallow and be immediately forgotten. And . . . yeah.




View all my reviews