I think there is something wrong with me. Whenever I finish a book I like, I feel the need to come here and apologize for it. I guess it is because I have read some big daunting challenging books in my past: I’ve read Dhalgren, Gravity’s Rainbow, Naked Lunch, Infinite Jest, Eco’s Theory of Semiotics and Lotman’s Universe of the Mind. I could do better, but I now have a job that works me to death. I am lucky to be reading at all!
Like a lot of books I read, I got the idea to read this from reddit. I get so many recommendations from Reddit that I should make a separate tag for it on my blog. But unlike some of the other Reddit Rekomends, this one was ok.
So how can you tell if you will like this book.
Start by pulling up the clip from the movie ‘The Martian’ where Matt Damon threatens to ‘science the shit’ out of the current problem he is facing. That’s this book, but now with 150% more sci-fi!
I wish I was joking.
In The Martian, Andy Weir’s first book, a lowly scientist finds himself on Mars, and somehow manages to live through the ordeal. The novel pretty accurately shows the challenge of all this, and to what extent living on Mars, said bluntly, fucking blows.
Huh. Why hasn’t anyone send a copy of The Martian to Elon Musk?
Famously, Isaac Asimov used pretty much the same formula for the books in his book series: book A introduces a problem, a protagonist finds a solution, and then that solution becomes the problem for book B, ad infinitum. Weir has condensed the formula into one novel: man has problem, man does a science on the problem, science has a consequence man didn’t forsee, man has a new problem. That’s a decent synopsis of The Martian, and that is a decent synopsis of Project Hail Mary as well – Except now with 150% more sci-fi!
Below might by spoilers, so here is your warning. If said in a single breath, it may also sound like I’m having an episode. Here goes:
In Project Hail Mary the sun is getting weaker and it turns out that microbes live on the sun, and they are eating it, and so science people need to science the problem, and it turns out that these microbes can be used as fuel, and so protagonist finds himself alone around Tau Ceti because his crew died mid-flight and low and behold as he gets there it just so happened that another sentient race is there trying to solve the problem, after which they both ‘science the shit’ out of problems old and arising.
I did like this book. But I opened this review with an apology. It felt like the book didn’t deserve my enjoyment. Some gripes:
Major:
Andy Weir, like many people who seem to really like science, seems to dismiss linguistics out of hand. Do you remember back in 2014 or so when google prematurely announced that they had solved the translation problem, and that in a couple of years you could just have your phone translate any language for you? Yea, how is that working? People like Andy Weir are the reason why that dumb shit happened. And he did it again in this book. The main character meets sentient life and they get to communicating within the space of a page or so. Figuring out their mutual language was some easy shit apparently. I can’t remember the last time I hate-read a passage so voraciously, but here it was. So far in my quest to find a book that does a linguistic encounter between two species well, everything has failed. The book ends with the protagonist fluent in an alien language that he started learning in middle age, and in the mean time I am in my late thirties and know I will never make any significant progress in Hungarian, a terrestrial language.
Linguistics is a science, and yet so called ‘science evangelists’ seem to just hand wave it away.
Minor:
The prose is pretty unspectacular. That’s the kind word I have for it. I was very much reading this for the plot. ‘Pageturner’ is another kind euphemism. Often with things I find from Reddit, the prose is actually kind of bad (Stephen King comes to mind). Here it was just dull. Nor did I think the humor of the story ever worked for me. De gustibus.
While I greatly enjoyed the character of Stratt, a benevolent dictator like character calling the shots on Earth to make Project Hail Mary actually take off, I thought it was a cute way of handwaving away the very realistic problems of politics that would have found itself into this story. But the author had to do it, or risk turning this story into ‘Don’t Look Up‘.
The book begins with the protagonist suffering from amnesia. Amnesia is such a cliche I would be willing to bet there are twice as many cases of it in fiction than there ever were in actual fact. Slowly, the protagonist begins to get his memory back and this leads to a split narrative, and as I have complained with split narratives before, this lead to a situation where I wanted the story to get on with one of the more exciting/interesting parts. And it happened frequently here.
In defense of the book, I got the impression that had it been told in chronological order it would have been a worse story. So there is that. And I did enjoy aspects of it immensely. I enjoyed watching the relationship between the protagonist and his alien companion.
Should you give this a read? I don’t know. It feels like everyone else already has. There are worse books, but there are certainly better. They are going to make this into a movie. You can also just go watch that instead.
Failures in Polymathy 