Science Fiction : Project Hail Mary
An interesting juxtaposition to The Three Body Problem and the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy.
Written by Andy Weir, the famous author of the book and subsequent film, The Martian, Project Hail Mary is fascinating when juxtaposed against the greatest science fiction (thus far) of the 21st century. Project Hail Mary tells a story about a solar-system-scale threat to the human species. It tells a story about the individuals and governments called to ensure human survival against unknown entities and tremendous odds. Importantly, it tells the story of specific individuals (and mostly a single individual) entrusted with the fate of humanity.
In those ways, Project Hail Mary is very similar to the Rememberance of Earth’s Past trilogy. Like The Three-Body Problem and its two sequels, Project Hail Mary attempts to grapple with the mortality of civilization and morality. Few people would compare the two works of fiction directly because that’s where the similarities more or less end.
Project Hail Mary is like an inversion of The Three Body Problem. While the latter takes place over decades and centuries with a massive cast of international characters, Project Hail Mary takes place over the course of a couple of months (with some flashbacks going back a year or two) with a cast of only a few characters, focusing entirely on a personal story. Andy Weir certainly knows his strengths, and he’s sticking to them like a fly on a glue trap.
To briefly summarize the book without too many spoilers: Project Hail Mary centers on Ryland Grace, a former high school science teacher from San Francisco who wakes up alone on a spaceship with no memory of who he is or how he got there. As his memory slowly returns, he realizes he's humanity’s last hope to save Earth from an extinction-level threat caused by a mysterious microorganism draining energy from the sun.
Alone in a distant solar system, Ryland has to figure out how his ship works and solve various problems as they occur while also developing a plan of action based on his intermittent memory. In the depths of space, he encounters an alien life form there for the same reason: something similar has happened to their host star. A biologically alien (but psychologically surprisingly human) entity capable of cooperating with Ryland to achieve their mutual goal: figure out what has happened to their host stars, and how to stop it. The two form an unlikely interspecies alliance, working together to develop a solution.
As is typical of Weir’s novels, he combines high science, humor, and a fast-paced narrative that occurs quickly. The characters seem like they’re always on the clock to achieve something effective before something else goes wrong, or they simply run out of air and food.
What makes this an interesting exploration into science fiction is the way that the story is kept extremely personal. Weir shies away from larger moral or political implications, and the lead character, Ryland, is extremely adept at not knowing and not caring what’s going on in the larger world. The moral conundrums are relatively straightforward and steeped in a conventional neoliberal humanist morality. There’s no great question of right and wrong, no question of Darwinism at the galactic scale. The alien encounter (an odd plot twist in the book, but one which makes up the majority of the meaningful plot) doesn’t explore a radically different moral or cultural system from that of late-20th-century Western civilization.
I always wonder what the long term (and potentially disastrous) implications of Weirs attempts to educate the alien on technologies and mathematics that we have and they don’t. I wonder what the long-term implications of the reverse may be. An entire trilogy could be dedicated to a potential conflict between humanity and the “Eridians,” as Ryland elects to call them. A potential conflict where humanity is on the back foot because they were trained by one of our scientists.
There are a lot of extremely important questions that are casually ignored by Weir in favor of a short little space partner-drama. What if the Eridians are fundamentally morally incompatible in some way? What if they’re Darwinian? What if their species’ development led them down fundamentally different methods of cultural organization?
Those are the types of question that would take center stage in a text like The Three Body Problem by CiXin Liu. In The Three Body Problem, the aliens are so alien that they are rarely even glimpsed. From a human perspective, we interact with their machines more than those bizarre and strangely inhuman entities who built the machines. It’s simply too much of a gulf to try and cross, to understand and communicate with something so fundamentally foreign to the human experience.
I think it’s important to have fun, small science fiction stories, but I also think that Andy Weir could have done a lot more with these ideas. He wants to tell something simple and short. Understandable. I would hope that another author continues the story differently at some point.
Also, apparently, there’s a movie coming out next year. Starring Ryan Gosling. Maybe Weir was onto something when he named his protagonist Ryland Grace… He knew what he was doing.
Weir is clearly a great biologist, but has no understanding of politics or morality beyond the superficial. As a biologist myself, his dive into speculative xenobiology was delightful, but you are also right that he has no aptitude for xenopsychology or moral philosophy.
I would give the book 8/10, because Weir knows his strengths and plays to them well.
A really good book.
This gave me pause ".. What if the Eridians are fundamentally morally incompatible in some way? .." because the alien signaled no 'tells' of dishonesty, his actions were rational.
And what if wrong?
The European Christian settlers and American indigenous shared-areas, comes to mind.
When a Christian family or families were considered weak and vonerable with something the savages wanted,, then all previous agreements were ignored by the murdering raping torturing thieving morally-broken savages, and they killed and burned and stole.
Then the Christians simply went and killed them, not for vengeance but safety and to cleanse the area of their wild-beast soulless danger.
And You would too, or someone like me will shoot you dead like the sick-dog you seem to be. There is no time for Vag-Feelie whining anymore. You help or die.