Last week I reviewed “Project Hail Mary” and I approved of it as high quality science fiction. But am I being consistent? Should I be calling it fantasy? In other words, can a story based on a completely impossible premise be considered science anything? So, let’s talk about this.
Andy Weir used a microorganism of extraterrestrial origin as the basis for his story. This lifeform which he called astrophage had a complement of remarkable properties that made it both the source of an existential threat to human existence on Earth and the key to human interstellar travel. Astrophage can convert light into mass and it can also convert mass into light. This is “explained” by claiming that it can harness the energy produced when neutrinos and their anti-matter opposites (which apparently are also just neutrinos) annihilate each other forming light. So somehow, the living cell can store neutrinos and then harvest them to produced light that can be used as a motive force to propel the astrophage at velocities approaching light speed.
Okay, this is gibberish. None of those things can be done in a particle accelerator, never mind inside the protoplasm of a cell. So, all of this is no different than E. E. Doc Smith pointing to his “inertialess” drive that allows the Galactic Patrol and their Boskonian enemies to hurtle through interstellar space at many time the speed of light. It’s just hand-waving to allow the action in the story to occur in a time period that allows for a fun story.
Now, granted, Weir at least restricts his velocities to the limit that General Relativity permits. And he allows time dilation and other relativistic effects to govern the fate of his astronauts. But having his starship reach 0.92 c is based on an energy production method that is completely inexplicable by any physics or biology that we can point to.
So, why isn’t that fantasy?
I think I’m going to invent a rule of science fiction.
photog’s First Law of Science Fiction – Thou shalt not change more than one basic law of physics when making a good story.
So, if Andy Weir wants astrophage to have a biological basis for matter/antimatter conversion then everything else about his story has to be “legit.” So, he can use astrophage as his workaround for amazing energy density for things like interstellar flight but everything else still requires the laws of physics, chemistry and biology to work the way they do in the real world. Now some folks might begrudge him xenonite because somehow, he turned a noble gas into unobtanium but there’s enough wiggle room in chemistry so that depending on what else besides xenon is in xenonite we could imagine all the properties of this make-believe material without calling down the lightning of the gods of the periodic table.
So, I think that’s fair. If you only make up one crazy make-believe MacGuffin to allow for the action in your story then I won’t cry foul and demote the story to the depths of the fantasy dungeon. I mean, who could ask for more than that.
“Project Hail Mary” is an sf novel by Andy Weir. It’s currently finishing off a theater run as a motion picture made by Amazon (MGM). And in fact, this is Weir’s second book to be turned into a motion picture (the first one was “The Martian”).
Just to start with the most important question, I think this is an excellent book.
(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)
My review will have spoilers but I think I’ll be cagey about some of the plot elements because they’re pretty important to the way the story unfolds for the reader and I think they shouldn’t be sacrificed for the sake of my plot synopsis.
The book’s protagonist is Ryland Grace; a biology PhD who now teaches Middle School science because a paper he wrote about the possibility of extraterrestrial life in the absence of water was severely criticized. As the story unfolds an autocratic European Space Agency administrator named Eva Stratta whose been given almost unlimited authority commandeers Ryland into a multinational science and engineering project that is studying a mysterious non-terrestrial organism that is absorbing an enormous amount of energy from the sun and threatens to throw the Earth into a cataclysmic ice age.
Ryland discovers that the lifeform (which he names astrophage) has a life cycle which sees it looping around between basking close to the sun in order to store up enormous energy traveling to Venus, reproducing in the atmosphere of Venus and then returning to the neighborhood of the sun. And it travels back and forth in this cycle at speeds approaching c (the speed of light). And the explanation for this capability is that astrophage can convert energy into matter and matter into energy. There’s some hand-waving about neutrino production creating matter/anti-matter annihilation but of course there’s nothing that makes any sense. Anyway, the astrophage is increasing its numbers asymptotically and within thirty years Earth will freeze and mankind will disappear.
And it is discovered that all of the stars in our neighborhood are also dimming because of astrophage. All except one Tau Ceti. So, a star ship will be built by the combined technical skills of humanity and staffed with a crew of three including a scientist trained on the current knowledge about astrophage and hopefully they will discover why Tau Ceti is immune to the dimming and use this to find a cure for our solar system. And the star ship is powered using astrophage as fuel. Well, actually the light that the astrophage produce for motion is the propellant pushing the ship through space. Unfortunately, in the short window they have to create the ship and breed the enormous amount of astrophage needed, they cannot make enough for a round trip. This is a suicide mission (thus the name “hail Mary”).
And in order to keep the crew from killing each other in the tight confines of the ship for four (relativistically speaking) years, they are in a coma state. When the ship reaches Tau Ceti, Ryland is awakened and doesn’t remember who he is or where he is or why. He discovers that aside from robotic presences he is the only living human aboard. His two crewmates have long ago died during their coma states.
Gradually Ryland’s memory returns and he realizes that he must carry out the mission unassisted by the deceased pilot and engineer. Slightly later on he realizes that another star ship is in his neighborhood and he discovers that the inhabitants of another local star system (40 Eridani) have also sent a mission to Tau Ceti to solve the problem of astrophage. The alien is a sort of five-legged giant crab with an outer shell of metallic minerals. His atmosphere is ammonia at twenty-nine atmospheres and 200°C and so Ryland cannot go into his ship but must allow the alien to come to the Hail Mary in a protective suit.
The remainder of the book is a journal of Ryland and Rocky (the name he gives the Eridian engineer who is the only surviving member of the 40 Eridani mission) learning how to understand each other and cooperate to combine their highly complementary skill sets to solve what should be an impossible problem; translating the resistance of the Tau Ceti system to astrophage into a practical solution for Earth’s sun and 40 Eridani. And after many setbacks and several acts of selfless friendship by both partners they overcome the challenges and solve the problems and save Earth and Erid (Ryland’s name for Rocky’s home world). Now Rocky’s ship has an enormous surplus of astrophage and he is able to provide Ryland with enough fuel for a return trip to Earth. But after they separate for their voyages home Ryland discovers that a flaw in a containment tank will mean that Rocky’s ship will be out of fuel and doomed. Ryland reverses course and rescues Rocky and returns him to Erid in the Hail Mary and must therefore abandon his own return to Earth. He is able to send the solution to Earth’s problem (another single cell lifeform that Ryland dubs Taumoeba that eats astrophage and can be inoculated into the atmosphere of Venus) in four robot ships that will return to Earth on their own. In the last scene of the book Ryland is living in a special enclosure on Erid that protects him from the atmosphere, temperature and pressure conditions that would kill him instantly. But he has his friend Rocky around to keep him company and he has returned to his former occupation as a school teacher to Eridian children.
Okay. This guy Weir doesn’t kid around when it comes to detailed scientific descriptions. He’s got two different artificial gravity mechanisms (centrifuge and continuous acceleration/deceleration travel) and he describes their successful and unsuccessful usage in the story. He goes into gory detail to show how his astrophage can be used in a stellar drive. He goes into gory detail to describe his efforts to get Taumoeba to “evolve” into a population that will survive the atmospheres containing nitrogen on Venus and the planet near 40 Eridani. He goes into gory detail to discuss his efforts to isolate and remediate the contamination of his fuel by Taumoeba. This guy love technobabble. But I guess most people reading science fiction love technobabble too so it’s a forgivable sin. The other thing I notice is that Weir writes characters that correspond to millennials. They’re much more touchy-feely and prone to virtue signal than I care for. In other words, he’s writing for a modern audience, not a caveman like me. In fact, even though she’s very much a girl-boss, the character I most closely relate to was the autocratic administrator, Eva Stratta. My verdict is this is a very inventive and entertaining science fiction story and well worth the reader’s time. I highly recommend it.
I’ve been reading Andy Weir’s book “Project Hail Mary” and I’ll finish it soon and put out my review (which will be quite favorable). But while working my way through it I was impressed by how the improbability of some of the “science” in a story doesn’t spoil the enjoyment garnered by its use. After all, the premise of the story requires that Earth send an interstellar mission twelve light years away in order to move the story forward. So, the “MacGuffin” has to be accepted to go forward with the story. But what’s the formula for inventing an acceptable MacGuffin?
I suppose there are several methods. The simplest is don’t explain anything. Figure out a way for the main character to be unaware of any of the “technical” details for the MacGuffin. Maybe he’s a completely non-technical individual; a grade school dropout or a literal caveman. Or the technology is owned by an alien race that we can’t interrogate.
A more common way is to build up some technology based on a breakthrough in physics and other sciences. And because it’s fictitious the main requirements and advantages of the explanation would be that it’s self-consistent and allows some very convenient short cuts in the plot. This is the avenue Weir goes down. His MacGuffin is both the problem and the solution to the problem. He has built up a scenario that creates an existential catastrophe but also provides a mechanism for solving the problem and also turning the danger into a potential boon.
And that’s what’s extremely clever about this plot he’s invented. It mimics the idea of the double-edged sword that some new discovery can be, for example, nuclear energy. That was something that both threatened human extinction and promised the solution to the energy crisis.
As much as the mechanism Weir invents for his MacGuffin is intensely improbable, still, once accepted as fact, the rest of the story follows logically and satisfyingly from this premise. He has this new “fact” introduced into the world and then spins that world around on it until he gets the wild ride that ensues.
So now he has interstellar travel at a respectable fraction of the speed of light, a reasonable excuse for an intelligent alien first encounter and throws that together with a likable protagonist who is swept along against his will by this cosmic catastrophe. What’s not to like?
But what I realize is that I’m going to have to up my game when I write my sequel. I’ve never fleshed out the rationale behind how Connors’ mining drone is able to do what it does. I just sort of waved my hands around and said “abracadabra!” Weir is careful to count up the zeros when he describes the amount of energy that his “astrophage” is able to store and discharge as the basis of his star drive. Sure, attributing a neutrino-based energy storage system to a one-celled animal living in the hard vacuum of space in the vicinity of a star is pure nonsense. But he does acknowledge the magnitude of the nonsense. And that does make it fun.
So, I’m a week in on the Kindle Unlimited program and I’ve got about a thousand pages sold. Now that’s like five books worth. Which is not much but the curve has been increasing for the last five days so I’ll keep an eye on this for a few weeks to see if it goes anywhere. If any of you guys currently uses Kindle Unlimited explain how it works. Do you read it on the website one page at a time or how does it work? It seems kind of clunky to me.
So, Camera Girl and I went to the Dunwich Spring Middle School Concert which includes both band and chorus sections at both the upper and lower levels. This is a remarkable experience because the range of accomplishment varies from fairly good to nonexistent. But realizing that the teacher has managed to get these children to even organize into an orchestra is almost inconceivable. The choral songs aren’t mostly to my taste. They tend to try to introduce a foreign language song that doesn’t translate to an American audience. One exception was Wimoweh (The Lion Sleeps Tonight). The Tokens version is a favorite of mine so I was excited. But something went wrong with the arrangement. As is typical in these school choruses the ratio of girls to boys is seven to one. So, the deeper voices are always practically missing in the song. But Wimoweh famously has a towering falsetto section and of course all those girls should have been able to translate it into a powerful soprano part. But instead, they had the three boys with their barely audible tenor voices whispering through this part. Oh, the pain.
But the highlight of the evening was the band giving their rendition of the theme to “Jurassic Park.” And the kids did a serviceable job of John Williams’ Fanfare for the Common Dinosaur. But the funniest thing was a kid sitting behind me. He must have been three years old and he started exclaiming loudly, “Giraffic Park, Giraffic Park!!!” at the top of his lungs and all the parents in the front rows started laughing. But the Conductor/Music Teacher never missed a beat and her band performed the miracle of producing a recognizable version of the popular melody.
I’ve started reading “Project Hail Mary.” My oldest grandson has loaned me his copy and I’m treating it with kid gloves since I remember what it was like when I had a mint hardback copy of an sf favorite. I’m a hundred pages in and it’s interesting. It’s definitely a millennial book. There’s a difference in the voice. It’s a kindler, gentler voice. There’s much more emotion. Now the protagonist is a Middle School teacher so you can say this is just the consequence of this particular character. But the choice of the character is part of this younger generation of readers and writers. Well, the book is good so far. It’s inventive and well-paced and has an interesting manner of unfolding the story. It starts in the middle and flashes back to the beginning but one flash at a time. Weir has come up with an interesting twist on an interstellar drive. It dovetails with the crisis that is forcing the need for a trip to Tau Ceti. Now I don’t think it’s a particularly plausible mechanism but it is entertaining for sure.
Well, what’s to say today? I was talking to some family and we were discussing this and that and I said that I wanted to see “Project Hail Mary.” And some knew about it and some had heard a little bit. Well, I think I talked them into getting together and going to see it. Now I plan to see it this week with Camera Girl. She’s not the biggest sff fan by any stretch of the imagination. When I brough her to see the original Star Wars film she was not particularly impressed. And come to think of it, she’s never been impressed by any sci fi or fantasy movie (or book) I ever gave her. Well, I take that back. She read “The Hobbit” back in 1975 and liked it. But that was it. When I told her to read the “Lord of the Rings,” she laughed in my face. So, she may not be the most willing audience for this movie. But since one of the characters is a puppet I’m guessing there may be an appeal there to her love of animals. So, I’m going to see the same movie in the theater twice? I think this may be the first time I’ve ever done that. Well, I’m sure it won’t kill me.
The other thing I’m doing next week is go see an accountant about how to pay my taxes on the royalties from my book. I have an inordinate fear of the Infernal Revenue Service. I think they’re a malevolent force causing pain and suffering for ordinary people at every turn. So, I’m going to find out what the process is for this kind of capital gain. I don’t think I have to pay quarterly but you never know so I’m not taking any chances. Also, I think there is a way to write off expenses like advertising and marketing so if I can find out whether it’s worth it I may even break even on this whole experiment (maybe!!!).
A friend was asking me about the sequel to the “The Sniper.” He had particular questions about the back story for some of the characters like Connors and Cutter. I said I’d love to tell him some of the details of their back stories but I still haven’t made them up yet. I think he was a little shocked that these important facts didn’t actually exist yet. Maybe even betrayed for investing in a story that was sort of a Potemkin Village. But I feel justified in pushing out the corners of my little universe as the spirit moves me. Although I will admit I’ve decided to do some outlining of the world, at least from a 35,000-foot height. I need to decide what stories will grow out of the eucatastrophe I set off in the first book. I mean, you don’t sink the White House, Capitol and Pentagon into the Earth’s crust without taking advantage of the elbow room that provides for political and social upheaval on a grand scale.
Well, it’s official, Project Hail Mary is a moneymaker for Amazon. The info says it cost $200 million to produce. Even if they spent another $100 million to advertise (which they wouldn’t have to because, of course, they’re Amazon!) that still puts them in the black. And this is all in advance of what they’ll make streaming the movie on their own platform after the end of the theatrical run.
Well, well, well. So people will go to the movies if you give them something that isn’t woke slop. If you give them entertaining story telling they’ll pay you money to watch it. Shocking. Wake up Disney. Amazon is eating your lunch, you fools.
One of my oldest friends has been advising me on the possibility of making a film treatment out of my book and sending it to Hollywood to become the next “Project Hail Mary.” What immediately came to my mind was Hollywood taking the story and making the evil president, Donald Trump and making Bogey a leftist trans-woman. Yikes!
But what was surprising is that there is actually an AI capable of taking my story and converting it directly into a film treatment. And it has an enormous capability to annotate the details necessary for actually filming the thing. There are notes on casting each of the characters (appearance, age, personality, voice), locations, special effects, visual effects, weapons, special personnel (e.g., armorer), special equipment, weapons, etc.
And then it used the dialog from the book and adapted it for the screen; shortened and elided from it to bring the screen time into a realistic movie length.
Now I haven’t finished going through this document but so far what I’ve seen seems very interesting. It’s basically my book. And that’s exciting. I was assuming the story would be too long for a movie without very serious pruning of scenes that I’m attached to. But we’ll see.
Now, I’m aware that Hollywood doesn’t make movies from books that don’t sell millions of copies. They’re looking for a built-in fan base for their product. So, no studio in their right minds would take a chance on spending potentially hundreds of millions of dollars on an unknown story. But it’s always fun to dream about these things.
And that brings me to Andy Weir’s story. He self-published “The Martian” on Amazon and only eventually got a book deal when he had already built up an audience for it on his own. And now he has two hit movies made from his books. Think about that. Someone who couldn’t get a publishing contract ends up with a smash hit movie that everyone in Hollywood probably hates because it has a white guy as its hero and he doesn’t have the usual diversity cast to allow the movie to be an Oscar contender. They broke all of Hollywood’s rules to make this movie by not having a girl-boss as the hero surrounded by the usual multi-cultural struggle session ensemble. It just brings tears to my eyes.
Chances are I won’t be duplicating Weir’s experience. My book is not an uplifting tale of human endeavor. Mine is a tale of revenge and destruction. I openly attack the Left and my heroes are identifiable people on the Right. So, no. I won’t be getting a Hollywood deal. Ever!
But despite all that I’m excited about what is now happening in Hollywood. The Ellisons bought Paramount and have now shut down the travesty that was Star Trek – Star Fleet Academy. They’re buying Warner Brothers and they’ll probably shut down the people making terrible stuff like “Supergirl” that’s coming out soon. And now we see Amazon/MGM making stuff like “Project Hail Mary (PHM).” That’s a pretty good chunk of Hollywood already. And with PHM looking like it’s going to break the $600 million mark and become a big moneymaker, even places like Netflix and Disney will say to themselves, “Hey, why can’t we get into some of that “normal film-making” that those other guys are doing and make money for a change? Let’s call that photog guy and get an option on, “The Sniper” before the Ellisons scoop it up.”
For years people have said in my presence that despite the leftist leanings of Hollywood, the people running it were there to make money. But despite that I watched as Hollywood produced bomb after bomb that preached the leftist creed above all other ingredients in the film. They sacrificed entertainment, artistry and certainly profitability on the altar of woke propaganda. Probably the most egregious of these studios was Disney that sacrificed the virtually unlimited money-making machines of such franchises as Star Wars, Marvel Comics and even the classic Disney princess movies to bang away at woke agenda elements like LGBTQ identity, anti-white racism and feminist dogma.
Well, maybe, just maybe, the tide has turned. I think this week we received two data points that signal a definite reversal. The first is the news today that Sky Dance has cancelled the third season of “Star Trek – Starfleet Academy.” This was a two-season installment that has been estimated to have cost somewhere between two hundred and four hundred million dollars. Now that is an enormous amount of money but what makes it astonishing is that when this show ran it wasn’t one of the top ten shows on Paramount Plus. It was regularly beaten out by reruns of “Everyone Loves Raymond” and “Sponge Bob Square Pants.” In fact, it was even worse than this. In order to build up buzz for the first episode, it was put on YouTube for free and less than a thousand people watched it the first day. Think about that.
Paramount was bought by Skydance last year so they didn’t order this show. And the production company (Alex Kurtzman’s Secret Hideout) is finishing its contract with Paramount in April and it’s looking like they won’t be doing anymore Star Trek for Skydance. And Skydance is probably going to purchase Warner Brothers this year and that may have a very great impact on how the DC Universe movies look going forward. So, there is an example of changing sensibilities going forward in Hollywood. Enormous costs for productions that no one wants to watch are ending. So that’s the negative case, what won’t be happening anymore.
As for what is happening on the positive side let’s look at what Amazon/MGM have released this week. Andy Weir (the author of the book turned movie “The Martian”) wrote the book “Project Hail Mary” in 2021. It cost two hundred million to make. It made $141 million on its first weekend. This is one of the biggest openings in the last four years. And it is predicted to be a big hit. It’s a movie whose only human character is a white male. The only diversity casting is an alien creature that looks like a pile of small rocks. There’s no woke elements at all. Just an adventure story about a man light years from Earth cooperating with an unearthly creature to save both of their planets. From all of the reviews I’ve read it’s a solid movie that the whole family can and probably will enjoy and it doesn’t say anything about the LGBTQ or how white people stole America from the Indians or enslaved black people. And the fact that the astronaut is not a girl boss but a young white man I take to be aspirational for every white American boy who has been told for the last couple of decades that they shouldn’t get a turn at being the good guy. So that’s the positive side. Hollywood can make good movies and people will come to the theaters to see them. And they can make money doing it.