I have descended from my ivory tower and read a fiction book that was written in the 2000s…and I had such a fun time doing it! Andy Weir weaves science into his stories so well, and I loved the relationship between Grace and Rocky. Finally, as far as tropes go, humans and aliens trying to teach each other their respective languages is one of my favorites.

  • psudds42@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    While, overall, I enjoyed it, I had two problems with Project Hail Mary:

    1. How would a race like Rocky’s, without sight, become space-faring? If you can’t/don’t experience the awe-inspiring, view of the heavens, how would you become curious about it or develop technology to explore it?

    2. While The Martian was an exhilarating mental exercise of “sciencing the shit out of” difficult situations, Rocky was a deus ex machina that could just, sort of, magically provide solutions to such situations. There’s an insurmountable problem? Rocky engineers a fix. No explanation - little description of how he does it - none of how he figures it out; that’s just what he and his kind evolved to do, so there it is.