Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

16:04Rebecca:We'll talk a little bit about that. You have some good notes about how this actually came to be. I also think that when you, I guess I have this question for you, because I have a question mark in parentheses here about really only the second bestselling author in the quote unquote science thriller category after Michael Crichton, who I think is the first. But I think he's one of two in this science thriller category. And the voice is quite different. Yes. I'll talk about my Michael Crichton pick as a read-alike a little bit later, but this is not science is scary Jurassic Park style. This is science is useful.

16:45Rebecca:Science is always presented as a solution to the problem, as not the problem itself. Now, that may or may not be fair in a lot of categories, but in this particular one it is. and sometimes you get a one-of-one that creates a new sensibility or a new sub-genre, a new feeling of how to read. The closest one I can really think of is like, it's sort of like what Dan Brown did with Da Vinci Code.

17:08Jeff:Yes, that's a great example, yeah.

17:09Rebecca:I prefer the Andy Weir books by quite a bit, though I really do like the Landon books as an entertainment. If I had to pick, I get a new Landon book or a new Weir book, I'm picking a new Weir book every time right now.

17:22Jeff:Oh, a hot take from you, okay. Well, some of it's scarcity.

17:25Rebecca:I don't know.

17:26Jeff:Yeah, that's true. We get these a lot fewer. And that does, I think we are maybe coming up on due for a new Andy Weir book because The Martian is 2011. Artemis was 2017. That's about a heist on the moon. That book was not very successful. Artemis didn't sell very well. The reviews were pretty middling to pretty bad, honestly. And so what Project Hail Mary was going to be and how it would be received was a really big question mark when the book came out in 2021. And it felt like Andy Weir's author future was hanging in the balance of like, this is your third go. And can you replicate something that's as good and big as The Martian or somewhere close to it?

18:04Jeff:Or was The Martian going to be a one hit wonder? And so Project Hail Mary is important for having sort of established him as an ongoing successful author in the genre. But this is also the rare four quadrant work of science fiction. And I think some of it's connected to what you were saying about that the science thriller, but where science is the solution and where science is fun and exciting and he really works to make it accessible. The books are super wonky and very detailed, as we were saying. But Weir also has this magic trick of making it possible to glide over that if you don't care, and then also giving real quick summaries for the civilians of what's going on.

18:46Jeff:So you can understand what's going on and find yourself still inside the story and invested. And you understand what's suspenseful about each of the experiments that they're going to conduct or each of the solutions that they're going to try. But this kind of book works for almost any kind of reader. And I mean, that's part of the reason that a movie studio has acquired it and put a bajillion dollars behind it and Ryan Gosling on screen starring in it is that it's going to appeal to just about everybody in the audience. Yeah.

19:17Rebecca:And as you have here, it has four and a half stars on Goodreads, which for those of you who don't really know, there's kind of an asymptotic thing that happens with Goodreads, which the closer you get, the higher you get, the more signal there is from a 4.2 for a 4.3 or a 4.4. But 4.5 stars with over 1.2 million readings, that is what we would call tall cotton where I grew up. There's a lot of people that read it. And if you read it, you tend to like this quite a bit. And that's certainly been my own experience of people I recommend it to. We recommend this all of this time. We have a term we use on the Book Riot podcast for recommendation shows, the Swiss Army recommendation, which you can give to a lot of different kind of people, and most of them will have a positive experience.

20:00Rebecca:Unsurprisingly, then it won the 2021 Goodreads Choice Award for science fiction. It was a finalist for the 2022 Hugo. I didn't go look up to see what won for best novel. And then we haven't talked about it yet. And you can maybe talk about this directly. I did not listen to the audiobook in full. I only listened to parts of it because I read it in print first. But as soon as I read it in print, I believe I said to you, do this in audio. Yes. Because I don't know if we want to talk about it here, but the audiobook is one of the great audiobook achievements. Because of the nature of Rocky and Ryland Grace's communication, of course, is, I mean, they're quote unquote speaking to each other.

20:40Rebecca:But it's through musical chords.

20:42Jeff:Yes. Right? So, yeah, Rocky's communication sounds to Grace's ears like musical chords. And when you're reading the book, anytime Rocky speaks, it's little music notes. Yes. And Grace builds software that eventually, as he understands Rocky's vocabulary, he's able to translate Rocky's sounds into the English words and then his English words into Rocky's sounds so that they can have conversations with each other. In the audio book, you actually hear the like diddly diddly diddly. It's amazing. You hear the music chords anytime that Rocky is speaking. And then along with a kind of like robotic sounding voice to communicate his words in English as they would be coming out of Grace's laptop.

21:23Jeff:And it is so fun and so singular. Like my husband and I listened to it on a road trip. We had been saving it for like whatever that thing was that we were traveling for. and like we had listened to the martian together both huge fans but this it felt really special and we hadn't heard something like it before and what you had said to me was like you'll know it when you hear it of why this is a thing to do on audio good job me giving you a little surprise to have yeah yeah and like i wanted to close that curiosity gap and i did you do know it as soon as you hear it like first it's really exciting that there's an alien and they're making contact and then how are they going to communicate with each other?

22:02Jeff:Then, oh my God, it's music sounds. And it's just great. That audiobook edition was performed by Ray Porter and it won the 2022 Audi Award for Audiobook of the Year. A great win. This remains an all-timer. I was just telling a friend who never got around to reading this when it was first published, but wants to read it before the movie, like, do the audiobook. If that's available to you at all, do the audiobook. It is a great time. It's just a truly special audiobook experience.

22:32Rebecca:And I think, you know, with the success of Project Hail Mary, even outside of the movie, it was a huge success. It continues to sell well. I often see it on the bestselling books of the week at Powell's and some other places. Now, it got a jump when the trailers came out, and I think it got some afterburner because of that. But it was going to be a perennial seller in this category for a long time. And the second book means you've got a brand here. And I think anything Andy Weir does in the future, in the book space at least, it's going to be an event when the next Andy Weir book comes out at this point.

23:04Rebecca:He worked on a TV show for a while. I think there were some other properties in the meantime. And I think that's one reason. And I think he was more involved in this production as well. He wasn't as involved in The Martian because he didn't have the stature and a bit of trivia, I'll say, for the trivia section about Andy Weir. But, you know, Andy Weir is a brand now. So this is really something that's going to be in our lives for a while. Now, with The Martian, we're like, can you do another one guy surviving in space? And he did a lot of filigree and gold leaf on this. This is still a one guy in space.

23:39Rebecca:I don't know that you can go back to this well again. So I guess I entered the next Andy Weir book with somewhat similar trepidation of after The Martian is like, okay, now what? but I certainly am interested to see what he's going to come up with. Yeah.

23:54Jeff:And, you know, I think we can expect Andy Weir to keep us in space. That would be my baseline expectation because he is a self-described lifelong space nerd. He grew up in the Bay Area. His dad was a particle physicist and his mom was an electrical engineer. And you can see all of that on display in this book, especially. And then he grew up reading sci-fi. His dad had a collection of really pulpy sci-fi novels from the fifties and sixties. Then he moved on to Asimov and Heinlein and Clark. And that's what made him fall in love with the genre. So you have all this in the stew, this guy growing up in a household with a particle physicist and an engineer.

24:31Jeff:He's reading science fiction. He goes off to college at UC San Diego, where he studies computer science. But then he runs out of money before he can get the degree. So he gets a job programming. He works at video game companies. He works at AOL. And he started writing The Martian in 2009 while he was working at a mobile game company. So he's just kind of writing this in between and around work. And he started posting chapters on his website for free and then uploaded the full text to Amazon after readers were requesting it. He charged 99 cents for the full text of it and sold 35 ,000 copies within a few months.

25:06Jeff:So that's how a literary agent named David Fugate, who's still his agent today, finds out about him and reached out with a book deal or offered to help him get a book deal. And Weir was skeptical at first, but ultimately he goes for it. He sold the book rights to Crown, which is a Penguin Random House imprint. And the movie rights were sold within the same week. So he was just off to the races. I think to your question earlier about why this doesn't get couched the same way as like Colleen Hoover or E.L. James in great self-publishing hits is the time period of it, like that this is 2009, 2010.

25:41Rebecca:It wasn't years of him slogging away writing self-published novels. It happens very quickly.

25:45Jeff:Like The Martian has just really started to be successful as a self-published book before Fugate helps him sell it to Crown. And there's not like in addition to not having a deep backlist, there's not TikTok. There's not a big social media phenomenon around this. No one in publishing knew who Andy Weir was. No mainstream book people knew who Andy Weir was until Crown picks it up and started publishing it. It was people who knew who Andy Weir was before. The nerds that are reading Andy Weir's blog knew about the portion.

26:15Rebecca:I mean, people that were willing to buy self-published sci-fi on Amazon. They were the early adopters for this. And it got enough momentum that someone took notice. And it makes sense that it was published seriously on a website. If you know the structure of The Martian, it's told in these journal entries, right? So you could do... I wonder if he was writing them in real time. Like, would he write one and post one? I don't actually know the answer to that, too.

26:35Jeff:Yeah, it is very episodic.

26:37Rebecca:Yeah. I interviewed Andy Weir a long time ago for an old show. And one thing I remember from that interview is he was working... He did some other things, too. He wrote comic books. He had this sort of universe called Cheshire Crossing, which sort of mixed a bunch of fantasy IP, like Mary Poppins and Alice in Wonderland. It's sort of a shared universe. So like he's an interesting person. He is certainly a sci-fi nerd and a coder and a programmer, but interested in storytelling on a grander scale, like outside of just how can you get this proton from one place to another, which he is singularly good at doing.

27:11Rebecca:I don't think anyone ever tried to turn that into a chapter or a plot point of a book, but a really fascinating person. And this is interesting, too, because, you know, my students used to ask me this, like, what if what if an author says their book doesn't mean what you think it might mean? So you have this note here that his books are meant to be purely escapist with no subtext or message. Quote, if you think you see something like that, it's in your head, not mine. I just want you to read and have fun. Sure. Right. I mean, I don't know. I will take authors saying what they think their book should be doing at face value, but they don't get to control it.

27:46Rebecca:And sometimes things are in it that they don't mean, but they're still in them anyway. And then so I find it very difficult to read a book like this without having some sense of some kind of way Andy Weir, for example, feels about climate change or feels about science funding or feels about like things that are true or two plus two equally four if we want to bridge off our Orwell discussion before. So maybe that's just when he says there's no subtext, that's just text. But I think there are some things that are very clearly in a more broadly humanist pro-science vein. I don't see how that cannot be.

28:23Rebecca:That is the text, Rebecca, to me.

28:25Jeff:It is the text. And there are certainly elements of conversations characters have in the book, ways that they go about problem solving, the different priorities that they place on even like why should a person be willing to go on a mission where they know they're going to die, they're never going to make it home. is it selfish to not go on something like that when it's your life versus saving all of humanity? Like, there are some sort of political and values-based things that show up. Like, I don't really believe that any art can ever be apolitical. No, I don't believe that either.

28:56Rebecca:Yeah.

28:57Jeff:Because people have ideas about things, and it infuses the way that we write and the way that we create. It seems like Andy Weir is a, like, lowercase L libertarian in his approach to politics. And that's really pretty believable from the books as well. So I believe him that he intends it to be purely escapist. And they certainly are escapists. These books are a great time. Project Hail Mary is so much fun. But you do bump into ideas that have political weight. And there's like jokes in the book about conspiracy theorists who don't believe that the space algae is real, who don't believe that the climate change is going to happen.

29:34Jeff:And that felt potent, of course, in 2021, but it feels really potent reading it in 2026.

29:40Rebecca:And he knows his P's and Q's in a very detailed way. I have this document here he created to build out what the atmosphere and ecology of this fake planet, Arid, is actually like, and what the mass is and atmospheric pressure. He goes into the weeds because he is both interested, and I think he clearly enjoys, and cares about having him, the science being as buttoned up as it can possibly be. And that's one of the joys here. Like, if you don't know the term hard sci-fi, congratulations, you do now. And that is science fiction in which the science is fussed over, right? The opposite end of the spectrum would be something like space opera, like Star Wars, where do they mention one thing about how anything actually works in Star Wars?

30:24Rebecca:No. I think Star Trek, those of you out here who are more fluent in these distinctions and gradations, you can shoot us an email. But like Star Trek is somewhere in the middle. Like there's some actual science and there's a lot of quite a hand waving. Andy Weir wants to do as little hand waving as is possible to tell the story he's interested in telling.

30:42Jeff:Yeah, like truly a nerd's nerd. When he was writing The Martian, he built software to calculate the constant thrust trajectories for a spaceship's ion engine. He studied NASA satellite images to map out the astronaut character's course across Mars. And then he gave a detailed formula for how to make water out of oxygen and hydrazines. He really is on it. I am typically not a reader of hard genre anything, especially hard sci-fi and hard fantasy. My eyes glaze over at highly technical descriptions of things. I just don't care. And the fact that Andy Weir can make me interested in them is a true testament.

31:21Jeff:I am one of those people who crosses into sci-fi for Andy weird. That's one of the ways that he executes this four quadrant kind of hit. Yeah.

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32:00Rebecca:We talked about our first exposure. I'll just note, this is my son's favorite book. He's read it multiple times and he's currently working on an honors project about how it intersects with the idea of the hero's journey, which is fun. All right. So what is it like to read this? I think maybe I'll pick up on something you just said there. There are moments of Andy Weir books, and I think it's both a feature and a bug, if that can be the case, where the science gets a little heady for most people. And I will include myself in most people. I think there are probably some people have more of a background in science that they will scale all the way up to the hardest core elements of the science here.

32:34Rebecca:And it usually lasts a paragraph at two at its longest. But also then you get things that you do understand, right? So I think he's giving a range of technical difficulty. And it's kind of like if you're going to top out at like the Thursday New York Time crossword, there are still people who do the Friday and Saturday by themselves, right? But they're going to get a lot of that. And it is okay and expected. And you are not weird. And I don't think it really affects the reading experience to be like, you know what? But I really don't understand that part about angling the astrophage panels away from the IR blasters because we're going to set the atmosphere on fire or whatever.

33:08Rebecca:Just words, words, words, words. Words, words, words. And I think that's one place where the movies as a different storytelling problem make different tradeoffs that can be more or less satisfying depending on where you are on that scale.

33:23Jeff:Yeah. And I think it's a great point about just a paragraph or two for the really hard sci-fi details. These are not like chapters about the whaling ships in Moby Dick. If your eyes do glaze over, it's not for long. And Weir is really good at coming back to a layman's terms, one summary sentence, one sentence summary of what he's trying to do there. It reads like sci-fi, but there are also mystery elements, which kind of the best parts of mystery show up in this book where Grace is trying to piece together who he is and how he ended up there. we as the readers are trying to figure out what's going to happen to him, what all of the components were on Earth going into making this decision to send him out there and how it's all going to go down.

34:08Jeff:And then what the mystery is changes at a couple of points. Like, oh, could he actually make it back to Earth? What's going to happen? What happens to Rocky after they part ways? Like, there are lots of satisfying little threads that you can try to pick up and track down, combined with what I always think of as like the Ferris Bueller record scratch moment of like, you're probably wondering how I ended up here.

34:31Rebecca:And so am I. I'm here with two mummified corpses in the middle of interstellar space.

34:35Jeff:It's just a really delightful vibe that we get to be along for the ride. It's so much fun. The ride of this book is so much fun. And Grace's voice with this particular blend of intelligence and humor and humility make him a really great hang. Like, I don't know if I want to hang out with Rylan Grace on Earth, but I'm really happy hanging out with him in space. And the problem solving of it is a fun time.

35:02Rebecca:The figuring it out. And I have this down here. It's like this is in the pro-curiosity, we can do things. And then they do them, right? Like, there's a couple of times where, and this happens in The Martian too, where Grace or Watney just sort of want to give up. Sidebar, there should probably be Xanax in this capsule. That's something I thought about. There should be, you know.

35:27Jeff:Yeah, so you just figured out you're the lone survivor. Take the edge off.

35:30Rebecca:Can we just take the edge off? Give me a little pharmacological assist here. And it is an amnesia book. I think this is the most forgivable amnesia deployment I can imagine. Because, again, I keep not wanting to spoil it because I know the movie is coming up. But one of the surprises, and it doesn't come real late, and I think it's the biggest character surprise, is Rylan Grace has said he does not want to do this. He does not want to go.

35:59Jeff:This is in the trailers for the movie. I don't think I've seen the most recent one. We're not spoiling anything with that. I think it's interesting that you name-checked Dan Brown earlier, because one of the things that recommends the Dan Brown books is you get to feel smart when you're reading them. Like you get to feel smart learning about art history and obscure things and then putting the pieces together. And I think Weir gives us that as well.

36:21Rebecca:Definitely at the same time. But here, so this amnesia thing, but it's a pretty interesting deployment of a different character. This is why Ames is so interested in the hero's journey element, is that part of the hero's journey is this call to adventure, right? Like, you know, someone knocks on the door and you open or close or whatever. Like he is forced into this. And that's pretty unusual. Like our great stern Dutch doctors, like you are just and there's a bunch of details we don't need to get into here that makes it the case where he really should go. Like, you know, the John Stuart Mill utilitarian imperative is like, you've got to do this.

36:52Rebecca:But he just doesn't want to. He's scared and understandably so. And then so she gives him this kind of medication, which as he wakes up from this coma will induce amnesia for long enough for him not to basically nope out. Like he'll sort of start working the problem, which has sort of a circular ouroboros to like did the amnesia. I'd be so curious to hear Andy Weir talk about how he put that peptide chain together of like the amnesia is caused by this thing. But the amnesia then gives you this wonderful. I'm assuming the first 20 minutes of the movie will be him figuring stuff out, just like who he is, what's going on.

37:25Rebecca:Tubes coming out of his butt and like how to get the food out and having this sort of talking to the computer. That's not really being helpful. I really hope they don't change the he refused because then there's another turn at the end where then he volunteers to give himself up secondarily for Rocky and his planet that, you know, it just adds to it that he has changed. Right. He's changed from the kind of person that will not sacrifice himself for a whole civilization to one he will. even if it's on his own.

37:54Jeff:Yeah, I mean, this is like dork boy wish fulfillment at its very best. Like, it turns out that being nerdy is an asset and Grace gets to discover that he's not actually a coward, which, like, there's this wonderful moment when he's resisting going and Strat is like, you're a coward. Like, it's a really brutal one paragraph. I like you, but I don't respect you. Right. Yeah. You're a coward. You're afraid of everything. You dropped out of grad school after people didn't, or you stopped being a biologist after a couple people didn't like a paper you wrote. And so like you've squandered your talent to go be a teacher when you could have been doing these other things and like just man up and go basically.

38:34Jeff:And he's like, oh my God, I never, he's having this realization in space about like, I never understood myself to be a coward before. And then the whole present day moment in space is his journey, his opportunity to counter that, to become something different, to become a hero, to become a brave person. And who is not attracted to the idea of getting to discover that about themselves? Plus, you just get to do MacGyver in space. It's process. And the story, all the process in the story and how Grace and Rocky communicate, how they teach each other their languages, how they share knowledge and how they work things out is so intensely satisfying.

39:16Jeff:And Grace gets to do that on that very basic level of the problem solving, but also be addressing higher order concerns and self-actualization.

39:26Rebecca:I do want to highlight, too, if people enjoy the movie and enjoy the book, and those moments that are so thrilling, as you say, and so satisfying and so sort of a relief when they make a breakthrough or something isn't the end of the world, or they have a brainstorm of an idea that gets him to the next piece of the puzzle is please do notice the creativity Weir has to deploy to put his characters in those situations that are both tense and interesting and explicable and that further the plot. I think that's underrated. This is one thing where some of the great writers of plot and popular fiction don't get the credit that maybe they should for the things that don't feel super writerly or super art art.

40:08Rebecca:but I'm sure he went through a bunch of different ways of putting this together, the astrophage and the Venus and then the going to the other, like all of these things that seem kind of almost inevitable over the course of the book are not inevitable by the institution of imagination. And that delight and surprise and satisfaction that comes out of problem A is actually not problem, it's problem B is the answer to problem C, actually, if you put it. Like there's sort of a Rubik's Cube level of connectivity here that is so you've turned the pages so fast, you're likely to miss it. So that might be one recommendation I have is like when you have one of the moments of like, oh, that was so cool.

40:51Rebecca:Maybe just stop and think about, wait, how did that thing get put together? Because one thing we like to do here is like that's part of being a different kind of a reader is stopping to look and stopping to smell the roses. Or as Rocky would do, echolocate the roses in that moment and notice how they're put together. So that's one thing I wanted to highlight here, too.

41:09Jeff:I think to notice just all the levels that Weir is working on. Like one of my notes is about alien jazz hands, which Grace notices that Rocky will mirror his posture and his gestures. And Rocky's got five arms, so he's always got like extra hands he can wave around. And when he gets excited, he does what Grace talks about as being alien jazz hands. And I find it just so charming. It's like the most charming alien jazz hands is the most charming thing I've ever read. But then you back out like he's giving us these charming interactions between creatures from two different species. He has already helped them figure out how to communicate with each other.

41:47Jeff:All the science is super technical, yet a layperson reader can understand most of what's happening. The stakes feel high. You always know where you are. Like there are 25 different balls in the air. And executing any three of the things Andy Weir does is hard in a book, and he pulls off like 25 of them. Yeah, it's the plot version of orbital mechanics.

42:07Rebecca:Like all these things spinning around get exponentially more complicated as you go. That's a really good point there. All right, time for some straight thoughts. Rebecca, why don't you lead us off?

42:16Jeff:Okay. Dr. Ryland Grace is a Colleen Hoover-esque character name.

42:20Rebecca:Definitely could lease this out to be the dark, stormy hero of a romanticcy.

42:25Jeff:What are we doing?

42:26Rebecca:Is that a real name? Have you ever heard the name Ryland before?

42:29Jeff:Yes. But it's like a millennial, like a bunch of millennials named their kids. Like Braden? Things like Ryland. Yeah. I don't know that someone who's the age this character is in 2021, like how realistic it is, but whatever.

42:41Rebecca:I don't know. Whatever. Especially since this person is supposed to be in their 40s, right? Yeah. Who was being named Ryland in 1983?

42:48Jeff:Exactly. Yeah. Like we don't have a lot of peers named Ryland. No, we don't.

42:52Rebecca:They're all Jennifers and guests. Right.

42:55Jeff:Yeah. And they're all gone. They're extinct. A little bit about how you can sort of gloss over some of the science. But years ago, you told me about Lauren Graham from the Gilmore Girls. She wrote a memoir and she talked about filming a medical show. And before they had learned all the medical jargon in their dialogue, they would just say medical, medical, medical in it. And like, I kind of just wanted a technical, technical for this or like a science, science. I gave myself permission to do that when it was like, okay, this is more detailed than I care about. And I trust that Andy Weir is going to fill me in on it later.

43:26Jeff:But like technical, technical, technical.

43:28Rebecca:I had this thought. I always think when he was publishing The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner wanted each of the chapters to be the font to be a different color so that people would know which point of view they're in. Oh, my God.

43:43Jeff:That would have been so helpful for that book.

43:45Rebecca:It's so cool, right? But the technology or the publisher. I don't remember the details of why it didn't come to pass. but I often think about different colored fonts as having, you could do different things with that if you wanted to. And people do do different fonts or italics, I guess is the famous one. I would like the difficulty of the technical descriptions to be color coded. So like, you know how in skiing there's like green, blue and black.

44:06Jeff:Yes. Yeah.

44:06Rebecca:Right. Could I highlight like if I'm lost and I'm realizing I'm reading a black, double black diamond, like, okay, I feel better about myself. But if it's a green and I'm lost, like maybe I should spend a little more time understanding what's going on here. Anyway, that was a stray thought I had as well.

44:20Jeff:You made reference to what's two plus two. That's the first line of the book. He's waking up and the robot is trying to figure out how cogent he is. But a character being asked what's two plus two is hilarious coming off of having read 1984 a couple of weeks ago. And you brought up Robert Langdon already, of course, the Dan Brown character. But there's a field of study mentioned in the book called speculative extraterrestrial biology. And that is some Robert Langdon shit, if I have ever heard of it.

44:49Rebecca:Yeah, for sure. Let's see. What do I have here? The Science Thriller, the Mystery, and the Heist novel all fall generally under the Figuring Shit Out novel. I'm proposing a new genre, and I would like more of these. I just would. I would read this in any kind. Spy novels are this. Spy novels are essentially a heist novel. I want people figuring stuff out. I want more of these. I want people working together to figure out interesting stuff. I find this as fun. This is my entertaining escapist. I want to have a great time reading and have dopamine fire. There's other things I want for my reading, but this is one of them.

45:26Rebecca:And when I'm looking for this, I want people to figure stuff out in interesting environments.

45:30Jeff:Yeah, I totally agree. I like this as a new subgenre for us.

45:34Rebecca:The panspermia theory. This is the theory of like all life has come from somewhere else. and see to different planets. We need a different name for this, Rebecca, for reasons that I think are self-explanatory. So there you go. That's one of my straight thoughts. Not great.

45:51Jeff:That's not great. I like your note here that you just don't like general relativity. I don't like general relativity.

45:57Rebecca:I don't like it. I don't like this idea. Neither does Rocky. That's one of the funnier moments where the Radians have not discovered general relativity because I guess they didn't have an Einstein. And you can, for reasons that it gets explained quite beautifully actually it feels like a very Carl Sagan sort of moment where um or maybe Douglas Adams moment where they they can't see right and so they have no reason really to be interested in space travel because they don't see stars and stuff um and so they haven't done a lot of astrology and basically the re they're trying to save their plans the first time they're doing a bunch of this stuff which creates some interesting narrative tension and humor but then he has to explain to them.

46:35Rebecca:And Rocky's like, I don't like that. I don't believe that. And I'm like, yeah, Rocky, you and me both, you and me both, brother slash five-armed sister. I don't know what's going on here, but I've never liked it. It's the time dilation, General Tid, and the Moxie Hall problem. Those can all go jump into the sun. I wouldn't mind if they got sucked up into the sun. I don't like any of that.

46:53Jeff:I've just never liked time dilation. What commentary.

46:57Rebecca:I hate it. It drives me crazy. I remember reading A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking and reading him. I was like, can I not? Can I just check other? I don't like it at all.

47:09Jeff:I do have one stray thought that I thought about multiple times. So they've got this group of four mini ships that they call the Beatles because they look like the bug beetle that Grace is supposed to be able to load up with data and send back to Earth because he's not going to make it back. And the Beatles in the book are named after the Beatles, the band, John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Jeff O 'Neill, what famous quartet would you name for Beatles?

47:33Rebecca:Boy, that's hard because that's where my brain just goes for famous quartets. Are there like, would you do, I mean, for science, could you do like Curie, Asimov, Einstein? Oh, I like that.

47:43Jeff:Okay.

47:44Rebecca:You know, something like that. You could do some scientists, you know, maybe do it that way.

47:47Jeff:Yeah, I was leaning like the Golden Girls or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Oh, I like that.

47:53Rebecca:Well, then you get the science as well, because then they're also Renaissance artists, which is nice.

47:58Jeff:I landed on Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin, the Hobbits, going on a long journey. I like that a great deal. Or the Sex and the City characters, but I think I would land on the Hobbits.

48:08Rebecca:That's pretty good, Rebecca. Thank you. That's a good find. Let's see. We should figure out elective comas. That sounds nice, is one of my straight thoughts. So one of the things that I think invented science, I didn't go look this up, is this idea of you can put people into medically induced comas in uttermost extremity, but you really don't want to do it because the side effects are generally worse than whatever you're trying to do. In this book, Weir has invented the idea of a company that's tried this, but it turns out that most people have very bad reactions to it. Only one in 7 ,000 people can't sustain it.

48:44Rebecca:That is part of the narrative armature that gets Rylan Grace into space, that he has this genetic mutation or whatever it might be. But their idea was to use it for very painful recoveries from like... Yeah, like it kind of is severance. You know, when I get the stomach flu, it's very bad for 48 hours. If I could do an elective coma for 48 hours, a trans-oceanic flight, you know? Yeah, you do not like a long flight.

49:12Jeff:You know?

49:13Rebecca:I think that's a good idea.

49:14Jeff:Where Grace mentions in the book that he has no idea what's happening back on Earth. And I didn't have the thought about the elective comas, but I was like, man, being 13 light years away from the news cycle would be terrific.

49:29Rebecca:You know, elective comas, Xanax, and not knowing the news. I think we're set up here. Maybe Arid sounds great to spend some time there. I know why we can't get one of these books every other year, but Lord, I wish we did.

49:41Jeff:Yeah. So much fun. That's one of mine. If we could get Dan Brown and Andy Weir, I have to think about a couple other authors, on an alternating schedule.

49:51Rebecca:Oh, I see what you're saying. Can you give us an Olympic-style winter-summer kind of situation?

49:56Jeff:If we could get them, some of our other super fun reads, get them on a regular rotation, I would love that. Let's do notable quotes.

50:05Rebecca:Notable quotes. I did not do a lot of highlighting here, Rebecca, but there's some fun. There's some fun to be had.

50:09Jeff:Mostly fun stuff. Dr. Strat at one point says, I have all of the authority. And just that's the dream. Like just to get to be a bossy lady in a situation where they're like, this bossiness is exactly what is called for. And every government on Earth has imbued you with all the power. Like just my wish fulfillment in Project Hail Mary and in the movie is going to come straight through Hertha Mueller.

50:33Rebecca:like just you know there's a similar sort of um uh mob boss figure in three body problem because they're encountering oh yeah not exactly the same but there is a there's a reason for the world to get together to figure a big problem out and they do come up with someone in a similar capability they go through a different process actually don't know what process dr stratt came to be um but you know what the the we've got a single problem here and we need to decide her can work I have just started to watch The Sopranos for the first time and that's very much in the early episodes of like we really need someone just to be in charge here and that works until it doesn't because then Dr.

51:10Rebecca:Stratt at one point also says I'm sure after all this is over I will be in jail even if it goes well because of the post hoc persecutions of things you said I could do but after the fact it's easier to say maybe not I have all of the authority

51:22Jeff:just really the dream there's a moment when Rylan Grace first turns off the centrifuge stuff that gives him gravity in the ship. And he feels like he's falling and he's adjusting to zero G. And so he's just, I'm not falling. I scream. I'm not falling. This is just space. Everything is fine.

51:42Rebecca:I would also like to add this to things I don't like that zero G is every, you're just falling all the time. As someone that struggles with motion sickness, this sounds like a torture. You're not going into space. I need an elective coma at all in space. Like it's all elective coma in space, but yeah, that's a funny moment.

51:55Jeff:I think that like I'm not falling moment is just also such a good example of what weird does. Like, this is what a person would do. You're by yourself. Also that Xanax would help with, by the way. Yeah, and you're like, everything's fine. Everything's fine. I'm not falling. Everything's fine. This is just space. And related to that, there's also a moment where he's like trying to go out to catch this first thing that Rocky has launched towards his ship. He doesn't know what it's going to be. Will it be a message? How are they going to communicate? But he's getting distracted by something else.

52:26Jeff:And he just says, I don't have time for this. I have an alien thingy to catch. And that weir will go from such highly technical language to I have an alien thingy to catch is such a good demonstration of his ability to reach audiences wherever they are in their comfort with the science language or not.

52:43Rebecca:I also think his sort of slangy, you know, glibness, both Watney and Rylan Grace, are they different characters? Who's to say at this point? But they share this ability to like be serious but also not they also joke and I think it's a survivability mechanism I think that's how it's presented here it's like if I take everything so seriously all the time my head's going to spin off my body even in space so making a joke making light of something using a little bit of slang that's presented in sort of the very first journal entry for Mark Watney and it comes very early for Rylan Grace here it was like he finds some humor in his sort of objectively hellscape situation that he wakes up into.

53:25Jeff:It's a nightmare.

53:25Rebecca:It's a nightmare, but there's a little bit of like, there's a little bit of funny here and I can make fun of myself and that's okay. Let's see. I'll do a couple.

53:36Rebecca:Good. Oh, this is Rocky. So they're kind of getting testy with each other. And at one point, Rylan Grace is like, just so you know, we have these things on earth that are called spiders and everybody hates them. They're scared of them. And you look exactly like that. And Rocky's like, good, proud. I am scary space monster. You are leaky space blob. They're just sort of busting each other's space balls at the same time, which I really enjoyed.

53:58Jeff:Yeah, there's a point where Grace has been up for two days and is not functioning super well. Yeah, a lot about sleep mechanics. And Rocky looks at him and goes, grumpy, angry, stupid. How long since last sleep? Question.

54:10Rebecca:As a walking cans counselor, you very probably tuned into Rocky making sure that Rylan Grace had been eating and sleeping. Oh, yes. You got to hydrate.

54:19Jeff:If you get lost in space with me, I'm 100 % going to be like, do you need a banana? Have you had a glass of water?

54:26Rebecca:Speaking of things I didn't like, and neither did Grace, I didn't particularly care for the red means eating process. I thought that was pretty gross. And I don't know why it was. I think we're just showing like there are other ways that life could be and like blowing your mind up. But I was like, I don't like that particular one. We basically put a ham sandwich or something up there and it's pretty traumatic and it stays up there and then you open yourself back up and like warp it out and then you put something it was gross i didn't like that we don't see that in the movie yeah and rocky like doesn't want to be

54:54Jeff:observed while he's eating because he knows they realize it's shameful yeah yeah and but that sort of connects to one of the things that i marked where grace is explaining that he and rocky have an unspoken agreement that cultural things just have to be accepted it ends any minor dispute so like rocky wants someone to observe him while he sleeps and it's just part of iridian culture that gets explained later on, but Grace just has to go with it, or Grace needs to go do something, or maybe when things don't make sense to the other person, but it's not about making sense. It's about, this is just the way we do things on Earth.

55:27Jeff:He's like, it's a cultural thing, and they just have to roll along and support each other in it. And I thought, have we tried that? Could we just try that on Earth? It's a cultural thing.

55:35Rebecca:Yeah.

55:35Jeff:Yeah, it's a cultural thing. Roll with it. Be cool, man. And they pull that off really nicely.

55:41Rebecca:I think it's in some version of what it means to be America. That's what we're supposed to do. Yeah. That's not super in current right now. But I would be happy going into an elective coma until that comes back into fashion. I think there are some sort of meta science fiction ideas that would inform like more of a Philip K. Dick sort of situation. One of them is intelligence evolves to give us an advantage over the other animals on our planet. But evolution is lazy. Once a problem is solved, this trait stops evolving. And then I don't know if this is in the same conversation, but it's similar.

56:13Rebecca:We're as smart as evolution made us. We're the minimum intelligence needed to ensure we can dominate our planets. I just thought those were cool ideas to think about. Yeah. What else do you have on quotes, Rebecca?

56:24Jeff:Let's see. Validation for corporate life, when they're back on Earth and they're figuring out all of the stuff. Everyone is wanting to work independently and trying to avoid meetings, but of course they end up in big meetings and that's the only way to do it. And Grace just says, sometimes this stuff we all hate ends up being the only way to do things. And I thought, yep. Yep, that's right. Sometimes you just have to have a meeting.

56:51Rebecca:um i think one thing that both the martian i think artemis has this too and then project hill mary is a very easy part for a lead actor actress to see themselves playing like you can see like this is it would be fun thing to do i think the first line that struck me with this is gosley whatever ryan they first gave this to maybe it was gosley maybe it was reynolds um so this is when grace is waking up from the elective coma and he's sort of trying to figure out what's going on, Jason Bourne style. It's like, all right, time to get to know my fellow patients. I don't know who I am or why I'm here, but at least I'm not alone.

57:22Rebecca:And they're dead. And you can just see that being something really fun for someone to imagine playing the shock, awe, and reactive defensive humor at the same time. So that's another one.

57:34Jeff:Do you want to talk for a second about Artemis? Because you teased that at the beginning.

57:38Rebecca:I keep doing it. I might as well do it now. So people might think, is Artemis a Rita-like? Because we have a Rita-like section. And there's not a whole lot of read-alikes for something like this. I enjoyed it. It's not as good for either of these things. And I think he just has a harder time managing. It's on a moon base and it's a heist. So, like, there's a bunch of people and you're in civilization. And there's, like, a crew and there are combinations. And it just doesn't really hold up, right? Like, some of the science, like, how I'm going to get outside the moon base to get this thing and how everything works.

58:09Rebecca:There's some family stuff that goes on. the character dynamics just weren't they didn't hold the water that you wanted it to I don't think it's impossible sometimes you write a book that doesn't work most writers have this experience but I think if you like Project Hail Mary and you like The Martian I don't think you're going to hate it but you might expect a sort of different vibe from it even though it's science based it's in space she's trying to do something a little bit different which is good you're going to need to do that because these two together are fairly similar high concept things he does add wrinkles Actually, more than ring curls.

58:41Rebecca:They're fully folding space time. But I don't know there's another fold of space time to do in this particular. I think that's right. Just sort of one person floating around in a tube trying to do something. Yeah. So that was it. That was it. Okay. Is this for you, Rebecca? How would you know if this is for you?

58:58Jeff:If you like a good time, I mean, this is, as we said earlier, a Swiss Army recommendation. Just about any reader can enjoy it. If you're on the fence, try it. Like, listen to the first 20 minutes of the audiobook. Give yourself some space. Well, maybe the first hour or two of the audiobook. But this is a great, really fun book. Very widely beloved, as evidenced by that 4.5 stars on Goodreads. That's kind of unheard of. Like, a good rating is 3.75. So 4.5 is very high. Yeah, this is in my, like, probably you should just try this. It's a good time. It's going to sweep you away in the first 50 pages, even on the reread.

59:38Rebecca:I remember you said this, you started rereading it before I did, like, oh, God, the hundred first pages just go by like wildfire.

59:44Jeff:Yeah, it's just, I don't think I've recommended it to anyone who didn't enjoy it. Like from my dad to nerdy friends to people who don't read very much, but they wanted a good time. And this is a really good time.

59:55Rebecca:Yeah. Let's see. If not, you hate fun. Okay, that's funny. I guess if you're really afraid of the technical stuff, boy, I can't overemphasize. I don't feel like how you're just not going to notice. You're going to notice that, like, boy, I didn't catch that. But then you're going to be moved on to the next. It doesn't matter. It's kind of hard to get hung up on it, I think. But that's my particular reading experience.

1:00:18Jeff:And like if the Bechdel test is a make or break for you, this book is not going to pass it. There are female characters, but they don't get a ton. I think I think the female characters will get more screen time on the movie than they get in the book. But this really is a guy in space with an alien that he talks to about as if it's a dude as well.

1:00:38Rebecca:He uses a he pronoun just probably for normal bias reasons. Like that's the first thing that came to mind. Yeah, Sandra Huller is going to make a meal out of Dr. Stratton. I really look forward to it. I'm sorry, Sandra. What did I say?

1:00:51Jeff:You said Sandra Huller. I think I said Hertha Mueller earlier, but that's wrong.

1:00:54Rebecca:Okay. Yeah. I don't think any German leaders are going to be taking on that particular part. That'd be an interesting choice for her career. Let's see. Immortal Questions Art asks, what is the good life? What do I owe my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? What to deal with good and evil, free will or not? I was worried this weren't going to happen, but actually there's a lot here for us. Yeah. Yeah.

1:01:18Jeff:I think the biggest one is what do I owe my neighbor? Like since Grace has to answer that question for himself on earth before he decides to go into space, but it also comes up later in the book of should he try to go back to Earth? Should he try to save Rocky after something happens to Rocky's ship? Are you going to sacrifice yourself? What are the ethics? What are the expectations? That's really big. Connected to what is the good life? Connected to how do I know what I know? Science is all about how do I know what I know? Is what I know right? Because what if Rocky knows something else and how do we rationalize and not quite justify, but like, how do you square the things you believe to be true with someone from a different culture who has evidence that their way of thinking about it is also true?

1:02:11Jeff:And he's also reckoning with the certainty of his own death at several points. It's not so much about that. But yeah. Yeah. What else might there be?

1:02:21Rebecca:I mean, Andy Weir does a lot to imagine another sentient life form that's so different from anything we may understand as life and imbue that species with a history, with morality, a worldview and a sensibility. That's a way of imagining that something that doesn't exist that actually expands our understanding of what could exist. Like this is sort of the, this is the boundary pushing thing that art and imagination and science can all do differently and sometimes in tandem. And Weir is using all the tools at his disposal to like broaden our mind about what might be out there, what might be possible, and that what it means about how we live our own lives and understand ourselves.

1:03:06Jeff:I think that's one of the things that really makes the book special is that the aliens are not either just like totally wide-eyed and naive and dumb or all-knowing and the evil.

1:03:16Rebecca:It's like a master species that's going to bite us out with their magic space race.

1:03:19Jeff:But Rocky and Grace are pretty much on par with each other. They just have different strengths.

1:03:23Rebecca:Right.

1:03:24Jeff:And that makes it work as well. And the buddy dynamic works through that.

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1:03:58Rebecca:This one is not about art and writing. No. So there we go. Easy one. Easy one. Could you get the most of the gist from watching the signal adaptation? You have Lord, I hope so. I guess if we reverse engineers from the Martian, you can. From the Martian, you really can.

1:04:12Jeff:Yeah. Yeah. I think it's going to be a great time.

1:04:15Rebecca:I really have high expectations for this. If we were to do another adaptation that's a movie, musical, TV series or Muppets, what would you do?

1:04:24Jeff:Muppets. Like, let's do it. I mean, but you could get the Muppets like all in the science meetings back on Earth figuring stuff out. Like I have Gonzo as Ryland Grace, Miss Piggy as Dr. Strat. That is a stroke of genius.

1:04:41Rebecca:Miss Piggy Estrat is extremely funny.

1:04:43Jeff:She's bossy. It's great. Is she ever?

1:04:46Rebecca:Yeah.

1:04:47Jeff:Animal could be that astronaut from the original crew who's just having a boink fest with his other crewmate and they're talking about it. Like great moments of humor in that as well. Grace first meets these people and one of the astronauts is like, well, this other astronaut and I have blocked out time at 2.30 this afternoon to engage in sexual congress. I'm like, that would be, it's so funny if you get Muppets. Like, I'm here for that.

1:05:12Rebecca:Beaker? What if that was Beaker giving that line? That'd be pretty funny. Or Skeeter, Beaker doesn't talk. I'm now confusing. Herda Muller as Gonzo as Rylan Grace is what we're doing right now. I actually think this would make a really good TV series.

1:05:27Jeff:I think so too.

1:05:28Rebecca:The chapters would line up quite nicely. A movie will be wonderful. Seeing at the Big Treen is probably what I would choose, but I think there's a version of this that maybe is like five episodes. I'm into this. I'm into the limited series for something like this. But I will be very much interested in seeing it on a big screen and being done in two hours and 17 minutes or two. It's also fun.

1:05:49Jeff:The early reviews are very go see it in IMAX. See it on the biggest possible screen. And I think there's a 70 millimeter at the Hollywood theater.

1:05:56Rebecca:I'm going to get to over here. Miscellaneous trivia, adaptations, rumors, misattributed quotes and more. Rebecca, this is our junk drawer for other interesting stuff we found. but didn't know where to put it. Yeah.

1:06:06Jeff:The most popular quote from the book on Goodreads is Grace describing something that he's done to telling Rocky about something that he's done. And he says, I penetrated the outer cell membrane with a nano syringe. And Rocky says, you poked it with a stick? No, I said, well, yes, but it was a scientific poke with a very scientific stick. And that gives you another sense of their interaction and the level of humor, like levity around this. They're not taking it too seriously, which I think is really the trick of the book. That, of course, this is like as serious as a situation can get. The fate of humanity hangs in the balance.

1:06:41Jeff:But you can still tell a joke about poking things with a stick and it being science.

1:06:45Rebecca:I think that might actually be earlier in the book when they just discover astrophage. But the point still stands about the dynamic. Yeah. Anyway, let's see. I have Andy Weir was so afraid of flying. He never visited the set of The Martian, which is mostly sort of Budapest. But he's had therapy and some work. And now he can fly. And I guess he's been part of this. But someone who is afraid of flying, riding the Martian and Project Hail Mary. That's a really good trivia thing to take to your... Face your fears. Maybe you should put that to Cocktail Party, but that's why we're doing it here. What else you got?

1:07:13Jeff:Ryan Gosling was cast in the adaptation of this before the book even came out. So this has been a big deal.

1:07:19Rebecca:They probably took it to all the dudes, right? They took it to Leo. They took it to... You would think. Or did they just maybe... Is Gosling your... This is what I was going to ask you. I forgot to put it in this here. Is Gosling your number one draft pick for this?

1:07:30Jeff:my personal number one draft pick for this is donald glover um he does terrific in the martian yeah he does the science stuff and that like highbrow lowbrow funny serious smart so well um he was great as one of the scientists in the martian i would have i would have loved to see him in the main role here he's not a big enough movie star to be the lead character in a film this big or like I can understand why a studio would have gone for the Ryan Gosling of it all like because Matt Damon had already starred in one of these.

1:08:03Rebecca:That was my straight thought I didn't get to is like I would kind of like to have seen a Mark Watney cameo when they're on ground still of like coming and saying okay it's not gonna be as bad as you think or here's some tips and tricks. Is this the same shared universe as The Martian? I don't think we get a definitive answer to that.

1:08:16Jeff:You just have to be able to play smart but also funny and also not taking yourself too seriously and that's a pretty specific skill set. Glover would have been my number one draft pick.

1:08:26Rebecca:I do have another thought around that. We have this format called Adaptation Nation we do for the BR pod from time to time. And one of the standing things, are we sure Zendaya shouldn't be in this somehow? And I think the answer is absolutely she could do that similar kind of a role.

1:08:40Jeff:She could be Dr. Ryland Grace, 100%. Yeah, that would be great.

1:08:45Rebecca:Ryland is good for many non-gendered, whatever you want to do.

1:08:49Jeff:Other stray stuff. Andy Weir is super into mixology. That is not a surprise.

1:08:54Rebecca:That is not a surprise. He wears a page boy hat and writes about nitrogen a little too often. I would like to enjoy a tiki tipple with Mr. Weir.

1:09:03Jeff:Yeah, he's got a large collection of cocktail books. You are a tiki mixologist in your own right. You guys could have a good time. You got matching hats. You could go for it.

1:09:12Rebecca:Yeah, he understands what's happening. I'm just dumping stuff into stuff. That's not really mixology, I wouldn't think.

1:09:18Jeff:All right.

1:09:19Rebecca:Also, Andy Weir got fired from an early coding job for poor performance. So you just you never know.

1:09:24Jeff:Well, we were talking about this on the 1984 episode that like nobody who knew George Orwell as a young person was like, that guy is going to write the most important book of the century.

1:09:32Rebecca:Who does say that? Do the people that get most likely to succeed in their yearbook ever turn out fine? Or do they just like a very good, you know, get addicted to cocaine and burnout working at Merrill Lynch or something?

1:09:43Jeff:Don't peek in high school, kids.

1:09:45Rebecca:Hot tips. Hot takes. Rebecca, you go first.

1:09:48Jeff:All right. This reading this again, it feels to me like we're got hip to how Hollywood works and really wrote to the goal of a four quadrant hit. I don't know if that's what he did, but I think it's believable. And like, I love this book. Do not get me wrong. I can't wait to see the movie. But Grace is a little earnest and aw shucks.

1:10:08Rebecca:That's a good observation.

1:10:09Jeff:The language is really cleaned up. Like the first line of the Martian is, well, I'm fucked. And there's a whole lot of like gosh darn and gee willikers kinds of language in Project Hail Mary instead. It's just less edgy than the Martian. And I cannot help but think that that was canny and intentional on his part.

1:10:28Rebecca:Does Ryland Grace ever swear?

1:10:31Jeff:I think there are like a couple moments. Yeah. But it's not. But I mean, he's not swearing nearly as much as a person would be swearing if you woke up alone in space and had to figure it all out. I would invent new swears.

1:10:45Rebecca:I would ask for Iridian swears to try to capture the. We need new language, Rebecca. That's one thing we're trying to do here.

1:10:51Jeff:At one point, when he's still on Earth, one of the other scientists teases him about his all-shuck sort of language. And he's like, well, what do you want from me? I'm a middle school teacher. but like once you've been alone in space and you're not catering to the audience of kids like i just i think that this is cleaned up so that you could give it to your teenage kid you could give this to like your son when he was a younger reader without having the same concerns about the language that some parents might have had about the martian like there are young readers editions of these but this just i i think andy weir just got a little too for me a little too smart about it.

1:11:29Jeff:Like I kept bumping.

1:11:31Rebecca:Almost the point doesn't seem believable. I hear what you're saying.

1:11:33Jeff:Yeah. I just kept bumping.

1:11:34Rebecca:I mean, I know middle school teachers that were off the clock. They would abash sailors. So I don't think that's any excuse. Yeah.

1:11:38Jeff:Like, are we really saying darn in this moment? I just didn't quite believe it. To yourself?

1:11:43Rebecca:Yeah. I don't know. I'm not sure. Maybe. I think Rocky has a chance to enter the alien cultural representation pantheon. Some combo of E.T. and Dr. Spock is what we're looking for here. That's what's going to happen.

1:11:54Jeff:I could be smart. What do you think?

1:11:55Rebecca:Are there going to be... So we made this mistake with the Baby Yoda. Is there Rocky merch ready to rock and roll? Do we have Rocky things ready for people to buy?

1:12:05Jeff:I haven't looked at any of the Project Hail Mary merch, but now I'm going to. I think they should. I'm going to take a look.

1:12:11Rebecca:What else do you have?

1:12:12Jeff:Here's my big one. We're not negging men enough.

1:12:15Rebecca:Terrific. Great. All right. This sounds fun.

1:12:17Jeff:Stratt does the full, like, you're a coward from, in the language of little women, she gives him the full, we've got to have it out, Joe. And it's really effective it gets grace on board it gets his ass in space like that's the thing that needed to be said to him and she says it like we need to do this more just pony up i mean not not

1:12:39Rebecca:to take that your take from you but i think we should remember who was saying we've got to have it out joe i think we just need more we've got to have it out ex-gendered person we're radical

1:12:48Jeff:candor people we are we are but i was and the fellows could probably take it more than others Yes, we're not begging men enough to get them to like just step up and do the thing.

1:12:57Rebecca:Well, maybe that dovetails nicely into my hot take. Could we not just mind soul swap Andy Weir and Elon Musk? Just they're interested in similar things. I'd rather we're be wielding that, you know.

1:13:14Rebecca:Anyway, further readings, Rex, read the likes and more. This is a very tough one. We talk about this all the time in the show. So that's why I want to do the Artemis thing because it's natural to wonder. I mean, The Martian, of course. I mean, yes.

1:13:25Jeff:Go read The Martian.

1:13:26Rebecca:The Androma Strain by Michael Crichton, that was one of his early, maybe his first sort of, they called that techno thriller at the time, which just sounds scarier to me. And the Crichton stuff is scarier. I want to use a science thriller for what Andy Ware is doing. There's a space bacteria that they get in Arizona. We're trying to keep it from taking over the earth. So similar dynamics. There's going to be a lot about containment in both. We want to keep them the same. I actually think for me, my closest read-alike might be Contact by Carl Sagan. There's a very good movie that stars Jodie Foster.

1:14:01Rebecca:The setup is that she is a space scientist who, not unlike Ryland Grace, she's trundling down a path of less sexy, less, I don't know, reputable science? Search for extraterrestrial life. She's trying to get grants so she can have giant arrays of space telescopes listen for E.T. essentially. And then something happens, picks up something one day. And there's a lot of science in it. It's not quite as hard sci-fi. My memory of the book is that it's a little harder sci-fi than the movie, but it's there. But it's cool. Let's figure this out. What's going on? Jodie Foster's great. Good side characters.

1:14:43Rebecca:I really like the book and the movie, and I think if you like this, it's worth a rewatch or just checking it out for the first time.

1:14:48Jeff:of Arrival, the movie based on the Ted Chiang short story, the stories of your life.

1:14:53Rebecca:That's a good idea, too.

1:14:54Jeff:I think that's a good read for the, if you like the problem solving of like, how are we going to communicate with each other? Because that's pretty much what Arrival is about. If you like the, we're waking up and figuring it all out, really, you just should go watch The Bourne Identity.

1:15:11Rebecca:None of these are as fun as an Andy Weir book. That's the one thing. Arrival, Contact is a little more fun. It doesn't take itself quite as seriously. There's some silliness that goes on quite. But like the autonomous strain isn't fun. Even Jurassic Park, the book is not as fun as Jurassic Park, the movie. No, that's not what they're trying to do. They're supposed to be creepy or darker someday. Yeah, someday we'll do. All right. Cocktail party crib sheets, three to five takeaways.

1:15:36Jeff:All right. It's not about the glory of saving humanity, Jeff. It's the friends you make along the way.

1:15:41Rebecca:It is no matter how they eat and defecate out of the same hole. You let your friends, you forgive them their monohole things. That's not even a cultural thing. That's just gross.

1:15:54Jeff:You forgive them their monohole things is definitely going in the clipped quotes from this.

1:16:00Rebecca:You just do. I have, science says, the only truly universal language and shared language means shared possible.

1:16:08Jeff:Yeah, that's it.

1:16:09Rebecca:That was nice. What did you think about that? Not a bad job, me. Only had to take multiple years of having read this book to come up with that line. And then take hard sci-fi as an idea. Not a lot of people think of this as a, I don't know if it's a subgenre, but it's like a flavor. A flavor, yeah, a flavor of sci-fi. And how exacting is the book trying to be about the actuality of the science? And some people like it and some people don't. I like it in moderation. I don't think I want to do this all the time. The final beat is our zero to well-read score. Each one of our categories gets a score from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest.

1:16:45Rebecca:Our five categories are historical importance, readability, current relevance of central questions, book nerd, read credit, and oh, damn factor. Popular hits, we grade on a curve a little bit, or some of these you're not going to be able to score as high, but that's okay. We want to mix.

1:16:59Jeff:Yeah. I mean, historical importance, this is an interesting moment to try to answer this question about this book. because there's a version of this that's like a two or a three, but there's a version where the movie becomes such a hit that the book gets another pop and stays.

1:17:14Rebecca:So what's the high side? So what's our historical antecedent for what the highest version of this would mean? Like The Matrix?

1:17:20Jeff:Yeah, if The Matrix had been based on a book, I guess. Because the book did go back onto bestseller lists after the trailer came out, and that's not common.

1:17:31Rebecca:Yeah.

1:17:32Jeff:it got enough attention and it's had enough buzz for a while. I think that the high side, Star Wars,

1:17:38Rebecca:Star Trek, like it's hard to imagine it reaching those heights, but those are the, those are the pinnacles of what the highest I can really imagine the book

1:17:44Jeff:ending up in historical importance is like a six or a seven. Yeah. There's not art stuff happening here. You need art stuff to get to a nine or a 10 right now. I'm going to give it like a three.

1:17:58Rebecca:Sci-fi has been a long enough around long. It can't do like a Jules Verne kind of thing or, you know, it doesn't have like, I mean, maybe if this turns out to be the high point of Weir's career and there's like five or six more books, maybe it could be a six or seven, but I think a three is probably readability. This is a 10. I mean, what's more readable than this? So readable and fun. Current relevance of central questions is interesting. How do you wrestle with this one?

1:18:29Jeff:well i mean there's not space algae on the sun but that we know that they'll tell us about but we are wrestling with climate change with what kind of sacrifices individuals can or should make

1:18:43Rebecca:for the greater good the utility funding and furtherance of science as a human endeavor

1:18:47Jeff:seems relevant yes let's i'm gonna go with like six yeah i think that's fair i think that's fair

1:18:55Rebecca:book nerd read cred is probably low because so many people read it and it's like so easy again this one's tricky um things that are new and popular at some point maybe if the book is huge that you went back and read the book maybe you'll be like i don't know two or three what's the lowest you can get i we've never really talked about what a one looks like that you read what's the lowest read cred but i really don't want to slight anybody but um geez i don't really know

1:19:22Jeff:No, because I mean, even when we talked about like Great Gatsby and some of the titles that you have that almost everybody has to read in school, we're giving the read cred points for like you went and read it on your own.

1:19:35Rebecca:What about AI generated fanfic? That's a one to me.

1:19:39Jeff:That's a negative 12. You get no points for reading AI generated fanfic. We're going to have Dr.

1:19:46Rebecca:Strat come to talk to you. Yeah.

1:19:50Jeff:And that won't be negging. It'll just be true. Yeah. Book nerd read cred. Let's just give it a two?

1:19:56Rebecca:Yeah, let's go three. Three? Let's go three. I don't know why, but a two doesn't feel... That feels disrespectful. Okay.

1:20:04Jeff:And the oh damn factor. There's a version where this is really high because what Weir is doing is really hard and a book this fun is unusual.

1:20:14Rebecca:Look, no one else does what he does.

1:20:16Jeff:Yeah.

1:20:18Rebecca:Or at least that that I know of. And I'd assume if it was really performed well, it would burble up. Maybe I'm wrong about that. She was an email, zero to well read at podcast.com. She was like, you know what? There's less or no Andy Weirs that are just as good. This happens. This happens where one person would love to. That'd be a thrilling email to get. But I think from that point of view, like eight or nine is possible. Like there's some moments. Yeah, let's go 8.5. That's amazing. Look at this. Yeah, 8.5. Cool. I like this. I feel good about this. Okay. I feel good about this book, Rebecca.

1:20:46Rebecca:I think our expectations here. We used to do this format called confidence index about adaptations in which you look at the director, the actor, the source material. I don't know that I could have a higher confidence index in this particular prediction.

1:21:00Jeff:I'm going to be buying IMAX tickets for release weekend. This is a big group experience. We're all going to go have a great time. It's going to be fun. I'm so glad that we had an excuse to do this book. I know.

1:21:13Rebecca:I'm too. Can I give a hot tip for those people seeing this on a large format screen that maybe get a little queasy? Half Dramamine and a Diet Coke. An upper and a downer. They'll take the edge right off.

1:21:24Jeff:It's not an induced coma, but it'll get you through.

1:21:27Rebecca:If you could have one thing put on your 13 light year space mission that, you know, is not, wouldn't necessarily be sanctioned. Oh. Is it goldfish crackers? Is it bourbon? What do you need to have in this special Shinsky locker that's just for you and you alone?

1:21:45Jeff:And only one thing?

1:21:47Rebecca:Mine would be industrial-grade Dramamine. I mean, that's what brought this up. That'd be the only acceptable thing.

1:21:52Jeff:What I want is a good, strong pot gummy and then a box of Cheez-Its. But that's the combo.

1:22:00Rebecca:That would be bad. You have the munchies in space and nowhere to go, just that slurry food? That's a real bummer.

1:22:05Jeff:Yeah, no. If you have space munchies, you've got to have some Cheez-Its.

1:22:09Rebecca:Have I told you before that sometimes Michelle will say, I wish I could just eat the Matrix Gruel and not to decide what I'd like to eat? Just like she just wants to like get calories in it.

1:22:16Jeff:I'm not on board with that plan. I know.

1:22:18Rebecca:I know. I know that would horrify you. But every now, we have to figure out what to eat. Can I just eat that goo? Space food. Some kind of weird space food. Yeah.

1:22:26Jeff:All right. Well.

1:22:27Rebecca:All right. You want to take us out? Why don't you do the end? I always do the end. Yeah.

1:22:29Jeff:You can find our detailed show notes, our free newsletter, and all of our membership options along with our paid bonus content, which is our office hours that we're going to stick around and talk more about Project Hail Mary at patreon.com slash zero to well read. You can follow us on the socials at zero to well read podcast, email us at zero to well read at book riot.com, especially if you know of someone else who's doing what Andy Weir is doing, because we don't want to wait this long in between books. Thank you to thrift books for sponsoring this season of zero to well read. And zero to well read is a proud member of the airwave podcast network until next time bye everybody