\u2014Andy Weir<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n
\u201cYou Keep Using That Word. I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.\u201d \u201cWe don\u2019t need other worlds. We need mirrors.\u201d Lers of Spoi.<\/strong><\/p>\n You Have Been Warned.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\n As the credits rolled at the end of \u201cProject Hail Mary\u201d, I turned to the The BUG and said \u201cWell, another story where the alien turns out to be a human in a rubber suit.\u201d The BUG shook her head: \u201cNot a Human. A smart goofy golden retriever.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n We weren\u2019t talking about morphology, of course. We\u2019re decades past the point where movies had to put actors in rubber suits to portray aliens. But intellectually. Psychologically. Rocky\u2014an anaerobic, blind, echolocating smart exoskeleton hosting a colony of alien microbes from I hesitate to admit this, but I actually liked this movie quite a bit the second time I saw it. (The first time, I thought it was the most scientifically-illiterate pro-science polemic I\u2019d ever seen. I calmed down a bit for the rewatch.) It does a number of things very well. The first act nails the sense of isolation, of loneliness in an infinite void. Ryan Ghosling as Ryland Grace is, as always, a sympathetic protagonist. Making him a sniveling coward who has to be dragged kicking and screaming into a suicide mission is a refreshing departure from the usual Hollywood hero who stoically accepts his fate for the sake of Humanity. The music soundtrack works way better than it has any right to. Space is mercifully silent: a small detail, but one that so very few movies have ever bothered to respect. The movie is never boring. It at least pretends to care about science, unapologetically portrays the scientific process as a good<\/em> thing, something that works<\/em>, bitches. Christ knows that\u2019s a message that needs as big a megaphone as you can find these days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The movie also undercuts that position by seemingly regarding its target audience as a bunch of incurious imbeciles who\u2019d rather be coddled than challenged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Speaking as one of the few modern authors\u2014 Movie first. Consider the main driver of the plot: a microbe composed \u201calmost entirely of water\u201d whose natural habitat is\u2014wait for it\u2014the surface of the sun. Also the atmosphere of Venus; it actively navigates between the two in the kind of ongoing feeding-ground\/breeding-ground migration you\u2019d see in humpback whales. (Hell, for all we know it lives on humpback whales too; the movie has the little buggers bopping around on Earth without any trouble.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n The movie recognizes the fundamental absurdity of this. Grace is recruited to the Hail Mary project because of his theories about non-water-based life, which the alien microbe clearly must be because \u201cIt lives on the surface of the sun. Does that sound like a water-based life form to you?\u201d Soon enough we discover that astrophage is<\/em>, in fact, water-based. Which should, as the movie has already acknowledged, be absolutely impossible for a denizen of the solar photosphere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The movie never acknowledges the paradox. The whole question of how an astrophage can live where it does is never answered, never even mentioned again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They could have answered it. Weir did, in the novel. His answer wasn\u2019t perfect. He pulls something called \u201csuper cross-sectionality\u201d out of his ass: a property that, instantiated in a cell membrane, traps neutrinos (which can then be harnessed as an endogenous power source and heat sink) and which is \u201copaque to all radiation\u201d. Super-cross-sectionality is the secret sauce that allows astrophages to stay just below the boiling point of water no matter where they are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Given that your average neutrino can\u2019t be bothered to even notice when it\u2019s passing through the mass of an entire planet, we\u2019re clearly talking one magical membrane here, and you know what? I\u2019ll give him that, even though the premise makes as much sense as saying Hey, these flatworms are just like the ones we have on Earth except they evolved with microscopic fusion reactors inside \u2019em<\/em>. SF is full of things that don\u2019t exist (or at least, haven\u2019t been discovered yet) in service of a good story. Intrinsic fields. Warp cores and jump gates. Alderson drives. Hell, I\u2019m probably gonna pull some kind of fictitious particle out of my own ass to keep the Sunflowers stories consistent (if any of the cosmologists I\u2019ve reached out to ever get back to me, that is).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, once you\u2019ve invented new rules\u2014no matter how batshit\u2014you\u2019re obligated to follow them, at least if you purport to be writing \u201cHard SF\u201d. That\u2019s the point of the whole exercise: posit a scenario, play out the logical consequences. If astrophages are opaque to all forms of radiation, then they\u2019re perfectly shielded; which is to say, they\u2019re perfectly blind<\/em>. There\u2019s no way to navigate to Venus without opening the windows at least a crack, and the moment you do that anywhere near the sun you\u2019re (very badly burned) toast. The same miracle that enables one facet of astrophage biology excludes another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Again: I\u2019ve not read the novel. It\u2019s possible that Weir had an answer to that too, one the essays and videos I\u2019ve digested simply didn\u2019t mention. But even if he did screw that particular pooch, at least the dude put some thought into it. Not a great solution, but at least the problem wasn\u2019t completely ignored in the book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, having already highlighted the issue in the screenplay, the producers could have spared a line or two of dialog to slot in Weir\u2019s solution. Apparently, though, questions like Wait a second\u2026how does a eukaryotic cell survive on the surface of the sun?<\/em> were considered too trivial, too irrelevant, to warrant mention in the adaptation. The audience won\u2019t care<\/em>, the studio seemed to be thinking. The audience will be bored. The audience is too dumb to even ask the question<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And the studio was right. I\u2019ve read no shortage of raves about \u201cProject Hail Mary\u201d. Many of them focus on how accurate its science is; Weir himself has spoken often and at length about the research he did, the equations he solved, how very rigorous<\/em> the whole production is. There\u2019s a market for intelligent hard science fiction<\/em>, people are saying. We\u2019re not niche any more. \u201cPHM\u201d proves it.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n I beg to differ.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I could witter on about this or that technical error showing that “PHM”\u2019s producers didn\u2019t do their Hard-SF homework (How can Rocky parse videos on a flatscreen when its echolocation needs 3D topography to bounce off? How can the Hail Mary<\/em> make it past 90% lightspeed when blueshift ablation would have melted the whole ship to slag at less than half that speed? How could Grace plot an intercept course to Rocky\u2019s ship without even knowing what masses to scribble on his white board?). But my problem with the movie is more fundamental, more\u2014philosophical\u2014than a list of technical gripes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Put simply: I don\u2019t think people love this movie because it\u2019s Hard-SF. They love it because it\u2019s comforting. It feels good. And while I don\u2019t have any objection to feel-good movies in principle, \u201cProject Hail Mary<\/em>\u201d brands itself as far more than that, and I fear the brand suffers as a result.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Which brings us back to Rocky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rocky is, biologically, a mindblowingly imaginative creation. I\u2019d put it on a par with the aliens in Adrian Tchaikovsky\u2019s Shroud<\/em>. Rocky isn\u2019t even the alien itself: the aliens are a specialized, non-sapient metacolony of microbes living within an inorganic chassis that evolved through purely Darwinian processes. Rocky\u2019s brain is the inorganic autopilot in charge of that chassis. Grace is talking to a Waymo, not its passengers (who aren\u2019t even multicellular). This is also a pretty cool way of way of getting around the whole question of how complex multicellularity could have evolved in an anaerobic environment in the first place. It didn\u2019t; all the macrostructures are inorganic. (I wish I\u2019d thought of that when I was writing Blindsight<\/em>. I could have dispensed with the whole they sprint their whole lives<\/em> shtick.)<\/p>\n\n\n Imagine such an entity: product of an environment so corrosive, so hyperbaric, that xenon can be forged into metal. A powered faceless exoskeleton with mercury for blood and two independent circulatory systems, that perceives reality through sonar and magnetic fields. Radially symmetrical, so no sense of forward\/backward, right or left. Egg-laying predatory hermaphrodite. Dual musculatures: one piezoelectric, one that runs off thermal gradients, both of which shut down entirely during dormancy. A crystalline optical computer for a brain. Blind to all EM; unaware even of the existence of light. These are but a few of an Eridian’s truly alien characteristics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now try to imagine the cognitive reality emerging from such an entity. Give me your best odds that such a mindset would converge on \u201cfriendly golden retriever\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If I were to go the Hard-SF route\u2014 posit the scenario, interrogate the consequences\u2014 I\u2019d wonder whether Rocky would even be sane by the time the Hail Mary<\/em> coasted into orbit. One of the least<\/em> alien aspects of Erid biology is the complete paralysis they undergo while asleep; they\u2019re profoundly vulnerable to predators\/enemies at such times, and can\u2019t simply wake up at the first unexpected noise. So they are compelled to sleep communally, at least one Eridian always on watch while others are dormant. This would be baked into their very natures for as long as they\u2019ve existed as a species: you do not, you cannot<\/em> sleep alone. And yet Rocky is the sole survivor of a mission gone catastrophically pear-shaped; it could have been forced to sleep unguarded for months, years, before company arrived. What would that do to a being whose fundamental species hardwiring equates solitary sleeping with mortal danger? Rocky would be traumatized at the very least, suffering some kind of nervous breakdown. Rocky could be insane\u2014downright psychotic\u2014before the movie even started. That\u2019s just one small ramification of Weir’s premise to get you started. Others are left as an exercise for the reader.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cProject Hail Mary\u201d is not bad by any means. As I say, I enjoyed it. And if it was just being pitched as a light-hearted feel-good movie I\u2019d just say, go with it. Mission accomplished. But that\u2019s not how it\u2019s being pimped. It\u2019s being described as smart, rigorous, hard<\/em> SF. Its rigor and empiricism gets thrust in our faces\u2014\u201cBuilt on Solid Science\u201d, \u201cscience that either exists today or could exist given the right conditions\u201d, \u201cthis story is packed with real science!\u201d\u2014like copies of The Watchtower from those pests that just won’t get the fuck off your doorstep. And sure, I\u2019ll buy the equations are correct. I\u2019ll buy that Weir calculated how many kilotonnes of astrophage was required to get to Tau Ceti, and how much time would dilate en route (even if the ship would have melted at those speeds).<\/p>\n\n\n\n But here\u2019s the thing: while he showed his work, he didn\u2019t follow where it led. We scribbled on the whiteboard; we witnessed the arduous process by which one makes painstaking first contact. We used Science to strip away the mystery, layer by layer, brought ourselves face-to-face with this profoundly alien intelligence, evolved under conditions we could scarcely imagine\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2026Only to discover it wasn\u2019t all that alien after all. It was like us in a crab suit. It\u2019s so much like us we get each other\u2019s jokes. It\u2019s so much like us that Eridians have their own fucking elementary schools, where little Eridian younglings jump eagerly up and down with their hands raised, hoping the teacher will call on them<\/em>\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n Science is a powerful tool. It can help us parse the furthest reaches of the universe if we practice it properly. But this story\u2014this paragon of Hard-SF<\/em>, this bit of a genre that\u2019s defined by looking unflinchingly at a scenario and asking what are the ramifications<\/em>\u2014has decided that the answer is People Are The Same All Over. “Project Hail Mary<\/em>” instantiates the famous Lem quote: it claims to be about other worlds, but really it\u2019s just another mirror. It has far more in common with the cozy Chambersesque Waltons-in-Space vibe than it does with Kubrick and Clarke, despite the hordes who keep polishing its Hard-SF credentials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And I get it. I really do. We want reassurance, we want to think that no matter how alien and threatening something might seem, underneath our differences we can all be friends. I can understand the appeal, especially nowadays. But it rings hollow when we can\u2019t even get along with our own species. It rings hollow when we\u2019re presented with the setup of something so breath-takingly original, only to see it squandered on a Hollywood ending. And to have this held up as some kind of icon of Hard-SF\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2026Well, \u201cbetrayed\u201d is far too strong a word, especially for a fun movie with such a big heart. But all the people emphasizing the scientific rigor of \u201cProject Hail Mary\u201d, all those praising it as a work of \u201cHard SF\u201d\u2014I\u2019d argue they\u2019re cheapening the concept, at the very least. The movie\u2019s carapace is Hard enough, to be sure. But look inside, and the really Hard questions go unexplored.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And this is coming from someone who\u2019s publicly expressed misgivings about whether the very concept of Hard-SF has much functional utility in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Make of that what you will.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yeah, I know about Clarke. But that story was about native<\/em> solar life, not invasive. Also Clarke\u2019s story had no solar-cooling shtick. \u2191<\/a><\/p><\/li>\n\n\n\n
\u2014Inigo Montoya<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2014Stanislaw Lem, Solaris<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Rocky_Movie.webp\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nVulcan<\/s> 40 Eridani\u2014turns out to be just a guy<\/s> super-smart golden retriever. The vastly different environments of Erid and Earth\u2014the radically different morphologies of the life that evolved on each world\u2014have somehow converged on the same overall personality template. I\u2019ve encountered Republicans with a more alien mindset than Rocky.<\/p>\n\n\n\nmaybe the only other?<\/s>[1]<\/a><\/sup><\/sup>(nope. Just one of the few)\u2014 to have published a story about alien life-forms taking up residence in the sun[2]<\/a><\/sup><\/sup> (right down to consequent Earthly perils due to solar cooling), I feel at least partially qualified to weigh in on the movie even though I haven\u2019t read the novel. I have, at least, gone down a variety of rabbit holes exploring the scientific underpinnings of Project Hail Mary<\/em> (we cite the novel using italics<\/em>; when talking about the movie, “quotes”). I have read\/watched pieces both gushing and dispassionate, ranging from the credible (a piece in the New York Times) to the sloppy (a \u201cA PhD-Level Breakdown of Every Organism, Equation, Material, Scene, and Production Decision\u201d, which appears to have been written by an LLM). I have a sense of which elements from Project Hail Mary<\/em> made it into \u201cProject Hail Mary\u201d, and\u2014more tellingly\u2014which ones didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/a>
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