Tangentially related, is this book worth the hype? I don't read a lot of genre fiction, but don't like to miss out on the exceptional (just finished and loved Flowers for Algernon, as an example).
Edit: Sounds like an enjoyable, low commitment book. Will give it a try, thanks for the feedback.
I give credit to Andy Weir for knowing what The Martian did well--setting up a bunch of technical problems as load-bearing elements of a plot--and going and executing that same general plan, but with new particulars and bigger and with fun new ideas. The made-up sciencey stuff feels infused with principled ideas about how new things we haven't discovered might work, rather than designed for their role in the story alone. And he's willing to write an ending!
There are things he does not stand out at, but those don't take you out of the story. As people work through things on Earth a lot of the nontechnical parts are, I guess, simplified, but I can't care that much; I didn't pick this up wanting a bureaucratic or psychological thriller. And he (or he + early readers and editors) usually make sure to quickly and efficiently get you through all of that to the next fun part.
The hype, absolutely not. I found the writing to be very poor. However I enjoyed it. The story is refreshing and straightforward.
To be fair, I read it months before the movie announcement and it really felt like reading a movie plot. If you prefer, I thought that the author had a great story idea but cared very little about writing a book, like he already knew this was for Hollywood.
I think with good production it’s going to be a better movie than the book.
Never read the Martian but I was told it was the same thing.
> Having been rebuffed by literary agents when trying to get prior books published, Weir decided to put the book online in serial format one chapter at a time for free at his website. At the request of fans, he made an Amazon Kindle version available at 99 cents (the minimum allowable price he could set).[9] The Kindle edition rose to the top of Amazon's list of best-selling science-fiction titles, selling 35,000 copies in three months, more than had been previously downloaded free.[9][11] This garnered the attention of publishers: Podium Publishing, an audiobook publisher, signed for the audiobook rights in January 2013. Weir sold the print rights to Crown in March 2013 for over US$100,000.[9]
Obviously subjective, but I had seen The Martian before I read the book (many years after seeing the movie), and liked the book way better than the movie. Read Project Hail Mary right after finishing The Martian, and enjoyed that one even more. I guess the writing is a bit dry, but it kind of makes sense and I quite like it. I'm cautiously optimistic about the new movie.
In my opinion, The Martian had better writing. You could tell Weir was having a blast writing it, and his enthusiasm translated directly to the main character's love of science and enduring sense of humor in the face of almost constantly dying.
Hail Mary felt like it was trying to capture the same magic but missed the mark. The plot felt constructed rather than spontaneous and I couldn't relate much to the main character at all. I agree about the Hollywood motive. I'll probably watch the movie.
> Never read the Martian but I was told it was the same thing.
That's the very feeling I had when I read 'The Martian'.
While I was reading it I actually thought something to the tune (It's been years now) "This reads like a movie".
Guess that explains why the movie is so faithful to the book.
In my opinion Weir is learning to write in full public view. I tolerate it largely because he is definitely getting better. But its not everyones cup of tea.
The scenario is definitely contrived to introduce interplanetary travel to a near future setting.
The amnesia parts of of the book are not very coherently written.
However what Weir IMHO excels at is having fun self insert characters solving problems. When you get past the cruft and get to the "This is a book about troubleshooting in space" sections, it takes off.
Almost nothing is worth the hype but the book is an enjoyable page turner if you like space adventures and speculative science. Audiobook also got some extra attention, I'd go with that if you like audiobooks.
It was really enjoyable to read. And I also do not read a lot of fiction, with my last book being the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy series.
My verdict is that Project Hail Mary was way much more engaging in terms of story-telling. The concepts were cool, and tbh I look forward for the movie and see if the adaptation will be nice
If you don't read/like much genre fiction, I would say probably no. The pacing is well done and I genuinely find story compelling, but the writing while solid-ish is not exactly of high literary quality.
Additionally, in terms of genre I actually find Weir's books to be more like detective novels than sci-fi, though obviously lots of sci-fi elements in them.
I've found and some have proven that sci-fi is just a setting of sorts, a background to the story at hand. For instance the Backyard Starship series is 100% a detective / cop novel set in space. Asimov did one called The Naked Sun that was pretty much a murder mystery and from what I understand written to prove a point that sci-fi really is just a setting to what ever main genre you want out of it.
That's definitely not true for a large number of science fiction stories. The science is often a core component and can't be substituted for anything. What does Star Trek look like in a fantasy setting? It doesn't work at all.
I have the same opinion, likewise for fantasy. But a lot of scifi and fantasy stories really have similar tropes and plots, even if it is possible to write say, a romantic book with scifi trappings. There are also some books like I, Robot that really are about the scifi and not just another genre in a scifi setting.
I also think anime is in the same boat, there is a ton of different stories you can tell and how they are animated. its a shame it gets all lumped together like it does
It's a fun read but, just like his other books, very one-dimensional characters with no depth. Not really remarkable literature, more of a bunch of Wikipedia articles strung together.
I agree that I really don't like Andy Weir's character writing: his dialogue in particular is rough, but despite normally characters being what I'm there for in stories, I give Project Hail Mary a bit more credit than this. The story has some interesting ideas and I think Weir's strength is the mystery of process: you see a challenge, and then you get to enjoy the competence porn of someone successfully going through the process of finding a solution, and I think he nails doing that in a really engaging way.
I do think the movie will probably end up better than the book: having a screenwriter go over the dialogue alone will do a lot, I think.
Project Hail Mary is light reading sci-fi. Which is fine, I enjoyed it, but if you are looking for something meatier, covering broader themes and character development, here's some other recent stuff (there's a lot of old stuff covered already in other comments):
Stories of Your Life and Others; Exhalation (Ted Chiang) - both are short story collections vs novels, though
Dissolution (Nicholas Binge)
Too Like the Lightning (Ada Palmer) and sequels (wordy, philosophical, interesting future society)
Tell Me an Ending (Jo Harkin) - more near-future and grounded
There’s lots of answers to this depending on taste, but you also get into arguments about whether such and such is space opera or planetary romance. Children of Time is hard SF the way a reader from the 1960s would have understood it.
I second this -- but, at the same time, it's such a shame that Tchaikovsky hasn't written anything else worth a damn, despite writing something like three novels every year!
His two most recent, Shroud and Service Model, are bloated, uninspired, and borderline unreadable. I guess he's now subject to that curse of established authors, where editors are scared to mess with their manuscripts and trim the fat.
Yeah I was going to say the same thing. Pandora's Star/Judas unchained is the best scifi I've ever read. Peter F Hamilton's worldbuilding is unmatched.
scalzi is mil-sci-fi, which I also enjoy, but not man vs nature conflicts like weir writes about (even Artemis is largely about solving physical problems even if they arise from interpersonal conflict..)
I second Daemon as an excellent sci-fi. I also really enjoyed Project Hail Mary and thought the characters weren’t too bad for a sci-fi.
Daemon isn’t about a rogue AI in the sense it was designed that way. Also you need to read the sequel “Freedom” to really get the true sci-fi philosophical message.
I personally enjoyed the sequel Freedom because it really explores the idea of a crypto-DAO like society that embraces human nature to build a more sustainable and fair society. It was ahead of its time as I don’t think DAO’s had been created yet.
Suarez’s later books also build on the themes in interesting ways.
I liked the audiobook a lot, but I'm a SF aficionado, so my opinion may not be relevant. The other comment may be correct about the "serious literary critic" opinion.
Just a counterpoint, I loved Project Hail Mary. I wanted my time back after reading Children of time, and it's exceptionally rare that I feel that way about anything scifi. Tastes differ. ::shrugs::
I enjoyed The Martian even more, but perhaps only because I wasn't prepared for how good it was. I was bored in Stockholm airport and thought "haven't I heard of this book oh HN?", flipped a few pages, and decided to buy it. It quickly became clear that I had a new favorite book (and it still is)
PHM, from the same author, I was very much expecting to be very good to amazing. It delivered, but it's a different feeling when you see it coming
I enjoyed it a lot, especially the audio book. I'm not sure how much I would have enjoyed the print version. I can't say much more without spoilers, but the sound effects really make the drama come to life.
Yes, it's a nice book. Especially if you are not a native English speaking and you are looking to practice your English reading skills. I enjoyed the book and so many of my friends. It's very easy read, and it falls under the hard sci-fi category.
I also enjoyed the expanse books!
I typically prefer somewhat deeper and more thought-provoking material, but I enjoyed this book. It’s a light page-turner, written-to-be-turned-into-a-movie type book. Overall, I would recommend it.
It's funny, I would not put this or the Martian into made-to-be-movie category, mainly featuring a single protagonist alone with his thoughts of how best to effect survival. I haven't (and probably won't) see the movies. I preferred the Martian very much compared to PHM, but I did enjoy it. Just had a problem with suspension of disbelief to do trivialization of language learning and communication (especially alien).
I liked all of them but i thought the length and the production for a PHM movie would be a lot. Compared to Artemis, no need for aliens, and a shorter read.
PHM was much more ambitious in its scope than either.
I enjoyed Artemis-- can't find too much fault in any book whose main character writes an extended love letter to welding-- but I enjoyed PHM much more.
It's really good in the way that the best cheeseburger in town is really good. There are snobbish reasons to dislike it, but it is very good at being what it is. It's a superhero story but instead of magical powers and bad guys, it's a nerd being somewhat implausibly good at solving problems in a sci-fi context.
That is a good explanation. I loved Hail Mary, but it's cheeseburger sci-fi. A lot of fun, an easy read, very enjoyable. It's not Michelin Star material, but even Gordon Ramsey eats at Burger King sometimes.
If you enjoyed The Martian (book or film), then this is just more of the same.
It was on my reading list for a while, and after the movie trailer was released, it finally nudged me and I read it. Took a few hours. It is very easy to read, quite enjoyable being a 'plausible' sci-fi. Though, spoilers ahead, alien part of the story was somewhat disappointing, by being not alien enough.
I thought it was a pretty good book as someone who reads a lot of sci-fi. It has a few unique ideas and plot points I haven't seen before, is an accessible read to anyone, and has a satisfying conclusion.
It’s not really good. It feels like the author was just trying to recreate the Martian and it was only written to be turned into a movie. It’s a book for people who don’t usually read. Everyone just talks about the audio book
Meh, to me it failed to engage. Characters very one dimensional, I’d call it young adult level sophistication . Some cool ideas though.
TBF I am trying to write fiction for the first time in my writing career, and I also suck at characters and non contrived story engagement, so I’m not trying to throw stones here. I do hope, however, to do better in my first published fiction.
It's maybe not a literary masterpiece and it's suspiciously similar to The Martian if you squint. But not many books can get me laughing out loud the second or third time through.
It's a really fun read and I find the aliens particularly compelling in a way that most Sci-Fi doesn't get right.
To make it shorter than OP's reply, from my understanding of the offerings:
- PlanetScale for predictable load. You pick a config (CPU, memory) and if you don't have traffic it sits idle, and if you have traffic it's limited by the config you picked.
- Neon for scalability. You pay for compute hours, so if your traffic is spikey (e.g. concert ticket sales), you don't pay for idle resources during low traffic, and get all the compute you need during high traffic.
I use Postgres on RDS. Our database is several TB and runs a 24/7 production app. It seems fine. (earnest question) Why should I look into either/both of these?
Except: "The active time includes periods when the database is receiving requests and for a duration (default 300 seconds) after the last request is received. Following this period of inactivity, the database scales down to zero, effectively pausing compute time billing."
So if you get at least one request every five minutes, neon will charge you for 24 hours of compute a day.
Long story short, I didn't want to make that analysis/distinction because it would miss the point.
They excel in their respective areas based on the architectural decisions they've made for the use cases they wanted to optimize for.
PlanetScale, with their latest Metal introduction, optimized for super low latency (they act like they've reinvented the wheel, lol), but they clearly have something in mind going in this direction.
Neon offers many managed features for serverless PostgreSQL that were missing in the market, like instant branching, and with auto-scaling, you may perform better with variable workloads. From their perspective, they wanted to serve other use cases.
There's no reason to always compare apples to oranges, and no reason to hate one another when everyone is pushing the managed database industry forward.
Easy to setup and instant forks for devs was it for me. Felt the pain with dev app state in the past and this took <20 minutes to migrate (beta users only) and go live, and get back to feature work.
I don’t get it. Sending a query to a remote server is going to be much slower than sending the query to local database. When has Postgres not been enough on its own?
For me it's all about the branching Neon provides. Being able to instantly and automatically have a branch of my production data for every dev branch is incredibly useful.
You can have an anonymized dump like you'd normally do and then branch it. This allows spinning up environments in seconds and without the disk footprint of a new replica or dedicated DB.
The privacy / security constraints stay the same whether you are branching or not.
Anonymizing data is the biggest part of such a workflow. Most prevalent use case that requires production data is for debugging. I guess there is some value in branching non-prod databases for feature development.
Most security teams do not allow prod data in non prod environments, anonymized or not l.
I’ve learned (sometimes the hard way!) that every design choice comes with real trade-offs. There’s no magic database architecture that optimizes every dimension (e.g., scalability, performance, ease-of-use) simultaneously.
Social media often pushes us into oversimplified "winner vs. loser" narratives, but this hides the actual complexity of building great infrastructure.
Recognizing and respecting these differences makes us smarter engineers, better community members, and frankly, just more enjoyable people to chat with.
PS Thank you for helping me add a new book to my list :-)