Twenty Percent True: 2023

April 6, 2023

I Read Project Hail Mary

I read Project Hail Mary in two days, and I need to rant about it a little bit. This book is a wild ride, and I need you all to read it so I can talk about it.

I usually hate it when people tell me to go into a book or a movie without knowing anything about it. Of course I should know some basic things about it before I dedicate substantial time to it! What if it's something I hate? What if there's something I love and I would have been way more excited earlier if I had just been informed that Baby Yoda is there and he's adorable? So I understand that it's hypocritical of me to say that now about Project Hail Mary: it's better if you don't know. But the thing that worked for me in this regard was that I did know a fair amount about what to expect even if I didn't know where the plot was going. The front cover has a guy in a spacesuit, floating in space, so I had an idea of the setting. I've read The Martian, so I know Andy Weir loves writing solitary men doing math and cracking dad jokes. And that is exactly what this book is.

A guy wakes up alone with amnesia. He gradually pieces together that he's on a desperate mission to save humanity. And that's all I'm telling you, and I think you'll know if you're onboard or not.

There are some emotional moments that got to me, especially since there are two characters that I am absolutely obsessed with (Rocky and Stratt, neither of whom are the main guy). The pacing is great and the tension is terrific. But what really blew me away was the structure. Impeccable structure.

First of all, our guy wakes up with amnesia. I've talked about this a fair bit with Breath of the Wild (a Zelda video game that maybe I like a little too much). In that, the main character wakes up with amnesia, which means you, the player, are discovering the world along with the character, even though he ought to know where everything is. It also means you uncover memories and piece together what happened as you play, giving you an unfolding story in a game where you can do anything in whatever order you want.

Although the functions and the outcome are different, this book reminded me of that. Our main character wakes up knowing nothing along with the reader, so to a small extent, he's an audience proxy. You figure out what's going on as he does. And there's a lot going on, so this structure makes it so there's no huge info dump at the beginning of the book. It also means the stakes at the beginning are fairly low: he's in a room and there are robot arms and he doesn't know where he is. Where is he? How will he find out? Well, he can do a small experiment to learn more! Then as more is uncovered, the questions get bigger. What's that? What's THAT? Where is he? How will he fix that problem? Well, he can do some bigger experiments to learn more!

So in this way, the reader isn't overwhelmed, there's a sense of wonder about each new discovery, and the stakes build and build and build.

Every now and then, he will remember something, which results in the story having two timelines: one while he's an amnesiac trying to save the world and one before his adventure where Earth was falling apart. The order that the memories are revealed is pretty much chronological, which I guess isn't very accurate to memory retrieval for amnesiacs, but that means the stakes in the memories get bigger and bigger as the situation on Earth grows more and more dire. That way the stakes in both timelines track together.

But also something will be happening in the present timeline that will trigger a memory of the past that's thematically similar or that explains some of the science. At first this felt like just a convenient way to convey information. The amnesia felt superfluous and we could have just had flashbacks. However, there's a point towards the end where it all comes together and I no longer felt this way at all, and at that point I started raving about structure. The dual time periods start to give tension to each other, like when we figure out enough to know how the story in the past ends: with disaster. Then there's tension when you learn more about what's at stake. The dual time periods mean that there's some interesting explorations of themes from different points in our main character's life. There's juxtaposition between personal tragedy and global tragedy playing out in both time periods.

And I think it's awesome how all this could thrive because of the use of structure.

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