Skip to main content

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Readable, cutesy scifi. Weir writes with the same constipated wittiness of John Scalzi, which unfortunately makes the book nowhere near as good as it sounds. 

All the characters are basically the same character, they all speak the same way, and "wow," "noted," "it's a thing!" and "or something" are standard dialog items. This author can tell a competent story but he can't (yet) produce interesting characters.

A reader looking for a significant recent sci-fi work (like Cixin Liu's The Three Body Problem) would be deeply disappointed with this novel.

There is one interesting MacGuffin-type device in this book worth mentioning: by giving his main character amnesia, the author has the magical ability to endow him with any technical skill or technical knowledge he needs: just narrate (or have the main character himself "realize") that he already knew it before. For example, if the main character needs to do a spacewalk, make him already highly trained at it, and then have the amnesiac character say to himself "I must have practiced this a lot." It's an interesting device that gives the author much more flexibility to deal with plotting problems, but it flattens the main character into a type of a Mary Sue (or "Competent Man") with superpowers.

More Posts

Empire, Incorporated by Philip J. Stern

Bluntly: this book is worth your attention if two things are true: 1) you're interested in the history of the early joint stock companies and their role in colonial history, and 2) you're willing to put up with a long, cluttered and disorganized book. Empire, Incorporated doesn't know what it really wants to be, and as a result author Philip Stern finds himself scattered everywhere, throwing at the wall anything and everything to do with mercantile-era joint stock companies. The book simply crawls with minutia to the point where even its own author at times gets his own lines crossed and loses his own thread. [A quick  affiliate link to Amazon  for those readers who would like to support my work here: if you purchase your Amazon products via any affiliate link from this site, or from my sister site  Casual Kitchen , I will receive a small affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you!] I'll critique the work more in another paragraph, but let's first ...
Read more

Understanding Human Nature by Alfred Adler

A difficult book, in part because Adler isn't all that good at expressing his ideas: he's a practitioner, not a writer, and it shows. Further, I believe Understanding Human Nature has more in direct value than direct value: the reader has to move from what the book teaches to a layer of second-order insights. I'll explain what I mean in a moment. First a quick summary of the book's core themes and ideas. According to Adler, we all have a psyche, formed and largely fixed in childhood, and that psyche has an ulterior psychological goal. For most of us, unfortunately, that goal takes the form of striving for power, control, attention, or superiority. Throughout the book Adler gives examples where peoples' psyche-driven strivings cause suffering, both for themselves as well as everyone else in their blast radius. Most of us will likely resist Adler's claim that to understand other people and their motivations you must first understand their psyches' "ulter...
Read more

The Practicing Mind by Thomas M. Sterner

This short and humble book will be priceless to an open-minded reader.  It discusses how to cultivate present-moment awareness, how to focus on process rather than product, how to make haste slowly, and many other practices that are increasingly indispensable in our haste-filled, results-oriented modern era. Several years ago I heard an unforgettable story from the owner of a language school in Santiago, Chile. She told me about a disgruntled customer who had been taking Spanish classes for weeks, but wasn't getting any better. This student complained, loudly, "I paid my money. Where is my Spanish?" This story stuck with me for well over a decade because it's a metaphor for how people confuse buying something with learning something, confuse "taking a class" with actually learning a domain and developing a sincere practice of that domain. We've productized so much of life in the modern era that people think they can buy language fluency off the shelf, li...
Read more