Tag Archives: Project Hail Mary

No Need for Good and Evil

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One story-telling aspect I’ve always struggled with is the demand for delineating between good and evil, which is what makes blockbusters such as The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Project Hail Mary or anything in the Marvel Universe unpalatable for me.

“You and me are good people,” Rocky says.

“Yeah.” I smile. “I suppose we are.”

The technocrats would have us believe that we cannot come to terms with our highly problematic selves nor accept that we will always have needs and desires that will damage us throughout our lives. Another way to picture this is thinking of a tsunami, Hollywood offering a magnificent wave cresting in slow motion over a city instead of the insidiousness of the thing, relentlessly rising, permeating everything, and then staying.

Hurricane Sandy, Downtown Manhattan, 2012

I recently went to see John Proctor is the Villain on Broadway, which also tends toward sorting people as good or evil, although it does allow for a gray area in the end, those who doubt, those we really don’t know, who we tend to judge but now might resist that temptation and think a fraction more.

Ari Aster’s black comedy Eddington digs deeper. Set in the good old Covid days, the film attacks both polarities – a sheriff refusing to wear a mask, a mysteriously glamorous Antifa plane, along with a barrage of other triggering images and dialogue – encouraging the audience to engage while offering little to no satisfaction in the end.

I suppose that is what I appreciate most about an effective narrative. It isn’t the dream of being carried off into a magical world but rather the demanding process of being made to think and realize something other than what I thought I already knew.

My “Hail Mary” Complex

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I was genuinely excited to read Andy Weir’s highly-acclaimed Project Hail Mary, hoping for inspiration on improving the writing, structure and marketability of my own speculative work, The Cx Trilogy.

My positive outlook waned after a few pages. It wasn’t just the undeveloped writing nor the caricatured characters – much of which seem at first draft level – but more the lack of an engaging narrative. While the premise was compelling – why is the sun getting dimmer and how can this be stopped? – there was little development of the protagonist and his journey beyond a barrage of scientific details.

I’ll cite examples to mitigate your opinon of me as a bitter unpublished author. Below that is the room I woke up in. The one with my dead friends. I sniffle and wipe a tear away. Initially, I thought this was intended as sarcasm, but I soon realized that this was a genuine expression of Ryland Grace’s emotion.

Each of them kind of look like a beetle. Each beetle has a name up top: “John”, “Paul”, “George” and “Ringo”. I’m on a suicide mission. John, Paul, George and Ringo get to go home, but my long and winding road ends here. This sense of humor permeates the book.

My students didn’t swear at me. Their squabbles were usually resolved within a few minutes, either by a teacher-enforced handshake or detention. And somewhat selfish but here it is: They looked up to me. I missed that respect. Mr. Weir has clearly never spent a day as a teacher in his life.

I could go on, but why bury myself even deeper? Mr. Weir has achieved incredible commercial success and knows how to market his work, while I’m an unpublished failure who teaches high school…which is what makes this difficult to process.

I genuinely cannot understand what it is about Mr. Weir’s work that is compelling to such a large audience. And what it is about my own writing that seems destined to never get beyond the literary agent’s automatic reply: Unfortunately, your project does not sound like a fit for me at this time, and so I will have to pass. Boo hoo. Poor me.