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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2585 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 16, 2026

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So, what are you reading?

I've finished Al-Ghazali's Prophetic Ethics, the rather slim 20th volume of his Revival of the Religious Sciences. Most of it is a recounting of Hadith, and somewhat threadbare, since the previous 9 books had apparently dealt with the issues presented in detail. The best parts are all when Al-Ghazali speaks in his own voice, which happens rarely near the end. I suspect I'll be pouring over this one occasionally neverthless, looking for lessons to be drawn from its structure and focus.

I finished Hail Mary Project after having abandoned it some time ago. I still hated the prose but it's out (the movie) on Netflix and my sons and I can probably watch it and I wanted to have read the book. I could barely get through it due to the writing style, which clearly must be entertaining or funny for a lot of people but made me wish I was better at speed reading. The "Oh crud" type exclamations and the general sense of humor of the protagonist (and by implication, author) grated. What's that Stephen King analogy? "Like biting on tinfoil."

From the same friend I am now reading Dungeon Crawler Carl. It's okay so far but in a way that is making me realize the distance in our habits and tastes. He's a big gamer and reader of sci fi. I haven't really played a game since I quit Warcraft a decade or more ago and have only read a dozen or so sci fi books, most of those long ago. Unfortunately the narrative voice so far is somewhat similar to the protagonist in Wier's Weir's book.

I liked The Martian for what it was - a web novel released chapter by chapter that got picked up by a major publisher. I appreciated starting with a possibly absurd premise and then logically going step by step over the challenges caused by that absurd premise in a way that mostly coheres to our current understanding of science. The voice of the narrator didn't matter as much, the puzzle was fun and seeing the math explained at a popular level was nice. I think I'd give it to a high schooler about to go into AP Physics to get them psyched up.

Project Hail Mary is kind of in the same vein, but without the advantages of being a first novel. It might help introduce a teenager to basic evolutionary concepts, the suspense was decent, there was legitimate pathos with the main character only acting brave because he thought he was the kind of person to volunteer for a suicidal mission and then remembered that he wasn't a volunteer after all. In that sense it was a better novel than The Martian but that wasn't enough to make it a good novel. The movie is a better movie even though I felt it didn't do enough to foreshadow/explain the problem at the climax - the book-over did it with the explanations, the movie under-did it in exchange for some nicer visuals.

I felt it didn't do enough to foreshadow/explain the problem at the climax

Problem(s) plural ... I think. It's hard to give a movie a fair watch after reading the book, because you just naturally fill in the blanks yourself, so maybe I'm underestimating what the average movie-only audience would have picked up from the film alone.

"They screwed up the taumoeba in a way that is a mild inconvenience for Grace and utterly incapacitating for Rocky" felt like it might have had a bit of a Diabolus Ex Machina feel in the movie to anyone who hadn't already read the book's detailed explanation, and I'm betting that's the problem you're referring to, but IMHO that's not the biggest problem at the climax.

In the big problem at the climax, it felt like they took away a lot of the Diabolus-level dilemma, changing Grace's perceived cost of saving Rocky from "I will run out of food supply" to "I will just have to go to Erid instead of Earth". I get that they didn't want to change the heart of the ending, and that they did want to remove the "me-burgers", and I don't see any way to remove the resolution of the food issue without just removing the food issue entirely. But keeping a silly me-burger joke in the epilogue would have been so worth it. "Grace was a coward who wouldn't die to save Earth yet now will starve to death to save his friend" was an awesome character arc and a devastating choice for him to make. "Grace obviously goes to save his closest friend after he makes sure everyone else will be okay" hardly even felt like a dilemma.

Hoping I'm being unfair about that - did they discuss the food supply issue in the movie and I just missed it?

It's minor but my biggest annoyance was that Eridian weren't immediately putting together a massive mission to earth. I realize it was meant to be a plot point that Ryland wasn't in a hurry to go back to earth and it would have altered that plot point. But it just seemed glaringly obvious to me that the Eridian would have been putting a huge mission, arguably a aid mission, to earth as fast as possible. Wither they're long life span it makes sense to get get relations and trade going, even without a desire to help the planet of the man who saved their civilization.

Nope, neither of those dilemmas were fully explained by the movie. My husband hadn't read the book and so I asked him about what he thought of the movie and he said he liked it until the end, where he was like, "I'm sure if I rewatch I'll catch what happened with Rocky's space ship, but right now I have no clue."

Towards the beginning he asks the computer how much fuel it has but I don't remember food really coming up as a constraint.

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