I probably won't go to the cinema to watch Project Hail Mary. I only saw The Martian on my own TV, too, and I only watched it once.
The way Andy Weir builds his stories is rather boring to me. I'm not into science fiction because I like science and engineering (I do, but that's not the point), I'm interested in how human societies change through science and technology, and how future societies might be radically different from anything we have seen in the past. That's probably also why I like Star Trek much better than Star Wars.
I'm not watching SF films and TV series to see epic space battles, I want to see how people might live in a world where everything can be replicated for free (or at very low cost), where changing your sex or anything about your body is trivial, where today's religions have either crumbled into nothingness or evolved into something strange. I want to see today's society through a strange lens. I want to see what horrors will grow out of today's technologies and power structures if things just go on like usual for another 50 years. I watch and read SF to show me possible new worlds, possible futures, good and bad, not just some Robinson engineer techbro far away from Earth somehow saving the day or at least himself. That can be interesting, too, but only if the story also shows the future in which the story takes place as a strange and profoundly different world.
I will probably eventually download a pirated copy of Project Hail Mary and watch it, but I don't expect much of it. I don't understand why Andy Weir is so popular. He doesn't care about his human characters at all, he doesn't care about the world in which they live, he only cares about engineering challenges.
#AndyWeir #ProjectHailMary #TheMartian #sciencefiction #scifi #sf





