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<p></p> <p class="has-text-align-right">“I try to be scientifically accurate. That’s my whole shtick.”<br /><span style="font-size: 85%;">—Andy Weir</span></p> <p class="has-text-align-right">“You Keep Using That Word. I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.”<br /><span style="font-size: 85%;">—Inigo Montoya</span></p> <p class="has-text-align-right">“We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors.”<br /><span style="font-size: 85%;">—Stanislaw Lem, <em>Solaris</em></span></p> </p> <p class="has-text-align-center"><strong>Lers of Spoi.</strong></p> <p class="has-text-align-center"><strong>You Have Been Warned.</strong></p> </p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="alignright size-large is-resized"><a href="https://www.rifters.com/crawl/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Rocky_Movie.webp"><img alt="" class="wp-image-11660" height="576" src="https://www.rifters.com/crawl/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Rocky_Movie-1024x576.webp" style="width: 343px; height: auto;" width="1024" /></a></figure> </div> <p>As the credits rolled at the end of “Project Hail Mary”, I turned to the The BUG and said “Well, another story where the alien turns out to be a human in a rubber suit.” The BUG shook her head: “Not a Human. A smart goofy golden retriever.”</p> <p>We weren’t talking about morphology, of course. We’re decades past the point where movies had to put actors in rubber suits to portray aliens. But intellectually. Psychologically. Rocky—an anaerobic, blind, echolocating smart exoskeleton hosting a colony of alien microbes from <s>Vulcan</s> 40 Eridani—turns out to be just a <s>guy</s> super-smart golden retriever. The vastly different environments of Erid and Earth—the radically different morphologies of the life that evolved on each world—have somehow converged on the same overall personality template. I’ve encountered Republicans with a more alien mindset than Rocky.</p> <p>I hesitate to admit this, but I actually liked this movie quite a bit the second time I saw it. (The first time, I thought it was the most scientifically-illiterate pro-science polemic I’d ever seen. I calmed down a bit for the rewatch.) It does a number of things very well. The first act nails the sense of isolation, of loneliness in an infinite void. Ryan Ghosling as Ryland Grace is, as always, a sympathetic protagonist. Making him a sniveling coward who has to be dragged kicking and screaming into a suicide mission is a refreshing departure from the usual Hollywood hero who stoically accepts his fate for the sake of Humanity. The music soundtrack works way better than it has any right to. Space is mercifully silent: a small detail, but one that so very few movies have ever bothered to respect. The movie is never boring. It at least pretends to care about science, unapologetically portrays the scientific process as a <em>good</em> thing, something that <em>works</em>, bitches. Christ knows that’s a message that needs as big a megaphone as you can find these days.</p> <p>The movie also undercuts that position by seemingly regarding its target audience as a bunch of incurious imbeciles who’d rather be coddled than challenged.</p> <p>Speaking as one of the few modern authors—<s>maybe the only other?</s>^{^{<a href="https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=11659#post-11659-footnote-0" id="post-11659-footnote-ref-0">[1]</a>}}(nope. Just one of the few)— to have published a story about alien life-forms taking up residence in the sun^{^{<a href="https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=11659#post-11659-footnote-1" id="post-11659-footnote-ref-1">[2]</a>}} (right down to consequent Earthly perils due to solar cooling), I feel at least partially qualified to weigh in on the movie even though I haven’t read the novel. I have, at least, gone down a variety of rabbit holes exploring the scientific underpinnings of <em>Project Hail Mary</em> (we cite the novel using <em>italics</em>; when talking about the movie, &#8220;quotes&#8221;). I have read/watched pieces both gushing and dispassionate, ranging from the credible (a piece in the New York Times) to the sloppy (a “A PhD-Level Breakdown of Every Organism, Equation, Material, Scene, and Production Decision”, which appears to have been written by an LLM). I have a sense of which elements from <em>Project Hail Mary</em> made it into “Project Hail Mary”, and—more tellingly—which ones didn’t.</p> <p>Movie first. Consider the main driver of the plot: a microbe composed “almost entirely of water” whose natural habitat is—wait for it—the surface of the sun. Also the atmosphere of Venus; it actively navigates between the two in the kind of ongoing feeding-ground/breeding-ground migration you’d see in humpback whales. (Hell, for all we know it lives on humpback whales too; the movie has the little buggers bopping around on Earth without any trouble.)</p> <p>The movie recognizes the fundamental absurdity of this. Grace is recruited to the Hail Mary project because of his theories about non-water-based life, which the alien microbe clearly must be because “It lives on the surface of the sun. Does that sound like a water-based life form to you?” Soon enough we discover that astrophage <em>is</em>, in fact, water-based. Which should, as the movie has already acknowledged, be absolutely impossible for a denizen of the solar photosphere.</p> <p>The movie never acknowledges the paradox. The whole question of how an astrophage can live where it does is never answered, never even mentioned again.</p> <p>They could have answered it. Weir did, in the novel. His answer wasn’t perfect. He pulls something called “super cross-sectionality” out of his ass: a property that, instantiated in a cell membrane, traps neutrinos (which can then be harnessed as an endogenous power source and heat sink) and which is “opaque to all radiation”. Super-cross-sectionality is the secret sauce that allows astrophages to stay just below the boiling point of water no matter where they are.</p> <p>Given that your average neutrino can’t be bothered to even notice when it’s passing through the mass of an entire planet, we’re clearly talking one magical membrane here, and you know what? I’ll give him that, even though the premise makes as much sense as saying <em>Hey, these flatworms are just like the ones we have on Earth except they evolved with microscopic fusion reactors inside ’em</em>. SF is full of things that don’t exist (or at least, haven’t been discovered yet) in service of a good story. Intrinsic fields. Warp cores and jump gates. Alderson drives. Hell, I’m probably gonna pull some kind of fictitious particle out of my own ass to keep the Sunflowers stories consistent (if any of the cosmologists I’ve reached out to ever get back to me, that is).</p> <p>Now, once you’ve invented new rules—no matter how batshit—you’re obligated to follow them, at least if you purport to be writing “Hard SF”. That’s the point of the whole exercise: posit a scenario, play out the logical consequences. If astrophages are opaque to all forms of radiation, then they’re perfectly shielded; which is to say, they’re perfectly <em>blind</em>. There’s no way to navigate to Venus without opening the windows at least a crack, and the moment you do that anywhere near the sun you’re (very badly burned) toast. The same miracle that enables one facet of astrophage biology excludes another.</p> <p>Again: I’ve not read the novel. It’s possible that Weir had an answer to that too, one the essays and videos I’ve digested simply didn’t mention. But even if he did screw that particular pooch, at least the dude put some thought into it. Not a great solution, but at least the problem wasn’t completely ignored in the book.</p> <p>So, having already highlighted the issue in the screenplay, the producers could have spared a line or two of dialog to slot in Weir’s solution. Apparently, though, questions like <em>Wait a second…how does a eukaryotic cell survive on the surface of the sun?</em> were considered too trivial, too irrelevant, to warrant mention in the adaptation. <em>The audience won’t care</em>, the studio seemed to be thinking. <em>The audience will be bored. The audience is too dumb to even ask the question</em>.</p> <p>And the studio was right. I’ve read no shortage of raves about “Project Hail Mary”. Many of them focus on how accurate its science is; Weir himself has spoken often and at length about the research he did, the equations he solved, how very <em>rigorous</em> the whole production is. <em>There’s a market for intelligent hard science fiction</em>, people are saying. <em>We’re not niche any more. “PHM” proves it.</em></p> <p>I beg to differ.</p> <p>I could witter on about this or that technical error showing that &#8220;PHM&#8221;’s producers didn’t do their Hard-SF homework (How can Rocky parse videos on a flatscreen when its echolocation needs 3D topography to bounce off? How can the <em>Hail Mary</em> make it past 90% lightspeed when blueshift ablation would have melted the whole ship to slag at less than half that speed? How could Grace plot an intercept course to Rocky’s ship without even knowing what masses to scribble on his white board?). But my problem with the movie is more fundamental, more—philosophical—than a list of technical gripes.</p> <p>Put simply: I don’t think people love this movie because it’s Hard-SF. They love it because it’s comforting. It feels good. And while I don’t have any objection to feel-good movies in principle, “<em>Project Hail Mary</em>” brands itself as far more than that, and I fear the brand suffers as a result.</p> <p>Which brings us back to Rocky.</p> <p>Rocky is, biologically, a mindblowingly imaginative creation. I’d put it on a par with the aliens in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s <em>Shroud</em>. Rocky isn’t even the alien itself: the aliens are a specialized, non-sapient metacolony of microbes living within an inorganic chassis that evolved through purely Darwinian processes. Rocky’s brain is the inorganic autopilot in charge of that chassis. Grace is talking to a Waymo, not its passengers (who aren’t even multicellular). This is also a pretty cool way of way of getting around the whole question of how complex multicellularity could have evolved in an anaerobic environment in the first place. It didn’t; all the macrostructures are inorganic. (I wish I’d thought of that when I was writing <em>Blindsight</em>. I could have dispensed with the whole <em>they sprint their whole lives</em> shtick.)</p> <figure class="wp-block-image alignleft size-large is-resized"><a href="https://www.rifters.com/crawl/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/655239624_18545739220070480_8381335919615781167_n-1.jpg"><img alt="" class="wp-image-11667" height="1024" src="https://www.rifters.com/crawl/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/655239624_18545739220070480_8381335919615781167_n-1-984x1024.jpg" style="width: 309px; height: auto;" width="984" /></a><figcaption class="wp-element-caption" style="font-size: 70%;">I mean, great, right? (Image by &#8220;<a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DWT8-DLkQEG/">Topherstoll</a>&#8220;)</figcaption></figure> <p>Imagine such an entity: product of an environment so corrosive, so hyperbaric, that xenon can be forged into metal. A powered faceless exoskeleton with mercury for blood and two independent circulatory systems, that perceives reality through sonar and magnetic fields. Radially symmetrical, so no sense of forward/backward, right or left. Egg-laying predatory hermaphrodite. Dual musculatures: one piezoelectric, one that runs off thermal gradients, both of which shut down entirely during dormancy. A crystalline optical computer for a brain. Blind to all EM; unaware even of the existence of light. These are but a few of an Eridian&#8217;s truly alien characteristics.</p> <p>Now try to imagine the cognitive reality emerging from such an entity. Give me your best odds that such a mindset would converge on “friendly golden retriever”.</p> <p>If I were to go the Hard-SF route— posit the scenario, interrogate the consequences— I’d wonder whether Rocky would even be sane by the time the <em>Hail Mary</em> coasted into orbit. One of the <em>least</em> alien aspects of Erid biology is the complete paralysis they undergo while asleep; they’re profoundly vulnerable to predators/enemies at such times, and can’t simply wake up at the first unexpected noise. So they are compelled to sleep communally, at least one Eridian always on watch while others are dormant. This would be baked into their very natures for as long as they’ve existed as a species: you do not, you <em>cannot</em> sleep alone. And yet Rocky is the sole survivor of a mission gone catastrophically pear-shaped; it could have been forced to sleep unguarded for months, years, before company arrived. What would that do to a being whose fundamental species hardwiring equates solitary sleeping with mortal danger? Rocky would be traumatized at the very least, suffering some kind of nervous breakdown. Rocky could be insane—downright psychotic—before the movie even started. That’s just one small ramification of Weir&#8217;s premise to get you started. Others are left as an exercise for the reader.</p> <p>“Project Hail Mary” is not bad by any means. As I say, I enjoyed it. And if it was just being pitched as a light-hearted feel-good movie I’d just say, go with it. Mission accomplished. But that’s not how it’s being pimped. It’s being described as smart, rigorous, <em>hard</em> SF. Its rigor and empiricism gets thrust in our faces—“Built on Solid Science”, “science that either exists today or could exist given the right conditions”, “this story is packed with real science!”—like copies of The Watchtower from those pests that just won&#8217;t get the fuck off your doorstep. And sure, I’ll buy the equations are correct. I’ll buy that Weir calculated how many kilotonnes of astrophage was required to get to Tau Ceti, and how much time would dilate en route (even if the ship would have melted at those speeds).</p> <p>But here’s the thing: while he showed his work, he didn’t follow where it led. We scribbled on the whiteboard; we witnessed the arduous process by which one makes painstaking first contact. We used Science to strip away the mystery, layer by layer, brought ourselves face-to-face with this profoundly alien intelligence, evolved under conditions we could scarcely imagine…</p> <p>…Only to discover it wasn’t all that alien after all. It was like us in a crab suit. It’s so much like us we get each other’s jokes. It’s so much like us that Eridians have their <em>own fucking elementary schools, where little Eridian younglings jump eagerly up and down with their hands raised, hoping the teacher will call on them</em>…</p> <p>Science is a powerful tool. It can help us parse the furthest reaches of the universe if we practice it properly. But this story—this paragon of <em>Hard-SF</em>, this bit of a genre that’s defined by looking unflinchingly at a scenario and asking <em>what are the ramifications</em>—has decided that the answer is People Are The Same All Over. &#8220;<em>Project Hail Mary</em>&#8221; instantiates the famous Lem quote: it claims to be about other worlds, but really it’s just another mirror. It has far more in common with the cozy Chambersesque Waltons-in-Space vibe than it does with Kubrick and Clarke, despite the hordes who keep polishing its Hard-SF credentials.</p> <p>And I get it. I really do. We want reassurance, we want to think that no matter how alien and threatening something might seem, underneath our differences we can all be friends. I can understand the appeal, especially nowadays. But it rings hollow when we can’t even get along with our own species. It rings hollow when we’re presented with the setup of something so breath-takingly original, only to see it squandered on a Hollywood ending. And to have this held up as some kind of icon of Hard-SF…</p> <p>…Well, “betrayed” is far too strong a word, especially for a fun movie with such a big heart. But all the people emphasizing the scientific rigor of “Project Hail Mary”, all those praising it as a work of “Hard SF”—I’d argue they’re cheapening the concept, at the very least. The movie’s carapace is Hard enough, to be sure. But look inside, and the really Hard questions go unexplored.</p> <p>And this is coming from someone who’s publicly expressed misgivings about whether the very concept of Hard-SF has much functional utility in the first place.</p> <p>Make of that what you will.</p> <hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity" /> <ol class="wp-block-list"> <li><p style="font-size: 80%;">Yeah, I know about Clarke. But that story was about <em>native</em> solar life, not invasive. Also Clarke’s story had no solar-cooling shtick. <a href="https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=11659#post-11659-footnote-ref-0">↑</a></p></li> <li><p style="font-size: 80%;">“Defective”, in the Lasksa Media/European Astrobiology Institute coproduction <em>Life Beyond Us</em>. Also forthcoming in <em>Fold Catastrophes</em>. <a href="https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=11659#post-11659-footnote-ref-1">↑</a></p></li> </ol>