Project Hail Mary

 Notes for our book club:

• Main character seems to leave burritos everywhere. In a book about him lacking food, this bugged me.
• Rocky is an interesting negative relief of the main character. Rocky is confident, Grace is not. Rocky is brave, Grace is reluctant. Rocky has little sense of individuality, Grace does. Grace has an ability to come up with creative solutions, but Rocky doesn't?
• Xenonite too convenient? Is anything else too convenient?
• Do you think Rocky threw his crewmates out into space like Grace did? Why?
• The book is like baseball. There's no time limit. It's just events and then events. It creates tensions by setting up situations and then presenting you with interesting solutions. The tension comes from the fact that you're not sure how he's going to succeed. It seems like Grace should make more mistakes than he actually does, and in a way there's also tension there. It seems somewhat unbelievable that he doesn't make more mistakes.
• The ending sort of disregards the relationship between Grace and Earth, and makes the book more about Grace's relationship with himself -- but in the end neither ending really seems to hit hard because the book was mostly about Grace's relationship with the problem being presented. Once the problem is solved and Rocky is saved, there's no reason for there to be more book.
• I like the structure of the book -- it doesn't make sense to reveal things about the character without the amnesia. It drives the flashback sequences.
• The environmentalist, Leclerc, seems a bit canned.
• The book is about countries uniting, and allows the plot to be MOSTLY about grace and his relationship with the truth. I like that it shows how simple our current problems are; we are humans but we don't see each other as the same. Rocky doesn't have this problem.
• It's interesting that most of the book seems plausible except for astrophage and xenonite. It makes it seem like we're actually really close to interstellar travel. Exciting!

Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood's End, 1953

 ...it was in the art of the cartoon film, with its limitless possibilities, that New Athens had made its most successful experiments. The hundred years since the time of Disney had still left much undone in this most flexible of all mediums. On the purely realistic side, results could be produced indistinguishable from actual photography -- much to the contempt of those who were developing the cartoon along abstract lines.

The group of artists and scientists that had so far done least was the one that had attracted the greatest interest -- and the greatest alarm. This was the team working on "total identification". The history of the cinema gave the clue to their actions. First sound, then color, then stereoscopy, then Cinerama, had made the old "moving pictures" more and more like reality itself. Where was the end of the story? Surely, the final stage would be reached when the audience forgot it was an audience, and became part of the action. To achieve this would involve simulation of all the senses, and perhaps hypnosis as well, but many believed it to be practical. When the goal was attained, there would be an enormous enrichment of human experience. A man could become -- for a while, at least -- any other person, and could take part in any conceivable adventure, real or imaginary. he could even be a plant or an animal, if it proved possible to capture and record the sense impressions of other living creatures. And when the "program" was over, he would have acquired a memory as vivid as any experience in his actual life -- indeed indistinguishable from reality itself.

The prospect was dazzling. Many also found it terrifying, and hoped that the enterprise would fail. But they knew in their hearts that once science had declared a thing possible, there was no escape from its eventual realization...

This, then, was New Athens and some of its dreams. It hoped to become what the old Athens might have been had it possessed machines instead of slaves, science instead of superstition. But it was much too early yet to tell if the experiment would succeed.