Project Hail Mary Is Not Hard Science Fiction
Project Hail Mary Is Not Hard Science Fiction By Robert Korczynski The most successful space film in years, Ryan Gosling’s Project Hail Mary has been talked about by critics as a triumph of hard science fiction. But is it? The only reason they are calling it that is because it is "competency porn," an industry term for movies where the protagonist is seen working out math on whiteboards, and because the story comes from Andy Weir, the author of The Martian, which is hard science fiction because it uses technologies that we have today, and a planet that we can actually get to. By doing hard science fiction about Mars, Weir effectively ended more than a century of speculation that we would find alien life in our own backyard. That started with Jules Verne and H.G. Wells more than a century ago, who wrote stories about civilizations on Mars and Venus because both planets are technically in the Goldilocks zone of our star, at least as far as the definitions we used to look for ne...