Power in a crisis: Project Hail Mary, by Andy "The Book Is Better Than The Movie" Weir

 Obviously, read this one.  Artemis was fun, if a bit of a letdown after Weir's more famous debut novel, but Project Hail Mary is something of a return to form, if also something of a return to familiar ground.  Regardless, the man can write, and I'll forgive a lot when there's good writing.  I'm a bit late getting to Weir's new one, but whatever.  If you are familiar with Weir's oeuvre, you mostly associate him with "hard science fiction," and the trials and tribulations of some dude trying to get the laws of the universe to play nice in a survival situation.  Yeah, that's basically what Project Hail Mary is, but I wanna ramble about politics.  It's what I do.

So here's the spiel.  Aliens arrive from the Tau Ceti system!  Only, they're just microbes (eventually called "astrophage"), and they're very bad.  They have a reproductive life cycle that involves going back and forth between the sun and Venus, feeding on the energy of the sun so much that they actually dim its output measurably.  That's bad.  Humanity has a couple of decades before the Earth cools too much for humanity to survive.  Solve the problem, or everyone dies.

At first, some astronomers just notice some weird IR light from the astrophage, and then after close study, a very tiny reduction in output from the sun.  Then... panic.

So we get our POV character, Ryland Grace.  Grace is a former biologist, drummed out of academia for claiming that you can have life without water.  He eventually becomes a junior high school science teacher.  Yet, because of the shit he wrote before leaving academia, he gets sucked into the oh-fuck-what-now project.

The project goes as follows.  Astronomers look around at nearby stars, and notice that nearby stars have also indicated astrophage infestations.  All except Tau Ceti.  So, they put together a project to build an interstellar ship to go to Tau Ceti, find out why, and send some probes back to Earth with the research findings in the slim hope that maybe there will be an answer that can save whoever has survived that long, keeping in mind that fuckloads of people will have died by then as the Earth cools and bad shit happens.  Grace, for various reasons, gets shoved onto that ship against his will, the other two astronauts die en route, and Grace has to figure everything out with the help of an alien he meets from the Eridani system once he gets to Tau Ceti.

How could any of this happen?  Blah, blah, engineering advances, but the science fiction premise even beyond the leap in engineering is the astrophage-powered engine that lets the ship travel at near-light speed.  That still means years will pass on Earth during Grace's trip, and more years will pass as the probes make their way back to Earth with the solution, so fuckloads die while the Earth cools, famine, war, and so on.  All off-page.  Also, relativity is a thing.

The book, of course, is just told from Grace's perspective, so it's all about his investigation into the astrophage, and how to stop it.  Weir is good, and it's fun, although I'm sure various physical scientists can pick apart aspects of his biology, physics, chemistry and so forth.  I don't give too many fucks about it.

Let's talk politics.

This is an apocalypse scenario.  A true apocalypse scenario.  Not one of those SJW fake apocalypse scenarios that leads to mass protests about bullshit.  No.  The real deal.  End of human life.  All life?  Well, go Google "snowball Earth."  Life is persistent.  Tardigrades and shit?  Yeah, somethin' could live, but not us.  Tardigrades are the only things harder to kill than bad ideas, so even if Grace failed, life would likely persist in some form, but petty SJW bullshit might, might finally be revealed even to them for the petty bullshit that it always was.

Or, they'd be so obsessed with the "social justice" issues in the first five years of astrophage as to pay no attention to the fact that there are only a few decades for all of fucking humanity.

Oh, who am I kidding?  These are SJWs.  We know what they'd do.

But that's not what happens.  Here's what happens.  Behind the scenes, all of the governments of the world get together and say, we're all fucked if we don't create Project Hail Mary, and throw every single resource behind it.  Tau Ceti may have an answer to astrophage.  Its output has not diminished.  Why not?  (Answer:  astrophage originated there, so there is a stable ecosystem there, which includes a predator microbe.)  We need to go find out, get the answer, and implement it or everyone fucking dies.

So they put everything else aside, throw every resource in existence at the problem, and hand all power to...

Eva Stratt.

Who the fuck is Eva Stratt?  Actually, Weir gives the reader almost no information about her.  She was a history major in college, which does not mean that you should major in history.  (Kids, don't major in history.)  She majored in history because she didn't know what to do.  Which... is generally what produces a history major.  Mainly, she's just the person selected by the world governments to be, essentially, dictator of the world with a strange lack of intersectionality cred.  I mean, yes, she's a woman, but she's white, and not stated to be LGBTQ, or anything like that, so in the modern era of woke, sci-fi writing, Weir went way the fuck out on a limb.  If his name hadn't been "Andy Weir," the editor would have forced him to give her more intersectionality, or this thing couldn't have been published.  Regardless, basically, Stratt is just... dictator of the world.  The world governments got together and said, this is the end of the world, unless everyone acts with such rapidity and unidirectionality that it only works with one person having absolute, unchecked authority.

AKA, a dictator.

Eva Stratt is dictator of the world.

And nobody outside Project Hail Mary really knows who the fuck she is.  (And even inside, they know nothing about her.)

OK, time to nit-pick.  You knew I had to do this, right?  I mean, Weir does this, I'm-a-scientist, I'm-so-persnickety thing, and then he fucks up basic law and politics.  He does it a bunch, but here's an example.  When putting together everything for the ship-- the Hail Mary-- Stratt puts together a database of basically every book ever, because the team won't know what they'll need.  Um... copyright law?  So, lawsuit ensues.  The project gets taken to court, and Stratt shows up with an attitude of total dismissiveness.  The plaintiffs' lawyers start their opening statement, and Stratt just cuts them off-- no lawyers, just her (um, no)-- and claims the following:

Congress passed a law giving her immunity from all criminal laws, and the President gave her a preemptive pardon.  OK, so the first part doesn't work.  Unconstitutional.  The preemptive pardon?  Questionable at best, and untested, and it wouldn't get the case thrown out of court, it would be a basis for legal appeals, but...

None of this is fucking relevant because a lawsuit is civil law, not criminal law.

A copyright violation is not a criminal offense.  It is a civil violation, so when you are brought to court in a lawsuit, you are facing a civil lawsuit.  Pardons don't apply, nor does the unconstitutional immunity from criminal law.

Weir wanted Stratt to have a badass scene where she says fuck you to the whole legal system, and tells the courts that she has an actual, literal army behind her, and if you want to threaten an overthrow of the legal system, you can have troops storm a courtroom, but you are overthrowing the legal system.  The central issue here, from my political science/legal perspective, is that Weir did not grasp the difference between criminal and civil law.

Given what Stratt was doing, was she violating copyright law?  Fuck, yes!  Might there have been some mechanism to protect Project Hail Mary from the inevitable lawsuits to follow?  Potentially, but what Weir wrote into the book didn't do it, because Weir may have spent a fuckload of time thinking about biology and physics and such, but none whatsoever thinking about the structure of the law.

And this is a thing that bugs me.  Obviously.

The deprecation of political science.  Politics?  Oh, that's easy!  Um, no, it's not.  This?  This is actually basic, and Weir got it wrong out of fucking laziness.  Out of the belief that when it came to politics and law, he didn't even have to fucking try.  He'll spend hours upon hours working out minor details of relativistic physics and engineering, but looking up basic civics?  Why bother?

Um... how about to be as persnickety about politics and law as one is about the physical sciences?

A few authors are.  Not many, but a few, and at this point, we make the obligatory reference to Neal Stephenson, and specifically, Seveneves.  Let's do a bit of compare and contrast, shall we?

In Project Hail Mary, Weir manages to save himself quite a lot with a tight focus on the perspective of Ryland Grace.  Mostly, we don't see the political machinations behind the empowerment of Eva Stratt.  (Where we do, Weir sucks.)  It just happens.  And there is logic to it, but logic of the simplest variety.  In a crisis, speed is of the essence, and so power must be delegated to someone to act quickly.  There are things for which it helps to have a graduate education in "Political Science" (capitalized for emphasis), read the journals, study econometrics and game theory, and blah-fucking-blah.  Yet there are some things that are sufficiently elemental that one can understand them without that degree, and that have not been debunked by empirical political science, even though I reject damn-near any claim justified on the basis of "common sense," or, that refusal to explain one's self on the basis of a fully-specified logical argument.  (Seriously.  Fuck "common sense," and anyone who dodges the responsibility to defend a claim by relying on the phrase.  Go read Paine.  That's not even what he was doing.)

A single decision-maker-- a dictator-- can act more quickly than any committee.  People are often lazy, and generically refer to the president as "the Commander In Chief," but that's not the job in general terms.  The president is the commander in chief of the armed forces.  That is part of the job, and the point is that the military must be run hierarchically, with one person at the top.  For obvious reasons.  Something like the astrophage scenario turns the whole world into a situation where it needs one person, and not just one person, but one person who can act quickly.  More quickly, even, than the commander in chief of the armed forces.

But how do you get there?  And where is the pushback?

The tight focus on Grace means we don't see it.  But if we are generous readers, we can permit it.

In contrast, consider Seveneves.  In Seveneves, Stephenson begins with the greatest first line in novelistic history.  "The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason."

Seriously.  Stop and appreciate that.  Best first line ever.

This sets off a chain of events that will lead to moon fragments raining down through the atmosphere and making the Earth uninhabitable.  The only way to save any fragment of humanity is to get as many people as possible into orbit, away from the impending hellscape.  Nearly everyone will die.  Everything, then, becomes a project to save some scrap of humanity.  But whom?  With such limited capacity, you get fighting between nations, and nuclear weapons enter the picture, and it's a brutal fight.

Here's the thing.  If one country decides that they're getting excluded from sending up enough people, and they try messing with the launch schedule, what do you do?  Nuke 'em?

Yup.  Venezuela gets fucking nuked in a fight over this.  They're dead anyway, right?  This is the kind of thing that plays out in plain view in Seveneves.  They don't get everything together, appoint an all-powerful world dictator, and work cohesively together.  Instead, the masses sit around watching the reality show of the ISS while everything starts to deteriorate with impending doom.  And hey, if you nuke a country that's fucked anyway, tomato, to-mah-to, right?  Whereas from Venezuela's perspective, they're all dead, so if they can't manage to get some "representation," who the fuck cares?

In Project Hail Mary, we see Stratt, and we see her throw around her power.  What we don't see is any conflict behind the scenes, either leading up to or in response to her.  Well, there's that court scene, and that fucking sucked, but I'm talking "nuke Venezuela" type conflict.  Seveneves-type conflict.  Stratt even gives Grace a lecture about how civilization is fucked because conflict over food will turn life on Earth into hell long before snowball Earth kills everyone anyway.  Yet... we don't see it.

Rationally, in a crisis, there is a need to act quickly and decisively.  In Seveneves, the world acts incoherently, and barely saves any scrap of humanity.  What we see in Project Hail Mary is unchecked power, exercised by Stratt, which is what would be necessary.  Yet how did that happen?  That's the trick.

And of course, as we continue living through a crisis unresolved, where idiots have been told to refuse vaccines as a matter of tribal identity, thereby perpetuating a pandemic, the idea of coherent action looks ever more absurd.  Of course, one might ask whether COVID was simply insufficiently virulent to prompt rational action.  As we see in the study of economic behavior, rationality increases as the stakes increase.  Mortality is a big thing, but with a 2% mortality rate, COVID is actually far more mild than many worst-case scenarios.  What if we had a pandemic with a 10% mortality rate?  20%?

50%?

How fucking stupid would these assholes continue to be as the mortality rate of the disease itself increased?  Russian Roulette is among the stupidest games a person can play-- dumber, even, than football-- but the more bullets there are in the chamber, even the most imbecilic and reckless fools walk away unless it's a didi mao situation.

Are we there yet?  Are we there yet?

Some music.  "Space Kitty Blues," by Eric McFadden, under the moniker of "Shake Well."  Why?  I dunno.  Weird guy.  Great musician, weird guy.