Posts Tagged Fiction
What ‘Project Hail Mary’ Gets Right about Science
Posted by Bill Storage in History of Science on February 11, 2026
Most reviews of Project Hail Mary focus on the science, the plot, or the plausibility of first contact. This one asks a different question: what does the story assume science is?
Andy Weir’s novel, and the upcoming film adaptation, treats science not as individual brilliance but as a coordination technology, a way fallible minds synchronize their guesses about the world. That framing quietly explains why an alien civilization could master interstellar travel while missing radiation, and why human weakness turns out to be an epistemic strength.
This review looks at Project Hail Mary as a rare piece of science fiction where epistemology is central. Things like:
- Science as method rather than facts
- Individual intelligence vs collective knowledge
- Why discovery depends on social structure, not genius
- Rocky’s cognition and epistemic blind spots
- Why humans “stumble” into deep structure
Most people think science is something smart individuals discover. Project Hail Mary argues the opposite: science works because none of us is very smart alone. This idea is the structure that holds the whole story together.
Science is not a property of brains. It’s a coordination technology we built to synchronize our predictions about nature. Very few novels even notice this distinction. Project Hail Mary, a 2021 novel by Andy Weir and a 2026 film starring Ryan Gosling, puts it at the center of the story. The question here isn’t whether Weir gets the science right, but what the story assumes science is.
I’m going to give you a philosopher-of-science take on why Hail Mary works when so much science fiction doesn’t.
Most science fiction forgets about epistemology, the theory of knowledge. How do we know? What counts as evidence? What methods justify belief? Epistemology sounds abstract, but it’s basic enough that it could be taught to sixth graders, and once was. Project Hail Mary never uses the word, and its characters never discuss it explicitly. Instead, epistemology is the plot – which is oddly refreshing.
Every observation and every conclusion in the book flows from astronaut Ryland Grace’s constrained first-person perspective. Weir keeps epistemology inside the story rather than lecturing about it. Walter Miller gestured at something similar in his 1959 A Canticle for Leibowitz, where the complementary mental habits of Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell are mirrored without ever being named. Insiders catch it, outsiders don’t need to. Weir pushes that technique much further. Epistemology becomes the engine that moves the story forward. I hope the movie retains this aspect of the book. Weir’s early praise of the movie is a good sign.
From a literary standpoint, science fiction has mostly lagged behind other genres in abandoning omniscient reporting of mental states. Weir avoids this almost to a fault. Grace knows only what he can operationalize. Awakening from a coma, even his own memories arrive like experimental results rather than introspection. This feels less like literary minimalism than engineering discipline. Knowledge is revealed through constrained interaction with apparatus, not through authorial mind-reading. Bradbury told us what characters thought because he was taught that was realism. Weir understands that realism in science is procedural.
Reactions to Hail Mary are mixed but mostly positive. Many readers praise its ingenuity while criticizing its thin prose, quippy dialogue, and engineered optimism. Weir has admitted that scientific accuracy takes priority over literary polish. Grace can feel like a bundle of dad jokes attached to a physics degree. But that tone does more work than it seems. We are, after all, inside the head of a physics nerd solving problems under extreme constraint.
The novel openly teaches science: pendulums, gravitation, momentum. Less openly, it teaches philosophy of science. That second lesson is never announced. It’s embedded.
Grace encounters an extraterrestrial engineer named Rocky. Rocky evolved in an ammonia atmosphere far denser and hotter than Earth’s. His blood is mercury. He has no eyes, five legs, speaks in chords, is the size of a dog but weighs 400 pounds, and can only interact with Grace across physical barriers. The differences pile up gradually.
Rocky is astonishingly capable. His memory is perfect. His computation is nearly instantaneous. And yet his civilization never discovered radiation. It’s a blind spot with lethal consequences. They developed interstellar travel without any theory of relativity. Rocky is not inferior to humans. He is orthogonal. Weir refuses to treat language, vision, or the ability to abstract as universal yardsticks. Rocky’s cognition is constrained by temperature, pressure, materials science, acoustics, and survival heuristics that are alien in the literal sense.
Interstellar travel without knowledge of relativity sounds implausible until you think like a historian of science. Discovery is path-dependent. Humans built steam engines before thermodynamics, radios before quantum mechanics, and turbochargers without a general solution to the Navier–Stokes equations. In fact, general relativity was understood faster, with fewer people and fewer unknowns, than modern turbomachinery. Intelligence does not guarantee theoretical completeness.
We often talk as if engineering is applied science, as though scientists discover laws and engineers merely execute them. Historically, it’s mostly the reverse. Engineering drove hydrostatics, thermodynamics, and much of electromagnetism. Science condensed out of practice. Rocky shows us a civilization that pushed engineering heuristics to extraordinary limits without building the meta-theory we associate with modern physics.
Weir shows us that ignorance has consequences. Rocky’s civilization has blind spots, not just gaps. They solve problems locally, not universally. That matches real scientific history, which is full of “how did they not notice that?” moments. Epistemic humility matters.
The deeper point is easy to miss. Rocky’s raw intelligence is overwhelming, yet Weir shows how insufficient that is. Computational power is not the same thing as epistemic traction.
Humans compensate for limited individual cognition by externalizing thought. Books, instruments, equations, replication, argument, peer irritation. Science is not what smart people know. It’s what happens when disagreement is preserved instead of suppressed.
Consider the neutron lifetime puzzle. Isolated neutrons decay in about fifteen minutes. Bottle experiments and beam experiments both work, both are careful, and their measurements disagree by nearly ten seconds. That discrepancy feeds directly into Big Bang nucleosynthesis and cosmology. No one is happy about it. That discomfort is the system working. Science as a council of experts would smooth it over. Science as a messy coordination technology will not.
Rocky’s science advances by heroic individual problem-solving. Human science advances by distributed skepticism. His civilization seems optimized for survival and local success, not for epistemic reach. Humans stumble into deep structure because we are bad enough at thinking alone that we are forced to think together.
Relativity illustrates this point. Einstein is often treated as a counterexample, the lone genius who leapt beyond intuition. But strip away the myth and the leap shrinks. Maxwell’s equations had already broken classical time and space. Michelson–Morley refused to go away. Lorentz supplied transformations that worked but felt evasive. Einstein inherited the problem fully formed. His leap was short because the runway was long. What made it remarkable was not distance but direction. He was willing to look where others would not. No one is epistemically self-sufficient. Not Einstein, not Rocky, not us.
There’s another evolutionary angle Weir hints at. Vision didn’t just give humans data. It gave easily shared data. You can point. You can draw on a cave wall. You can argue over the same thing in space. In Rocky’s sightless world, translating private perception into communal objects is harder. That alone could delay theoretical physics by centuries.
The book’s real claim is stronger than “different minds think differently.” Scientific knowledge depends on social failure modes as much as on cognitive gifts. Progress requires tolerance for being wrong in public and for wasting effort on anomalies.
Thankfully, Weir doesn’t sermonize. Rocky saves the mission by being smarter. Humanity saves itself by having invented a way for dull humans to coordinate across centuries. It’s a quietly anti-heroic view of intelligence.
Project Hail Mary treats science as failure analysis rather than genius theater. Something breaks. What do we test next? That may be why it succeeds where so much science fiction fails.
Here’s my video review shot with an action cam as I wander the streets of ancient and renaissance Rome.
Fattening Frogs For Snakes
Posted by Bill Storage in Fiction on December 2, 2025
(Sonny Boy Williamson’s blues classics reinterpreted)
1.
Three a.m. and the coffee skin was thick enough to skate across. I listened for heels on the stairs, the click of the screen door, but heard only the refrigerator humming a tune it couldn’t possibly know.
Took me a long time, long time to find out my mistake
You can bet your bottom dollar, ain’t fattening no more frogs for snakes
I had told her the frog-and-snake thing over venison and morels I picked myself above the ruined mill on Deep Creek. She’d worn a blue-green dress that looked like pond water reflecting setting sun. I remember thinking: that’s the color a man drowns in. She smiled at the frog and snake story. I tried to catalog the smile. Amusement? Patience? Or the kindness of someone who knows you’re performing before you know it yourself.
Now, she dreamed that I was a kissin’ her
On down by the mill
She’d dream that she’d taken me from
That girl up on the hill
Beneath the front window leaned her unicorn clock (acrylic on wood, fine art kissing kitsch), its hands frozen for years. She loved the useless thing. I measured the dead mechanism, then lost an hour on Amazon picking the exact shaft diameter, thread length, hand style. Details matter.
But first, could we find out what went wrong? I disconnected, tested continuity, checked for a bind, and listened again. The hum – or its absence – could tell me nothing. Still, I traced the edge of the case, felt for the tiniest resistance, imagined the coil shifting beneath my touch.
She asked if frogs really tasted like knowledge. I said only if you cooked them slow, with doubt and regret. She laughed so hard the candle guttered. But I’d just put more snake on the table than I’d meant to. She caught the mote of a pause when I stopped myself from straightening the candle.
She was the dreamest girl
The dreamest girl I most ever seen
The new movement arrived with six pairs of hands. I laid them out like tarot cards, wondering if anyone would notice an hour hand married to the wrong minute. I’d measured the inset twice and chosen the three-eighths movement, though I had doubts about the depth. Just in case, I’d already walked to Ace for a single Everbilt fender washer, bright enough to show every fingerprint of doubt.
Installation took thirty seconds. The old mechanism went into a drawer with all the other pieces that once belonged somewhere. The clock looked identical, but felt somehow different, like it had learned a secret.
That was the night I felt the first cold coil around my ankle.
Later, when the affair was coughing blood, I blamed more worldly men. I can’t dance – it doesn’t load right. I pictured them in Teslas, playing jazz, their beards shaped like the decisions they agonize over.
Oh been so long, been a mighty long time.
Yes a mighty long time since I seen that girl of mine
Sometimes, driving the back roads at dusk, I’d pass a slough and see her reflection in black water. Sometimes the reflection had my face. Sometimes it smiled like it knew the joke. Frog? Or snake?
2.
He was gone and the kissing dreams had faded. Who won the breakup?
I keep taking the same left past a collapsed barn with the Sinclair sign still bleeding green, and somehow I’m always coming up on it again. You saw it on Twilight Zone. The odometer isn’t moving. That’s how I know I’m still inside the dream he left me.
My mind was a room he enjoyed furnishing. I’d sit on the counter while he cooked – I couldn’t boil water when we met. I’ll grant him that. And he’d feed me concepts the way other men feed you strawberries. I grew up with X-Files and Nine Inch Nails. He gave me real art, history, literature. Not pretentious crap but the kind you hoard. I grew fat on it. Addicted.
Like I need an addiction. My thought turned sleek and cold-blooded.
My dreams inverted. I’d be sitting alone, and liking it, then there he’d be, fixing things I never used, and things that were broken but worked well enough. He seemed to audition for intimacy.
Now an’ I’m goin’ away, baby
Just to worry you off my mind
Tonight, I cook. I’m craving chicken. I’m not seeking fame here, just something with enough moving parts to keep me honest. The ingredients line up like suspects. Shallots, white wine, a sprig of thyme that’s tired but still willing. The thighs wait off to the side, trimmed and patted dry. Salt and pepper both sides. I want crisp skin.
Skin down in the pan, they hissed at me, and the smell shifted from raw to something that makes the neighbors reconsider their life choices. I did. Don’t fuss with the thighs. If you poke too early, the skin will tear.
I mince my shallots microscopic. Knife work is the closest thing I have to meditation. There’s no arguing with a blade that demands truth. From an onion or otherwise.
I remove the chicken once it loosens from the pan. In go the shallots, and the wine lifts the browned bits. The sauce pulls itself together and thickens like a story with unneeded characters. Heat on low.
I’d be walking the ridge and the ground would soften, turn to loam, then to water. I’d sink to the ankles, then the knees, and something muscular would brush my calf. No bite, just tasting the temperature. I looked down and saw his face under the surface, mouth open in a silent croak. Then it was my own face, older, eyes already filmed with the green of deep water.
I add stock, thyme, a whisper of cream. Soften it. Chicken back in the pan and then simmer. I load the D-minor Partita on Spotify and headphones.
The sauce coats the back of a spoon. I taste it, and it tastes back, which is how you know you’ve gotten somewhere. I plate the chicken with potatoes. Nothing theatrical. Just a little structure.
Snakes? Now the Bible prefers linear time, a story with a big bang and an end. Not loops, endless returns, and recurrence. The ouroboros, the snake that eats its tail, showed up in Greece and Mesopotamia. Put a cyclic symbol creature inside a linear story and you got tension.
Behind a clock face is a nest of gears that no one sees. Most folk just look at the hands. I tried replacements. They spoke depth in the voice of a dryer sheet with a taste for Wikipedia. None leave tracks when they walk across a lit room. None make the air go thick and listenable.
I wake up pounding my fist on the bed. I’m quoting dead Germans and want to bite my own tongue off. One says clocks murder everything alive about time, turn it into a corpse on a conveyor belt. I know their names. I can quote them. But why? Knowledge I wish I didn’t have, I tell myself, humming the partita.
Don’t start me to talkin’. I’ll tell everything I know.
Last week I found a morel growing through the floorboard of my car. Passenger side. I think I might be dreaming someone who’s trying to wake up from me. The Sinclair sign’s still bleeding green and the odometer hasn’t budged.
Oh been so long, been a mighty long time.
3.
The woman came at the blue hour when the bats stitch the sky together. She stood on the plank that used to be a dance floor before the flood of ’63 carried the jukebox down Deep Creek still playing Sonny Boy. She touched the face in the reflection.
She looked thinner. Hunger can do that, even if it’s the mind that’s starving.
She asked the water the questions people always ask when the music stops:
“Did he love me the way a man loves a woman, or the way a man loves a mirror?”
“Did I love him, or did I love being transformed into someone worth ruining?”
It was like she had read the script. I pressed a smile back down and let one eye break the surface.
“You loved me,” I told her.
She stood on the bank. A turtle hauled itself onto a sun-warmed log. Something regal in its refusal to hurry. The turtle blinked slowly, a gesture suggesting amusement. I nodded, thin as a drawn line – acknowledging the age, the armor, the calm.
The water held the crooked reflections of bottlebrush sedge. A few loose seeds clung to the stems. When a dragonfly landed, the stem leaned, and the whole cluster tilted just a hair.
She stepped in. The water took her weight without sound. Her hand found mine. Cold met cold. The scales remembered every classic she’d devoured whole.
I tasted the new skin budding under the old one – thin, translucent, the color of creek ice at breakup.
Above us, the mill wheel groaned. The years ran backward: the flood returned the jukebox, the mill stood up straight. The venison walked back into deer. Somewhere a screen door clicked shut.
I live it through my diary
And I read all my problems now are free
“Grow a new skin,” I told her. “You’ve earned it.”
And in that hush, I slipped beneath the water, silent on the downbeat.
Don’t start me to talkin’. I’ll tell everything I know.
___
.
Recent Comments
Atty at Purchasing on Anger As Argument – the… 
Bill Storage on Anger As Argument – the…
The Multidisciplinarian 
The Comet, the Clipboard, and the Knife
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary on October 2, 2025
Background: My grandfather saw Comet Halley in 1910, and it was the biggest deal since the Grover Cleveland inaugural bash. We discussed it – the comet, not the inaugural – often in my grade school years. He told me of “comet pills” and kooks who killed themselves fearing cyanogens. Halley would return in 1986, an unimaginably far off date. Then out of nowhere in 1973, Luboš Kohoutek discovered a new comet, an invader from the distant Oort cloud – the flyover states of our solar system – and it was predicted to be the comet of the century. But Comet Kohoutek partied too hard somewhere near Saturn and arrived hungover, barely visible. And when Halley finally neared the sun in 1986, the earth was 180 degrees from it. Halley, like Kohoutek, was a flop. But 1996 brought Comet Hale-Bopp. Now, that was a sight even for urban stargazers. I saw it from Faneuil Hall in Boston and then bright above the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. It hung around for a year, its dual tails unforgettable. And as with anything cool, zealots stained its memory by freaking out.
A Sermon by Reverend Willie Storage, Minister of Peculiar Gospel
Brethren, we take our text today from The Book of Cybele, Chapter Knife, Verse Twenty-Three: “And lo, they danced in the street, and cut themselves, and called it joy, and their blood was upon their sandals, and the crowd applauded and took up the practice, for the crowd cannot resist a parade.”
To that we add The Epistle of Origen to the Scissors, Chapter Three, Verse Nine: “If thy member offend thee, clip it off, and if thy reason offend thee, chop that too, for what remains shall be called purity.”
These ancient admonitions are the ancestors of our story today, which begins not in Alexandria, nor the temples of Asia Minor, nor the starving castles of Languedoc, but in California, that golden land where individuality is a brand, rebellion is a style guide, and conformity is called freedom. Once it was Jesus on the clouds, then the Virgin in the sun, then a spaceship hiding behind a comet’s tail.
Thus have the ages spoken, and thus, too, spoke California in the year of our comet, 1997, when Hale-Bopp streaked across the sky like a match-head struck on the dark roof of the world. In Iowa, folk looked up and said, “Well, I’ll be damned – pass the biscuits.” In California, they looked up and said, “It conceals a spaceship,” and thirty-nine of them set their affairs in order, cut their hair to regulation style and length, pulled on black uniforms, laced up their sneakers, “prepared their vehicles for the Great Next Level,” and died at their own hands.
Now, California is the only place on God’s earth where a man can be praised for “finding himself” by joining a committee, and then be congratulated for the originality and bravery of this act. It is the land of artisan individuality in bulk: rows of identically unique coffee shops, each an altar to self-expression with the same distressed wood and imitation Edison bulbs. Rows of identically visionary cults, each one promising your personal path to the universal Next Level. Heaven’s Gate was not a freak accident of California. It was California poured into Grande-size cups and called “Enlightenment.”
Their leader, Do – once called Marshall Applewhite or something similarly Texan – explained that a spacecraft followed the comet, hiding like a pea under a mattress, ready to transport them to salvation. His co-founder, Ti, had died of cancer, inconveniently, but Do explained it in terms Homer Simpson could grasp: Ti had merely “shed her vehicle.” More like a Hertz than a hearse, and the rental period of his faithful approached its earthly terminus. His flock caught every subtle allusion. Thus did they gather, not as wild-eyed fanatics, but as the most polite of martyrs.
The priests of Cybele danced and bled. Origen of Alexandria may have cut himself off in private, so to speak, as Eusebius explains it. The Cathars starved politely in Languedoc. And the Californians, chased by their own doctrine into a corner of Rancho Santa Fe creativity, bought barbiturates at a neighborhood pharmacy, added a vodka chaser, then followed a color-coded procedure and lay down in rows like corn in a field. Their sacrament was order, procedure, and videotaped cheer. Californians, after all, enjoy their own performances.
Even the ancients were sometimes similarly inclined. Behold a relief from Ostia Antica of a stern priest nimbly handling an egg – proof, some claim, that men have long been anxious about inconvenient appendages, and that Easter’s chocolate bounty has more in common with the castrated ambitions of holy men than with springtime joy. Emperor Claudius, more clever than most, outlawed such celebrations – or tried to.
Brethren, it is not only the comet that inspires folly. Consider Sherry Shriner – a Kent State graduate of journalism and political science – who rose on the Internet just this century, a prophet armed with a megaphone, announcing that alien royalty, shadowy cabals, and cosmic paperwork dictated human destiny, and that obedience was the only path to salvation. She is a recent echo of Applewhite, of Origen, of priests of Cybele, proving that the human appetite for secret knowledge, cosmic favor, and procedural holiness only grows with new technology. Witness online alien reptile doomsday cults.
Now, California is a peculiar land which – to paraphrase Brother Richard Brautigan – draws Kent State grads like a giant Taj Mahal in the shape of a parking meter. Only there could originality be mass-produced in identical black uniforms, only there could a suicide cult be entirely standardized, only there could obedience to paperwork masquerade as freedom. The Heaven’s Gate crowd prized individuality with the same rigor that the Froot Loops factory prizes the relationship between each loop piece’s color and its flavor. And yet, in this implausible perfection, we glimpse an eternal truth: the human animal will organize itself into committees, assign heavenly responsibilities, and file for its own departure from the body with the same diligence it reserves for parking tickets.
And mark these words, it’s not finished. If the right comet comes again, some new flock will follow it, tidy as ever, clipboard in hand. Perhaps it won’t be a flying saucer but a carbon-neutral ark. Perhaps it will be the end of meat, of plastic, of children. You may call it Extinction Rebellion or Climate Redemption or Earth’s Last Stand. They may chain themselves to the rails and glue themselves to Botticelli or to Newbury Street, fast themselves to death for Mother Goddess Earth. It is a priest of Cybele in Converse high tops.
“And the children of the Earth arose, and they glued themselves to the paintings, and they starved themselves in the streets, saying, ‘We do this that life may continue.’ And a prophet among them said, ‘To save life ye must first abandon it.’”
If you must mutilate something, mutilate your credulity. Cut it down to size. Castrate your certainty. Starve your impulse to join the parade. The body may be foolish, but it has not yet led you into as much trouble as the mind.
Sing it, children.
—
bandwagon-effect, cults, Fiction, mass-hysteria, memetic-transmission, religion, social-contagion
Leave a comment