Book Two is Better
A fantasy readthrough podcast with Avery and Travis. Bug us on Reddit/Twitter @BookTwoIsBetter, or email us everything you love or hate at booktwoisbetter@gmail.com
Book Two is Better
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
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We're shaking it up and covering a book AND a movie! Amaze!
Please join us for a fun between-seasons special of Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. We're breaking down our favorite science experiments, passionately defending Carl and #1 Pokemon Rocky, and joshing around with an Astrophage load of bull-puckey.
We'll be back soon with a brand new series, The Bound and the Broken by Ryan Cahill! In the meantime, please send us any ideas, feedback, or notes at booktwoisbetter@gmail.com or on Reddit @booktwoisbetter!
Avery, coming to you live from the book two is better news desk. Today we have Breaking News out of the Red Rising community. Pierce Brown, Red Rising author and noted Hottie, has come under criticism recently for releasing a $10,000 special edition of Red Rising. Today we would bring in our correspondent Travis to comment on the issue. Travis, what are your thoughts?
SPEAKER_00Pierce Brown betraying the Reds once again with this gold-leaning disaster of a PR move.
SPEAKER_01Unbelievable to tell the average American what they can spend their money on.
SPEAKER_00Well, it turns out the average American's probably an idiot because they spent $10,000 to sell this thing out immediately. And they've launched a mid-tier version for $800 on the website, which is selling out incredibly fast.
SPEAKER_01What's next? We can't drink and drive? We have to wear seatbelts? Where does it stop?
SPEAKER_00Tiger Woods disagrees with that take.
SPEAKER_01That guy loves drinking and driving. Something goes, man, once he just has a belly full of pills and liquor, that car is like fucking siren to him. That wheel's looking good, man.
SPEAKER_00I never understand how people who could afford a hundred million Uber blacks could decide to go drive 15 minutes home.
SPEAKER_01There's no explanation other than he finds it fun. Yeah, he's like, oh, it feels like go-karts at this point, you know. Yeah. When I saw that he flipped his car, I was like, man, I bet it was on a highway or something. I looked up the photo and it was like a residential street, 20 mile-an-hour speed limits. Like, how did you flip an SUV? You must have been hauling ass.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And this time his Scandinavian wife didn't even come try to attack his car with golf clubs at the end of this.
SPEAKER_01Man, yeah. I had to give Kathy a full lore breakdown of Tiger's DUI journey.
SPEAKER_00I know it's it's truly incredible. Yeah. It's wild. That was my that was my hero. That was my Wheaties box athlete. I grew up Emily, you know. I was like, oh my god.
SPEAKER_01Did you want to know the most everything in the world? Yeah. I was always a big Phil guy and didn't like Tiger. Of course you were. You're disgusting. I know. I just couldn't take the obvious thing. It's like I didn't know.
SPEAKER_00You probably had a Rocco mediate and David Duval poster in your bedroom.
SPEAKER_01If I had known enough golf, I would have. But yeah, I just, yeah, it was. That was my thing. To find something annoying to like.
SPEAKER_00You love the second place guy, you know.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Shout out to our Gohan conversation a couple episodes ago. That really is me. I love yeah. I love an underachiever and I have become one. Man, okay. Project Hail Mary Time. Are you ready to talk science?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Do you we both have some big news?
SPEAKER_01Oh, I'm unemployed.
unknownWoo!
SPEAKER_01And you're much less exciting and way less positive now.
SPEAKER_00I got engaged. It's pretty sweet. Woo! Love is in the air. Yeah, she's a lot of things.
SPEAKER_01She's in love, and I love not working.
SPEAKER_00I know. This is this might be the happy go-luckiest you've ever seen us if you've listened on the pod. This is definitely Avery's zenith of happiness.
SPEAKER_01I am looking back on the past few years of my life and wondering, do I have trouble sleeping, or did my job make me have trouble sleeping?
SPEAKER_00I I mean, as an outside observer, I can guarantee you the job stress caused 99% of your issues. The other 1% are your fault entirely, and you need to fix them. But you know.
SPEAKER_01I'm working on it now because I got time to work on myself. But you know what I'm working on. I was gonna tell you this before the recording, but you demanded I table this. Um I have created uh an OSHA violation uh waiting to happen in Pocopia.
SPEAKER_00What have you built? What abomination and monstrosity have you developed?
SPEAKER_01No, it's a crafting game. You gotta you gotta smelt iron ingot or iron ore into iron ingot so that you can build things such as iron fence. Um and I took all of my many smelters. I was like, I want an area for them, you know? And where'd I put them? Underground, baby. What what better be I just have like this this like cobblestoned out dungeon with torches, and I put all of my like coal burning smelters underground where my where my pokey slaves can go and die of carbon monoxide poisoning.
SPEAKER_00My god, you're like a West Virginia mayor. This is terrible. Oh, that's wild. Do you okay? I saw a clip of the phone.
SPEAKER_01I make the Pokemon shop at the company store.
SPEAKER_00Oh, that's perfect. Yeah, but they've got great housing on company lands. Yeah, they do. Uh what were you saying? Uh, do you have okay? I've I think I've seen a clip of this. I'm not Pakopia because I don't have the switch to, obviously. But boy. Um do you do you have to have like little Charmanders in there pumping fire into the the bellows to make all this run?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, but they like doing it. That's the thing. There's sight, and I'm like, I need you to make me 50 iron ingots. They're like, holy fuck. Really? I would love to.
SPEAKER_00I did see some clips that's like Pokemon accidentally created a slave labor simulator.
SPEAKER_01Oh, they did.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01But the but they like it. That's that's what makes it okay. We're all having fun together. Yeah. Um, so yeah, that's my that's my Pacopia update. Um, and okay, past the five-minute marks we do Project Tail Mary?
SPEAKER_00I think so. Yeah, welcome. We're doing a one-off. We're doing Project Tail Mary in between our long series, and we kind of had a little fun bang bang this week. We did both the book and the movie.
SPEAKER_01Dinner and a movie.
SPEAKER_00Hey oh.
SPEAKER_01The song by Fish. Didn't know that one. Yeah. And I think we kind of soft announced this, but we are doing The Bound in the Broken by Ryan. Don't quote me on this. I think it might be Cahill. Cahill. Come on, you know I'm not getting it right. Oh, yeah, you're going Cahill the whole time. No worries. Um, but that's up next. We're doing is it of fire and blood or of blood and fire?
SPEAKER_00I thought it was like of blood and bones and ash and destruction or something.
SPEAKER_01It's fire and blood in some order. It's um anyway, you you know what it is. Yeah, it's sequel to my person.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, we'll Lenny's revenge.
SPEAKER_01Lenny gets reincarnated as a dragon rider.
SPEAKER_00I'm pumped. I'm I'm what? I'm through the prologue of it, and it feels so good.
SPEAKER_01It feels like coming home. It really does. It's like, is this reinventing fantasy? Quite the opposite. But goddamn, is it the exact type of book I wanted to read after revisiting Rome in 10 settings in our last books?
SPEAKER_00We got a magic sword, we got uh knights.
SPEAKER_01I'm like, oh, this is the son of a blacksmith in a small village that's named the Glade, not the Shire. Are you fucking kidding me?
SPEAKER_00I actually did a double take when I saw the map at the beginning of the book, and I was like, I I feel like I've read these villages in every John Gwynn or have you heard the theory that in every fantasy series it's always a West Coast. No, I haven't. That's interesting.
SPEAKER_01What's up with that? It's like true 90 something percent of the time. West Coast, West Coast. I guess I was trying to think what has a more of a fantasy feel. The American West Coast or the American East Coast? I kind of think the East Coast.
SPEAKER_00No, it's definitely the West.
SPEAKER_01It's exploration. You think? Like kind of more sparsely populated. Yeah. But there's more of more nature. But y'all got more pots. I don't know if we have pot smoking hippies and oh blood and fire. Um okay, Project Hail Mary. We read the book, we saw the movie, we're gonna discuss science. Here's the question. Do we want to say anything before I get into my plot summary? Or do you want to do the plot summary?
SPEAKER_00I'm not doing the plot summary. For sure.
SPEAKER_01You want to listen to me do the plot summary?
SPEAKER_00Oh, I wanna I definitely want to listen to you do the plot summary. Should we do like a little quiz before we uh get into it? Oh, you have a little science quiz? I got a little science.
SPEAKER_01I'm gonna get an F minus because uh goddamn, was I skimming a little bit of science in this book?
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_01I skimmed 400 of the 450 total pages.
SPEAKER_00I know. The middle section, we'll get to it. There's a lot of science there. Okay, hit me. Okay. Three questions. Quick science quiz. Pretty easy. Just getting us getting us in the in the mood here. Yeah. How many limbs does Rocky have?
SPEAKER_01Oh, five. Come on. Great work. Okay, I know that.
SPEAKER_00Easy. How did Iridians calculate their journey to Tau Seti? Math. Newtonian physics. Because they don't know about relativity. And that's why they're all talking about it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I know, I know that they don't know. Okay, yeah, yeah. I never would have gotten that, but yeah, sounds good.
SPEAKER_00What is the meaning of 269.29 Hertz?
SPEAKER_01Ooh. Something sound related for Rocky's Communicate. Oh, wait, is that like some sort of frequency that they can both hear?
SPEAKER_00No, that's just the note between C and C sharp, because we're talking about microtonality. And this is now a Montreal jazz funk punk podcast.
SPEAKER_01Angine de Poitrine?
SPEAKER_00Angine de Poitrine, 10 out of 10.
SPEAKER_01Several of my friends are now going deep on Wikipedia on microtonality. What a wonderful thing.
SPEAKER_00I've never seen so many frets in my life. And if you're listening to this and you like music, you should go look these people up because they're Do you like King Gizzard?
SPEAKER_01Do you like costumes? Do you like off-putting music? Well, goddamn, do I have a band for you?
SPEAKER_00Do you like pissing off boomers with the sounds that you're producing from your speakers?
SPEAKER_01Oh man, one of my good friends, Jorge, um, he really has a theory that I only like music that's bad. Like fish. Um, and goddamn was I excited to send him edging to watcher. And I was like, oh, if you thought I hated if you thought I liked shitty music, let me show you. Let me show you this.
unknownMan.
SPEAKER_00I've come I've come around. You introduced me to PC music before AI music was a thing. And I I liked PC music for years.
SPEAKER_01Man, I was early on PC. Well, I don't know if I was early. I was pretty early though, given that they're now around like just producing Charlie XCX's shit and hyper pop is like taking the Olympics by storm. That's true. Shout out to Lys Lou. Um anyway, that was getting us warmed up in the mood.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, pretty much. I just wanted to make a microtonality joke.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah. Well, go listen to Angine depotrine. Angine depotrine. Very good, very normal music. Okay. Summary.
SPEAKER_00Let's hear about this book and movie.
SPEAKER_01Rip it. Can you count me in and some sort of three? I was gonna do like, can you count me in in like nine, four or something? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Okay. Project Tell Mary is the story of an autistic space MacGyver who saves the planet from evil space algae, and it and it presents a convincing argument that humanity would truly advance and flourish if it simply consolidated all political power in the hands of a single strong-willed Dutch woman. Cool, quipsling science teacher Ryland Grace awakes from a coma and holy shit, he got amnesia. It's a real David Burns situation. How did I get here? This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife. After a few quick science experiments, which lucky for us will eventually take up most of this book's 450 pages, Grace establishes that one, he is not in a centrifuge, which is actually kind of wrong, and two, he's in a spaceship orbiting a star that is not our big beautiful sun. Fuck. Also, his two crewmates are dead, so let's flush those bodies into space and get back to experimenting, baby. As Grace's amnesia as Grace's amnesia clears, we learn that humanity is under threat of extinction from a pernicious space algae called Astrophage, which Travis is going to mispronounce for the remainder of this episode. Astrophage is doing a big sucky sucky on the sun before doing a cosmic salmon run to Venus, and apparently this is no bueno. The novel ping pongs between Grace on the ship and flashbacks to Grace working with Ava the flying Dutchman Strat and a circus of science caricatures who are working to save the planet from Astrophage. Present-day Grace eventually happens across a friendly five-legged rock alien on the big space highway to Tauseti, the only nearby star that isn't getting slurped dry by Astrophage. Grace and the aptly named Rocky decide to team up, and after the inevitable Let Me Learn Your Language first contact sequence, they team up to figure out why Taosetti is immune to the big suck. And the flashbacks were treated to a series of increasingly audacious attempts to combat astrophage and make ready for a suicide mission to Tau City, the wildest of which include a private-public partnership to pave the Sahara Desert and a nuclear strike on Antarctica to accelerate global warming. Did I mention that all the science in this book is completely grounded and accurate and perfectly researched because it is, and some people like that. Grace and Rocky eventually find that Astrophage got ops in the form of an amoeba that Grace names Tao meeba. So all that's left to do is capture some of those little fuckers and make sure they can survive in the space between the Sun and Venus. You think this would be challenging, but like almost every problem in this book, it's solved with a maximum of one minor setback. The amnesia sequence closes with the revelation that Grace was forced on the Hail Mary by the flying Dutch woman because the horny, autistic Russian guy who was supposed to take Grace's place, bazooked himself with astrophage. Strat forces Grace onto the ship and doses him with a heretofore undisclosed French amnesia drug, which I have no issues with because, as established, all science in this book is completely grounded and accurate and perfectly researched. With genetically modified Talmeba in hand and a tank full of astrophage from Rocky, Grace finally sets out for home, but holy fuck, the Talmoeba are loose because idiot Rockboy made an engineering mistake, kill him. Grace discovers that the cases Rocky made for the Tamoeba are permeable, and after containing the outbreak, he realizes that Rocky is probably having the same issue on his ship. Grace is then forced to consider an age-old moral dilemma. Do you return home to the planet that is probably being ripped apart by climate change, food scarcity, and global military conflict, or turn around and rescue your rock buddy, who is somehow your only friend in the entire universe? In a true hero turn, which some have described as a rebuke to MAGA Christianity, Grace swoops in and saves Rocky's crusty hide, and they zoom off into the Tau City sunset to save the humble rock folk Adorkable. Adorkable.
SPEAKER_00Well done. Well done. Well said. Really long. Yeah, you you packed it in there. You brought us through all the key elements.
SPEAKER_01Among our summaries, I feel like that was one of the more helpful ones.
SPEAKER_00That's actually like I I could listen along and be like, wow, I don't actually have to read the book. More substance. It's not just us making really niche jokes about.
SPEAKER_01At least one of us might make the case that you shouldn't read this book. Though if you're listening, probably already have. I think you should read this book.
SPEAKER_00I'm gonna start there. You should read the book. So if you don't think science is cool, you should totally read the book because you know I have my issues with some of the science been that was beaten into our heads throughout these 450 pages, but it's good to see science be celebrated, and I'm just gonna put that from center.
SPEAKER_01That's a really positive take.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I'm gonna I'm gonna give it to you there. Yeah. It's an anti it's an anti-xenophobic book celebrating science. And at its core, I'm okay with that.
SPEAKER_01I gotta say, that is funny that that's like a twist on the medium or on the genre, I should say. The alien's actually friendly, he's nice.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. After Hadrian spent five books trying to convince us aliens were good, just to genocide them.
SPEAKER_01That's so funny. We went from uh uh genocide is both necessary and uh you know morally fine, um to uh friendly rock man. And uh God, when I put it that way, I I do really prefer friendly rock man.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, this was this was fine. This was very fun. I enjoyed this two weeks of my life. It is focused on Project Tail Mary.
SPEAKER_01Good beach read.
SPEAKER_00It's a good beach read. I actually think the Martian's a better beach read, but we're not here to fully compare.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Okay. Where do we begin? Do you want to start stepping through this or do you wanna do you wanna go high level?
SPEAKER_00I want to talk about our favorite science experiments.
SPEAKER_01Oh, okay. So early in our reading process, I told Travis to start writing down his favorite experiments, and then I proceeded to not do that myself because my favorite was easily the first.
SPEAKER_00What stabbing the astrophagyogy?
SPEAKER_01No, that was fun. I did like that. Um no, it's when he it's when our boy got amnesia and he wakes up in uh in some sort of metal cylinder cell thing. And uh rather than like look around, try to read some labels, see if there's a window, do fucking anything that a normal person would do, he immediately starts doing a science experiment involving a pendulum to figure out if like the normal level of gravity is being exerted upon him to figure out if he's on Earth or in a centrifuge or perhaps somewhere else. My favorite is that he just never looks out the window for 40 pages. There had to not be a window, right?
SPEAKER_00There has to not be because there's a whole thing about he can't get through the door to the next house because he can't remember his name. But I was like, I was like, come on, brother.
SPEAKER_01Like you're on a spaceship. I just would have done a much more thorough and well, first of all, I couldn't have done the pendulum experiment because you know, I'm an English. But uh two, I just would have yeah, I would have looked around and done some other types of deductions before I started calculating gravity.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I agree. I mean, okay, before we get too deep, I think we should structure this a little bit. Let's talk book first, and then at the end, let's do a little book movie comparison. That's exactly what I was thinking. Perfect. Because I have too many thoughts about book scene versus movie scene for a lot of this plus. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01But um, okay, Henry, do you have a favorite experiment?
SPEAKER_00I I liked a lot of the experiments, but I want to talk and now I want to talk about I want I want to talk about the the ship. I want to talk about when he wakes up. I really like the medical robot. I could have used a little more medical robot. I thought we were gonna get a little bit more personality, and I think that was a swing and a miss because the medical robot rocked.
SPEAKER_01There's no reason to not make it have like a sort of glib personality. Yeah. He did it with Rocky. Make it the robot. Totally. Yeah. There's what a bummer. Real real uh missed comedic potential with the robot. Unbelievable. Yeah. I wonder, I wonder if uh in his uh very thorough research he did for this book, he's like a uh you know, sentient robot too far.
SPEAKER_00We're not that advanced. Oh, we could we could never do that. All the world's researchers and scientists.
SPEAKER_01You might call it an arbitrary line, but it's actually a very well-researched line I'm drawing.
SPEAKER_00Oh, there's some there's so many good little plot explanations for why the science has to work this way in this book. It's it's amazing. So you could have you could have made a talking robot. Come on.
SPEAKER_01Would it surprise you to say uh to hear that in an interview he said that when he's writing a book, um, he usually starts with the science and fills in plot and characters afterwards.
SPEAKER_00It would not surprise me at all. I've seen the man's I've seen the man's spreadsheet of science that I sent you, like his his astrophysicist notebook of formulas that are so unnecessary, I have to say.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, Andy, I was pretty sure you didn't start with Ryland Grace's backstory um first.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, helpful to you know when you can't figure out a character's backstory as you're writing them, a really helpful tool is just give them retrograde amnesia.
SPEAKER_01One amnesia, two, no friends or family. Fuck it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. What if I don't want to develop characters? Let's just not have any characters.
SPEAKER_01Much like uh the Hail Mary is powered by uh Astrophage, Ryland Grace is powered purely by quips.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, he really is. And you know, I thought I'd get a little bit more of his life, but after one short vignette of a San Francisco lunch, that's it. That's all we got.
SPEAKER_01So funny. It really yeah, we'll get into that more. Did you uh I hope that this this is a novel observation? Did you sort of feel like this was written by the writers of Gilmore Girls?
SPEAKER_00So my immediate thought when I started reading this, and I think it first hit me when I got like to the flirt first heck or mother fluffer, you know, the first like non-cursing segment of the book. And I realized that I never had felt like I was reading a book that already had secured a movie deal before it was written. Like yeah, it felt so much like okay, he wrote this book to be universally appealing to an advertiser audience and also an international audience, and like kid, you know, it's just like a perfect advertisement because there's nothing offensive, one of the most frictionless reading experiences I've ever had. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um, it almost in no way wants to challenge the reader. And I'm not saying that like as a criticism, but. Like this book aims to please at at every turn. Yeah, it takes no hard stances. I'm not trying to say fuck with my stories. I am here so you have a good time. Which I kind of respect. Like, you know, there's nothing wrong with that being an approach. Like, you know, it's just a matter of taste as to whether you like that or or like something else. But like Right.
SPEAKER_00I mean, it is somewhat refreshing. Like, I don't have to think that hard. Like, science is cool, friendship is awesome. Well, friends, yeah. Yeah. But like the the the fact that because he couldn't figure out if he was American and he was like praising other cultures very deliberately in the first 50. I'm just like, Yeah, man, Andy, you had a movie deal and you just like it's it's it's funny, you know. It was very funny. Oh man. Yeah, it was good. And it to be fair, both funny to read that from my perspective. And the book, I thought the book was funny. I thought a lot of it was pretty, pretty funny.
SPEAKER_01I did not. I it was it was amusing. Like do I think he's a particularly funny writer? Not really.
SPEAKER_00Um no, and I'd say Ryland's pretty annoying at times.
SPEAKER_01It's I think it's the Gilmore girls thing. It's like not every line needs to be a quip. You can just have it be straight ahead. Like at some point you're fucking waterboarding me with quips, and like they're not all gonna land. And it did just strike this like the tone of it to me was so like Facebook web comic-y, like it yeah, like there's not a dad in America who wouldn't love this book, and I'm not saying that in a positive sense as regards the humor.
SPEAKER_00Right. It's like a boomer XKCD, is how I describe this.
SPEAKER_01You know how dads love submarines? Yeah. This is like submarine dad book fucking one of one. This is the peak submarine dad novel.
SPEAKER_00Uh I I inherited from my dad the Master.
SPEAKER_01Are you gonna say Master Commander?
SPEAKER_00I was gonna say my Patrick O'Brien, my Patrick O'Brien and Master Commander Obsession, but also the inability to walk by any harbor and not point out to Angela the boats. Like, look at look at that boat. That's a pretty big boat.
SPEAKER_0122-footer. My goodness.
SPEAKER_00Two sails, two mast.
SPEAKER_01Love that.
SPEAKER_00Love that. Um part of me, part of me was that.
SPEAKER_01I have thought of this and forgotten it like three times in this episode. So I'm gonna get this very dumb thought out real quick. Here's my issue with bullpucky, which I do think about all the time, and I kind of like that. Um bullpucky. So he's a middle school teacher. But there are many hours of the day when he's not a middle school teacher. Yeah he doesn't need to say bullpucky off the job. No, it's I don't curse in my place of work, but I do curse outside of work because I'm a human being. Like I can draw a line between my work and my my other life.
SPEAKER_00Uh, I don't think he's doing that. No. And you know, I kind of chalk it up to him not having any sort of backstory or like, you know, there's no real reason. And that's why for me it was like, this is just advertiser-friendly. Like this was just a choice he made to make a a PG book.
SPEAKER_01I would love to have you read The Martian? Yes. Is it this squeaky clean? I don't know. I wanted to know if it's like when I heard the first bullpucky, I I really I was a little annoyed. But then like shortly thereafter, we do get the you know, the in-world explanation as to why he doesn't curse, you know, because he's teaching little kids. It's like, okay, you know, that helps. But I was wondering if like is that unique to this character, or is Andy Weir actually just like a Puritan?
SPEAKER_00No, I remember, and I just fact checked myself because I was like, I remember cussing in the Martian. There's like 160 F bombs in the Martian. Just did a little quick search on that.
SPEAKER_01That makes me feel a lot better about it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so it's not that he has like a puritanical approach to riding. Yeah, it's that he made this character incredibly friendly to a wide movie audience. That's my whole that's my whole take. Like, yeah. He made Ryan Gosling, like hot Ryan Gosling, who doesn't offend anyone and his kin from Barbie, you know?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, he really is like the highest approval rating actor they could have found. Um, we'll get we'll get to we'll get to the goosling later.
SPEAKER_00Oh, can we can we imagine a recast with like Killian Murphy or something?
SPEAKER_01The black and dark like space paranoia version of this book.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00Like Robert Pattinson in the lighthouse, just black and white, going crazy in space.
SPEAKER_01That is like very much a version of this book that exists. And I don't know, that's like something I really want to like about it. Is like you and I don't love Grimdark. Like we've like fucking gritted our teeth through a handful of Malice An books, and it's usually like, ugh, I feel stinky like after that. I usually find myself drawn to stuff with like a little bit of lightness and humor, but I guess I guess you you need a little bit of salt with your sweet, is is maybe what I'm learning.
SPEAKER_00I need a little bit of suffering for my payoff.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, make him suffer.
SPEAKER_00Um well, let's let's talk about Grace waking up and um doing some science and trying to figure out what his life was like before he got catapulted into the space. Deep state.
SPEAKER_01Did you like the structure?
SPEAKER_00I actually did. I did. I thought it's it's a nice way to kind of get this. Well, okay, let me pause there. I did like the structure. I thought it was helpful and fun to kind of flash back to the earth experiments. Um I had a similar problem with character development on the flashbacks as I would say I did with Grace, where you know, because the way I take notes for books, I have like general thoughts, plot notes, and character character notes. Like, oh, who's this character? What do I need to know about them? This book I had I wrote down main guy Ryland Grace, Strat, and Rocky. And that was it. That's all I needed.
SPEAKER_01That's it. Yeah, the rest are very quickly sketched caricatures of different types of scientists and people from TV shows.
SPEAKER_00Right. Like, um so I thought they were fun. Like the flashbacks actually were fun little vignettes to me, but they didn't really serve a greater purpose of developing him as a character or anything. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I I really like the flashbacks at the start. And you know, like amnesia, like we can joke about it. Like, yeah, it's been done a million fucking times. But I mean, there's probably a reason it's been done a million times. And yeah, I was like interested. How's why is this guy on the ship? Why is everyone dead? Like, you know, like it was a very fun way of learning about the whole global threat. I think where I lost a little bit of interest is that most, if not all, of my questions were answered in the first quarter of the book. Because, like, you know, the first flashbacks are interesting because he doesn't really withhold information. Like, you understand the threat, you get introduced to strat, like things move quite quickly, and then you get to a point where you're like, well, my only remaining question here is how does Grace end up on the ship when he's not initially slated to be on the ship? But that doesn't stop there from being flashbacks for the remainder of the book.
SPEAKER_00And most of those flashbacks are like a weird scientist quoting his own one academic article back to him and talking about how they like this is the person working on the coma thing. This is the person working on the the spin drive, this is the person working on the medical robot. And it's like, yeah, they don't have any continuity except for the two that kind of blow themselves up, which was really funny.
SPEAKER_01Funny and convenient.
SPEAKER_00Convenient. Uh but I get your point. Like the first few are really illuminating and it's actually really helpful. I guess this is more of a problem I had with the middle of the book in general, is that it doesn't feel like you're progressing too much or solving big problems or anything. Um and then the end, yeah, you get the other big reveal and yeah, which I like.
SPEAKER_01Like I thought yeah, I thought that scene was really good where like Strat kind of pivots on him. Um I do think the flashbacks are sort of like a microcosm of some of my issues with this book, which was like they very often did not serve the characters. They didn't really serve any plot purpose either. It was more just like a way for him to show his work and show like he's really considered how Astrophage would be dealt with and like its you know, interim effects on climate and all that stuff. Like it just felt like a chance for him to showcase more science that he'd looked up. Yeah, and it wasn't really serving the novel. And I think if I had like one complaint about the novel generally, it is that it is like are you trying to tell a story or are you trying to show us the research you did on your laptop? And you know, it's but at the same time, like that's clearly an issue I have. And this book has sold 10 billion copies and people fucking love it. So like it clearly works for most people.
SPEAKER_00So I think that's a that's a good point to make because a lot of the like potential criticism I have is like, I wish you went down this rabbit hole more. Like I wish you went into the geopolitical conversations about you know, before we blew up Antarctica, like what else is happening around the world? Like because you kind of it creates this environment when you're reading it where it's like, oh yeah, all the countries get along in a very American US centric way. And you don't it's like don't question it. Nothing like nobody nuked each other. Like there's no there's there's no conflict like besides scientific discourse. And so part of me is like, oh man, I really wish like that would be fascinating. I'd love to read more about like the UN and stuff in this environment. And similarly, like I'd love to learn about his how his life was uprooted when they just kidnapped him and put him on a boat for like six years. Like, how does that affect someone's personality and relationships? Yeah, but Andy Weird just was like, We're not writing that book. Like, I'm not writing a 900-page book, I'm writing a 450-page buddy cop science book.
SPEAKER_01Seems fundamentally uninterested in that sort of thing. Yeah, like maybe not like broadly, but in and the context of this narrative, that's not what he cared about. Like, that's not the story he was trying to tell. Like, this is primarily about the science. Like um the I d I did want to talk a little bit about the uh very strange political world he has set up in Project Hail Mary. Where it's like at a complete contrast with the science, where he's like, No, I want to show you and make you believe and show you that this is all plausible. And then he couldn't be more magic wandy with everything interpersonal and political. He's like, Well, there's a very fucking bullyish Dutch woman, and she whips all world leaders into order, and she can't be tried in court, and anyways, they're just gonna get this shit done. Um fascinating that he's he's so willing to like fucking wrangle with neutrinos for pages and pages, but he's like, I couldn't be fucked to actually deal with like how hard this would actually be to get done in our world.
SPEAKER_00I I think the funniest scene on that that note for me was the courtroom one where they're getting sued for patents infringement.
SPEAKER_01Anti-IP litigator propaganda.
SPEAKER_00How dare you? And she's like, she's she's like, how are you gonna stop me? Like, you and what army? I've got the US army, and that's a pretty damn great army. And I was like, oh my god, what is this? That was a lot.
SPEAKER_01Um yeah, it's just I don't know. I like saw some people online trying to say that like this was pointing to some sort of like third-way techno fascism view of the world. Um and I guess I see that argument, but I also think he's so uninterested in saying anything with this book that like I wouldn't even and he, you know, for all I know, he probably is into that. Like, but I don't think he's trying to make that point with this book. I don't think he's trying to make any real fucking point in this book other than like take care of your friends.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I will say on that note, I was reading in just a little bit on that of you know, I think there is this there is this larger narrative that rich spectrum adjacent techno bros like to make, which is basically that you know, technology is the solution to the world's problems, like technology in and of itself. And uh I think that might be the the narrative that if if any, that's maybe the narrative that he's putting into all of this. That is like if you streamline power and you put all focus into technological development and scientific research, good things will happen regardless. Like, yeah, even if even if things get broken along the way, the world will be a better place. And some of the article or some of the interviews I read with Andy Weir, he was talking about that exact point, like, scientific progress is good no matter what. And he was asked about like, you know, what about the nuclear bomb? It's like, yes, nuclear bomb, but nuclear reactor and energy development. So he has like this counter counterpoint to all um criticisms of technology, which is that it's made the world a bit like technology has done more good than harm overall, and so therefore it's a good thing no matter what. And I think that, if anything, is the the thing that encapsulates the whole whole story here.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's it's a weird thing because like I I genuinely don't think that's the message that the book like if take Andy Weir's name off it. Like, what is the text telling me? I don't I genuinely don't think that's what the text is telling me. But like from what I know of Andy Weir, yes, I do think he is like a huge what are the yeah, he's he is this like techno fascist guy who's like we need to deregulate and let the smartest people in the room call the shots and you know progress will be made, which like is one of the dumber frames of mind, I think. Like it really takes a complete obliviousness to like most of human history um to to feel that way. But I mean it's a it's like a type of person. Like I know they're out there, but um you know, whatever. Um I would be remiss if I did not point out that uh Andy Weir joined uh our uh Travis's favorite YouTuber, the the critical drinker, for a live stream recently. Um so I think if you had any questions about where where Andy Weir was coming from on the uh political spectrum, you can probably draw a few conclusions from that.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell Yes, but he is apolitical, so yeah, of course.
SPEAKER_01I just want to know when I'm gonna be wrong about if someone says they're not into politics, they're a right winger.
SPEAKER_00That's uh it's a pretty good barometer at this point.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell There's no one who voted for Bernie who says they're not into politics. Right? Like that person doesn't exist. No, they're all marching on the right. I'm not interested in politics. Yeah, I'm a yeah, like fundamentally I'm a socialist, but like I'm not into politics. I'm not willing to tell you about it. Like, no, you're just worried you're gonna get fucking canceled. Where let your freak flag fall fly, Andy. I'm looking at your silly little Irish flat cap, and that tells me all I need to know. Just tell me with your mouth, too.
SPEAKER_00He loves that hat.
SPEAKER_01It's a bad hat. You know, I was did I have this conversation with you? I don't know. I was talking about this in in in my pre-andy weir life. You know, we've lived long enough that I think basically every piece of possible piece of clothing has come in and out of fashion. Sure. With one exception. The flat cap Irish flat cap. It's never in my whole life, it has not been cool. Even fedoras were cool.
SPEAKER_00No, Peaky Blinders. What are you talking about?
SPEAKER_01The character was cool. I didn't see anyone walking around looking like Killian Murphy.
SPEAKER_00No, okay, you're right. But the people got the haircut, the Peaky Blinders haircut for like. Yeah, Proud Boys got it. Yeah, okay. Well, I'm I'm not saying cool people thought it was cool.
SPEAKER_01It wasn't sort of like fashion didn't coalesce around it.
SPEAKER_00Like, I'm sorry, you're wearing a 1997 golf bowl.
SPEAKER_01I look sick, and thank you for buying me the shirt by the way.
SPEAKER_00Also, I'm wearing a science, this is my science's awesome shirt from a local science museum.
SPEAKER_01So, if Travis had hair, he would have a fucking Proud Boys haircut. I've thought about a lot when my hair would look like crazy in a Proud Boys haircut.
SPEAKER_00I would. I think I would do um the broccoli head Gen Z look. Little bangs.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, just yeah, bite your lower lip a lot. Yeah. I'm mewing. I'm mewing. I'm looks maxing. Do you have one of those jaw exercises machines?
SPEAKER_00Uh no, I just shatter, I do micro fractures every day.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's smart. That's smart. That's why I have I do have kind of a subhuman chin profile. It's a little it's a little concave. Oh we got we got real off track. What are we talking about? The book. How much you like critical drinker?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, 100%. Actually, let's talk about science. I want to talk about science for a while.
SPEAKER_01Okay, yeah, we'll do science. What do you want to say about science?
SPEAKER_00I want to talk about Grace's some of his experiments that I thought were fun, and I want to talk about the cool big science experiments that were fun. Him getting exposed to astrophagyogy for the first time was uh I thought it was really fun. Just poking it and shooting it all over the room. That was great.
SPEAKER_01And when they escape was really wonderful.
SPEAKER_00When he had to black out the whole room, it's just like, oh god.
SPEAKER_01He turns on the light and they zip. Speak of, I know we're stepping on the movie, but I thought they did a great job of showing them zoom away in the movie. It was really cool.
SPEAKER_00I agree. I thought that was a really, really fun scene, even though they added a guy named Carl who doesn't exist.
SPEAKER_01I saw some hate for Carl online. I ride for Carl.
SPEAKER_00Carl was fine. I just was like, who I I thought was like, were you in the book? Did I miss something? I was like, no.
SPEAKER_01Carl Rox. Yeah, that stuff was fun. Yeah. Early Astrophage days were really, really cool. Um I don't know. I I think like seeing the movie, like the more condensed version of it, did remind me like he did set up a really, really fun like end of the world scenario. Like I really like the idea of Astrophage and like this like sun-sucking bacteria that like goes to Venus to breed and stuff. It's great. Like it really is like a fun sci-fi setup.
SPEAKER_00Totally. One of my favorite books in this genre is Seven Eaves, which has a very similar setup. It's like the the moon is fracturing and slowly drifting, like the debris is slowly drifting towards Earth, and like we have seven years or whatever to come up with a plan. And I I actually really like that, where it's not imminent doomsday, but slow doomsday scenario.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um, because then you get cool shit like let's go find the gambling addict miscreant scientist in a prison and let him pave the Sahara.
SPEAKER_01And those uh those uh very by the books uh Kiwi prison guards do not fuck with those guys.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, they're they're gonna search. They don't care about Strat's unlimited power.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Did she have a night? Did she have a weapon? I can't remember.
SPEAKER_00Her weapon is the US Army.
SPEAKER_01No, I I can't remember if she had a weapon and had to hand it in to the Kiwis.
SPEAKER_00I don't I don't remember. I don't remember. I think she was just objecting to being searched in general.
SPEAKER_01Did you know what I thought was gonna happen in that scene? I thought she was gonna get him to explain the black panels and then be like, well, thank you for your time. Fuck off. I kind of would have preferred that. Man, I thought that was going that way the whole time. Her just like danger.
SPEAKER_00But that would ruin the idea of the hero scientist. A lot of this is like the whole book. No, no, but the whole book is predicated on the idea that individuals are the pinnacle of science, not theories behind the science. So, like, of course, this guy told you how his all of his research, which is published, works, but you need him specifically. He's the only one that can do it.
SPEAKER_01That is I hadn't thought of that. Did they really need to go see him in person in prison to learn what plaque panels were?
SPEAKER_00No, also you can tell Andy Weir hates Zoom because every meeting is like flying someone on a jet in person across the world for three days instead of just calling them.
SPEAKER_01That is something I was thinking about is like, you know, what what what genre box am I gonna put this in? And I think I settled on like low budget 80s sci fi movie and like network procedurals. Yeah. Like I think a lot of like the These characters have so much in common with like an average, like law and order character. You know, it's just like, all right, well, here's the toughest snails lady interrogator, and here's your wacky side. And like that's kind of it. He's just like, it's almost like he he knows that he's drawing on like character caricatures and tropes, and he's trusting you to fill in the blanks. And so he doesn't have to write a character. He's like, You've seen the fucking drunk Russian guy, and here's like the gambling science. It's like you've seen these people before, right?
SPEAKER_00Stern Chinese astronaut leader and drunk Russian lady, and like, yeah, it's yeah, it is. I mean, they are like because they're also in such isolation within the story, you get them for like 10 pages total for each character that yeah, I mean, they have to be characters, he has to convey, you know, from his approach.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And I would say when he tries to come up with something more original and backfires, for example, when Strat is like really stressed about the end of the world, uh, Grace finds her, and what is she uh what is she drinking as she's sitting alone at the bar? Just a cup full of gin. What the fuck? What kind of behavior is that? I don't think a bartender would give that to you. Just just straight up a cup of gin, please. Straight up. You want anything in it? Nope. Just gin for me.
SPEAKER_00That's brutal.
SPEAKER_01I'm trying to get the Christmas tree tonight. The world is ending, baby. Straight gin.
SPEAKER_00Find me some mistletoe and a bottle of gin.
SPEAKER_01Three shots of gin for the boys. Line them up.
SPEAKER_00Damn. Speaking, speaking of alcohol, though, I did actually really like when he got drunk on vodka.
SPEAKER_01That was great. Yeah, that was great. Um it's also fucking wild. The Russian lady was like, How do you want to go? It's like, heroin, baby.
SPEAKER_00I kind of want to feel that. I heard it's good. That's what I'm saying. There were a lot of underrated funny scenes in this book.
SPEAKER_01It's good, yeah. I my feeling reading it was like the raw material for good comedy is here. We just need another person to rewrite these jokes. And my hope was that I think if there's one thing that people do kind of better in adaptations is touch up the comedy. Yeah. And uh, and for me, the comedy was a just it was a little tighter in the movie. And importantly, I'm really hoping that's what they do with the Mistborn and Stormlight adaptations. He needs a little tight. Yeah, like let Sanderson mostly cook, but uh, can they get like a some sort of comedy expert to touch up uh Shallan's lines, please?
SPEAKER_00Or just like give us give us some breeze and ham, you know. Like we're gonna have gold, pure gold there. We can get a writer for that.
SPEAKER_01Sanderson has a very he needs a Dutch editor, is what he needs. He needs a funny ball buster.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, he does. Oh man. Um my favorite joke, uh, my favorite really, really, really bad joke in this book is that Iradians value face to carapace communication. That's pretty good. And I really I just I couldn't stop laughing when I read that.
SPEAKER_01Okay, my man, I just I I every time you say something nice, I respond with something bad. Yeah, what the heck? You like this? I liked a lot of this book. Um the the line that really sticks in my head is like right when Grace wakes up on the ship, he's you know, he's naked and he needs clothing and he wraps a sheet around himself. And uh there was a two-word sentence which was instant toga. Yeah. It's like, oh okay.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the beginning. The the writing at the beginning was really rough. What was the the quote? I said, I fall into with a table and smack a set of supply drawers with my shin. It hurts like a mother fluffer.
SPEAKER_01G Willakers.
SPEAKER_00I think I saw somebody on Reddit who took that quote out and compared it to like a red rising quote that was like, Death has become me. My enemies are now my like. There is no blood in my veins, it is only eight. I was like, which one should I read first?
SPEAKER_01I'm starting to think this book is a bunch of bullpucky. God damn.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Oh all right, I want to wrap off some more fun science. Um I really, I really liked when they spent hundreds of hours of doing slave labor to make chains. That was so silly. For their fishing, their like probe fishing experiment.
SPEAKER_01Xenonite really was his just like catch-all wonder drug. Like there is no problem that cannot be solved with a little bit of uh unbreakable metal.
SPEAKER_00And what really can be created with some unbreakable metal, but that was my problem with the book from like 40% to 80%, is that we had a lot of like very minor speed bumps that not only were not insurmountable or serious, that were just like engineering problems for an alien off screen.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Man, I think yeah, I do think that was what eventually rubbed me about the science was just how frictionless everything was. Um it just felt like he never failed at anything more than once. I was like, I'm gonna try this, and if that doesn't work, I'm gonna try this, and then bingo, got it. Um and moving smoothly between completely separate disciplines of science. Like this guy had a PhD in microbiology, that doesn't mean he is like a fucking astrophysicist.
SPEAKER_00Like Yeah, he became an expert in every domain, like automatically.
SPEAKER_01That was the yeah, I saw I saw the movie with Kathy, and she is in fact an actual physicist. And that was like her biggest complaint about the science in the movie, was like, why is he like calculating the di you know how much fuel he needs to get to Rocky, like at the end of the like he wouldn't know how to do that, he's a biologist. It's like correct, like the you know, like most people with doctors like do know enough of the other disciplines like to be dangerous, but that doesn't mean that they know all of this shit and they know it on the fly.
SPEAKER_00Um and and because through the book we find out like he didn't have this extensive prep period. No, he wasn't like he just got drugged and thrown on a ship.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, like he was no smarter than the day he said he didn't want to go on the ship, like and then he woke up and that's that's what sort of rubs me about the whole like I researched this, it's all accurate. It's like it might be accurate, like in the factual sense, but like as applied to one person, it's completely unbelievable. Yeah. Like he's just like picking which things are supposed to be real and then asking us to suspend our disbelief about anything that is like more on the human level.
SPEAKER_00Um have you heard about Nobel Nobel syndrome, Nobel syndrome, which is it's basically when people win the Nobel Prize for research and then decide that they're a genius in every category that isn't their original field. That's that's what this field's like. Yeah, no, that's that's what it is. Uh that is that's what it feels like.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's interesting. Um yeah, I think that's what my my probably biggest rub on on the science was like one, everything got solved so easily, and two, he was able to do so much, which didn't line up with his credentials.
SPEAKER_00But yeah, and I I hear you. I think my my take on it was just the the repetitiveness of small obstacle xenonite solution. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um his 3D printing ability really was clutch.
SPEAKER_00Also, can we just talk about Rocky? We're 50 we're 50 minutes in. We haven't spoken a word about Rocky.
SPEAKER_01Okay, let's sell I want to celebrate Rocky. I've said a lot of bad stuff. I'll die for Rocky. I'll die, I'll take a bullet.
SPEAKER_00I'll do anything for Rocky. Rocky's the greatest.
SPEAKER_01I'll eat a Talmiba right now.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I'm gonna suck all that astrophagy right off of the Venus line. I'll do the big suck until you.
SPEAKER_01Um I mean, there's a reason people love this book, and it's gotta be 90% Rocky, right? He's the best. I love him. I love it. It's nice to feel something. Yeah, this is like where the the lighter tone like completely fucking works for me. I love a story about friendship. This is so great.
SPEAKER_00It's a buddy cop movie, like for the second half, and it's awesome. And Rocky is adorable, and them trying to communicate is so cute. And Rocky gets a ball, and he goes around on the ball, and he's a little spider in a ball. He's like a hamster. Amaze, amaze question. He's the fucking best. I love him.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, he really is great. Um, I really liked his language too. I thought that was really cool. Um, did I have some questions about like Grace's ability to like convert his language into MIDI and run a program that like can convert everything in real time?
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Doesn't feel like something a biologist would do, but really cool. Really cool. Really cool. And a little audiobook note. Well, one, the audiobook is fantastic. Everyone has said this, but like if you if you are an audiobook person, this is a good one. Um and he did it as a cold read, which is pretty impressive. It's looking crazy. Yeah. Yeah, actually, it was really very sweet because there are moments where like, you know, great, you know, Grace is narrating this and he like gets choked up talking about things, and the narrator was like, no, that was just me. Like I hadn't read this, and I was just getting emotional reading the book. So I thought was really sweet. Like, because I heard that before the sort of moments where that happened. It's like, oh, that's so nice, like very human thing. Yeah. Um, but anyways, in the audiobook, like uh, you know, when Rocky speaks, like it'll show musical notes and they play like funky synth sounds. I love that. That's so cute. It was really cool.
SPEAKER_00I'm happy because that's what it was in my head. Like doo doo doo.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it was basically that. Yeah, like little, yeah, just like little square wave synths. Oh yeah, it was really cool. Really like that.
SPEAKER_00I fucking love Rocky. And we get the we get the get down Mr. President scene with Rocky and backpack Rocky when he saves him and then when he pumps him full of air and almost kills him on accident.
SPEAKER_01Oh, that yeah, well, yeah. I want to talk about that. Um okay, here, I finally have a a good science thing that I really liked. Um I really liked um the little details about how Rocky's crew died, like just the way that they'd evolved in their planet. Like they didn't know about radiation because they weren't exposed to it. Um and yeah, they just it's just like horrible luck, had no idea that was out there. And then Rocky, like pure stroke of luck, happened to be spending most of his time surrounded by astrophage. So it was shielded. Um and like not knowing about relativity and stuff. Like that it was all still through science, but it gave me a little bit of the like investigating these cultures that I thought was kind of missing in the book.
SPEAKER_00So I thought that was I thought he did a a really good job on the Iridian culture and like just kind of lore building and science building. And there's actually, I found a really there's a website that has a really good word document and it has like a full breakdown of the built Iridian culture, like all the facts about Iridian, like just really and I this is actually something I liked about Matt Deniman from the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. Apparently, for all his characters, he writes like a 10,000-word backstory that may or may not ever appear in the books, really, but it's like he does like a full life story for every care every major character, yeah, because then it makes them feel like one that's it's um consistent with like how they would actually be acting in the books, but also they feel like they have depth and stuff, and that's what I feel about the Iridians is like he built it with a ton of depth so that when you're learning these little things about them, it's like, oh wow, this is a real culture, this is a real planet.
SPEAKER_01You yeah, you do get that nice feeling that like there's a lot he didn't tell us about the Euridians, but I bet if you got him like in an interview context, he could rattle off so much about their planet and their cultures and norms and stuff. Like, I feel like that's very confident writing to be like I'm gonna trust that you're gonna feel that this is real, even though I'm not gonna tell you everything that I've thought of. Yeah, I was bought in.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00Like, yeah, we're yeah, we're on Tal Ceti.
SPEAKER_01I don't I don't know where that is. Oh, you know what my biggest regret of the week is? I I didn't order the Tau Seti cooler, which was the signature cocktail when I went to the films. But I did get some impossible chicken nuggets with ranch.
SPEAKER_00What does an impossible chicken nugget taste like? Talk about science is in a bottle. Unbelievable. Have you never had one? No, I I've maybe had one impossible burger in my life.
SPEAKER_01Impossible chicken to me is far superior than like impossible beef products. I think it tastes exactly like a Wendy's spicy chicken sandwich. Oh wow. Does that taste like chicken? Not really, not like the way you would cook it, but it's got a chicken-y thing going. Um they've made a puree of something and fried it, and it's really nice.
SPEAKER_00Wow. Can't wait to live with your eating habits for a week next week.
SPEAKER_01You're ready for a lot of instant meals.
SPEAKER_00We were Angela and I were like, we're actually gonna go grocery shopping before we get to their house.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's something I've really learned about myself is how not food motivated I am.
SPEAKER_00No, no, and that's okay. Not everybody views meals as the same joy.
SPEAKER_01I know, but people always want to go to dinner. I'm like, ugh.
SPEAKER_00Can we just eat some dots and white monsters? Play Morpocopia.
SPEAKER_01You got any you got any of those cookie dough bites from the movie theater? By the way, you know that candy? It's like in a red box, it's cookie dough bites.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Am I the only one who buys those? I can't believe they still stock them, but I love them.
SPEAKER_00My tier list of movie theater candy is number one, the Butterfinger bites. Because I'm a freak. Very good. Very good. Number two, Reese's pieces. Number three, Buncher Crunch.
SPEAKER_01Ooh. Buncher Crunch may be a little loud.
SPEAKER_00I mean, I I sit by myself.
SPEAKER_01I'm seeing like it went by it went viral. A whole ass apple into a movie. You can't beating a hand for in a movie. No chance.
SPEAKER_00Oh, my my funny is when uh when I was studying abroad in Italy, my my roommate and I went to a movie. We brought we were 20 years old, so we brought a bottle of wine and we sat in the back and just like drank a bottle of red wine. Yeah, and then he put it by his feet and kicked it over, and it rolled down every every step of the movie at the end. Just uh it made us it made us feel terrible.
SPEAKER_01Uh did anyone drop their uh barefoot Moscato? Yes. That's me. That was good. Man, that's I was running late for a flight one time, but I I hadn't eaten, and it was like just one of these like an awkward like 3 p.m. flights, or it's like, if I don't eat, I'm also missing dinner. Um so I ordered for some reason like a Philly cheese. Took forever to come out, didn't have time to eat it before I got in the plane. I was like, can I ethically eat a Philly cheese right next to another man? You just eat that middle seat, spread your channel. So I didn't hit the Philly cheese. I was like, he doesn't need to see me sauced up right now. Like that's just rude. And I know I'd lose my mind if someone were philly cheesed up on a flight. Um and then I got off the flight and left the Philly cheese under my seat. Forgot it. Oh. Didn't eat the whole day.
SPEAKER_00That's boring. That's that's terrible.
SPEAKER_01I know, I know. Um is that it? I'm pretty much, I mean, we should get let's get to the ending. I guess we didn't talk about it.
SPEAKER_00I mean, there's the whole sequence where uh there's a couple twists towards the end, you know.
SPEAKER_01Okay, we gotta do the twist and the whole uh they almost get crushed by gravity after their uh giant fishing expedition. And Rocky very bravely goes into the human airspace.
SPEAKER_00What a brave boy.
SPEAKER_01Saves our boy. Really touching, really well done in the movie, I might add.
SPEAKER_00Also, I don't think we know if Rocky is a he. Apparently, he chooses to call him a he, but there's 13 Iridian genders or something.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, they reproduce completely differently, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um Rocky's a Rocky's a good boy. Love him.
SPEAKER_01Big fan.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and then he like catches on fire and then it sucks.
SPEAKER_01And Grace uh kind of accidentally blows off all of his scabs from his mini orifices. Oops. That was uh that was kind of see, that was good comedy. I liked that.
SPEAKER_00Also him eating. I thought eating and watching sleep, I thought those were golden.
SPEAKER_01You sleep, I watch. Um sleep, I watch. I watch you sleep. I thought the eating scene was was frankly disgusting. Uh which was exactly what he wanted. Exactly. As not a food guy, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Okay, any any scene with Rocky in it for me is like a nine out of ten automatically.
SPEAKER_01Yep. If honestly, if you just made this a 300-page book, I feel like I'd be having a completely different conversation right now.
SPEAKER_00It's really just a hundred pages of of science in the middle for me that that slowed it down.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Um okay. It's not all bad. It's not all bad science, but a lot of it's a big uh backstory twist is that Du Bois, who is um the guy who very matter-of-factly tells Grace that he is having sex with the other scientist. Um oh, hold on. Side note. I think we were saying, like, man, Grace really is this is an autistic science boy, ain't he? However, if you zoom out, he's supposed to be the cool scientist, and everyone else is the autistic science boys. That fucked me up. I was like, oh my god, he thinks he's writing the cool guy. And all these other people are the weirdos. That's wild to me.
SPEAKER_00It's a it's an interesting point.
SPEAKER_01Some of the how is some of the scientists are the coolest guy in the book.
SPEAKER_00I think the worst dialogue line in the whole book is when he meets I don't even remember which scientist from which country this is, but she quotes his entire like 14-page paper title to him. Are you good?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, are you Renlin Grace who wrote the theory of hydrogen and oxygen and why it's not necessary? It's like, oh come on. People don't talk like that.
SPEAKER_00We know PhDs and scientists, and they they do not talk like that.
SPEAKER_01They also do. I mean, this is just like a this is just like a TV writing thing. They'd be like, Are you familiar with neutrinos? It's like, oh yes, neutrinos, of course, the part the subatomic particles that like you could just say yes. Like most people would just say yes. But then we would never learn. So then we wouldn't know.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah. Unless you're um Christopher Rachio, and then you're gonna make us look up seventh century lore.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, then I need an illuminated version of your text to follow all your illusions. Um okay, yeah. Finally twist. Yeah. Unfortunately, horny Russian scientist and his lover go up. Uh they go out in glory.
SPEAKER_00Which I actually thought was uh that was the thing that made the most sense in the whole book is that somebody would mix up a nanogram and a my a milligram. Let me tell you what I'd do if they put me in there.
SPEAKER_01I would have a macrogram. Yeah. I'd have a teaspoonful of astrophysic. Um yeah, and that's really it. And so we get a situation where it's grace or like a lab tech from Peru. I can't even remember if the fuck it was, but it was.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, because he's created a plot armor, which is that there's a they have to put him in a medical coma for the 12-year flight. Are we talking coma gene? Coma and you need a coma gene, which one in every seven thousand years. I okay, yeah. This is we're getting really close to start talking about movie comparison territory. So let's let's get through the last couple things here because we can yeah, we can talk about that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Long story short, there's only one man for the job, or a person who's way worse for the job. And uh Grace doesn't he doesn't got it in him, but that's okay because Strat's kind of fucking uh she's got her hands on a on a French amnesia drug. Never heard of it? Amnesia that was one of the more forehead slappy things in the books.
SPEAKER_00Oh, that was so funny.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the thing that would make you forget all about this for just a time. Uh it's so bad.
SPEAKER_00It's also what's funny about this whole thing is like it's the same principle as the Michael Bay movie where it's easier to teach drillers how to be astronauts than astronauts how to drill things. And so in this case, it's like, yes, he is a a you know, microbiologist or whatever, but like he has to learn 900 other scientific disciplines on the fly in space. Like there's probably other people who could learn biology faster.
SPEAKER_01You'd think. But well, who knows? We're not gonna question that. Um the comagene thing, too, not to get like too tangenti here, but we talked about this a lot. With the strength of the few and the lack of plot holes does not mean a good plot. And this comagene thing, it felt like weirs like, okay, well, I need to make it plausible that he would actually be put on this mission. So I've created the comagene to winnow the number of people who could be put there. And then so that grace will make sense. I was like, you are combat, you are fighting a ghost right now. This is a fantasy. This is not a plot hole. And the movie proved that it definitely works better if you don't do like as long I was I was really thinking about this a lot. Like, what how do you decide? Like, how much is too much plotting? And I I think it's just like a threshold y thing. Yeah. If I can suspend my disbelief, that's enough. But it but there's another, there's an upper limit where it's like, oh no, you're explaining too much. And then now it invites a whole nother level of scrutiny that you don't want. Like coma gene crossed that by a month.
SPEAKER_00Right. If in order for your main protagonist to exist in your story, you need a massive freak explosion with the right people in it, a French amnesia drug, and a very specific coma gene, then it's like it's too happenstance.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. But it's also like the movie proved you didn't really need any of that. It's like because you could just rely on the simple, like, Grace, you were around for this whole fucking thing, us developing the Project Tail Mary, you're a biologist. It makes sense for you to go. Like, you can leave it that simple. And it's like, yeah, I buy that one.
SPEAKER_00I actually thought the m I was mad at first at the movie because I'm like, you didn't talk about the coma gene. God. And then I realized it's actually way more believable to your point that, like, yo, we have to launch this thing into space in like six days, and we're in the middle of like Siberia, and you're the closest person.
SPEAKER_01Not a lot of people have like let it rip. Yeah. I think yeah, it's it just seemed one of those things where like he got paranoid about the story losing possibility, and like he kind of came out on the other side where it was too engineered. Yeah. Um, but the twist I actually thought was really good. I I enjoyed that turn from Strat. It like completely makes sense with everything that we've seen about her.
SPEAKER_00Like, yeah, of course, this is what she would do. Like, and you get the nice little like, am I a hero? I guess I am, you know, back and forth with himself. And ultimately, second twist towards the same part of the book. But he does choose to sacrifice potentially his life and return to Earth to save Rocky. And I thought that was adorable. Go see your buddy. The ending, great. No notes. Ending was oh my god, teaching kids. It was perfect. Teaching the alien kids was so heartwarming. I loved it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. No. Yeah, I really have no complaints about the ending. Like I definitely had kind of a 150-page stretch where I was struggling with the book, but um that last hundred I thought was wonderful. Like, I I really I think it's hard to walk away from the book with a bad feeling because of how well it all wrapped up.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah, I thought it was super super fun at the end. Um I want to hang out with Iridians. I want to hang out with Rocky.
SPEAKER_01I want to hang out with Ryan Gosling. Did you like that segue? I did too. Let's let's talk about the movie. Okay. Time to time to do a little roll switch. I fucking loved the movie, and you didn't like it as much as me. What's wrong with you? You don't have a.
SPEAKER_00I I got in a weird place where like I'm not like a I'm not like a fanhood person of this. I read this book a you know a week ago.
SPEAKER_01Daenerys Targaryen is supposed to have purple eyes.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I'm not as bad as some of the posts I've seen on Reddit about them. Like the centrifuge was actually off balance. I'm a fish.
SPEAKER_01Can I can I can I make a note on centrifuge?
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Kathy leaned over to me. She's like, that's not right. You can't do that, do it. I was like, holy shit. And I had to whisper. I was like, Reddit has been exploding with the centrifuge. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Like even a self-balancing centrifuge could never be that offloaded.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And I would and then I I think in line with a lot of the Reddit comments, I was like, Yeah, people have been saying this, you know, you could you could self-balance, but then other people are like, well, you still would never do that. And Gabby's like, Yeah, you would just never load it that way, even if it might work. Like it's just you would just put them on the other side. So uh I wonder if they were just like, we're gonna fuck with these nerds.
SPEAKER_00I I think they were just like, well, okay. Also, the the movie, uh, as as most movies are, the original screening cut was four hours.
SPEAKER_01So I would have watched it.
SPEAKER_00Um, okay, that's actually my beef. I'm just gonna because I I'll encapsulate it in one short thing, which is that I think they made a four-hour version that was page for page of the book, roughly. And I actually thought they did a really good job adapting the the text straight to the movie, and like they did a really good job there. But then I got pissed at a lot of stuff they clearly cut out because it was so plot relevant to the book itself.
SPEAKER_01You wanted you wanted to see the Sahara paved.
SPEAKER_00Okay, I wanted to see the Sahara paved, I wanted to see an artica blow up, and there's a scene towards the end where he's like, Oh, Rocky, all those breeding tanks that you built me, the xenon on the sides, like it's escaped. And I'm like, you never talked about that in the movie.
SPEAKER_01Like, that's the first mention of the really there's a really strange decision. They kind of mix up, they fuck with some of the timing where Rocky is like in his coma through the whole breeding of the Tao Meeba. Right. Um I don't know why exactly. I'm sure there's a reason why they did that, but yeah, it was strange, and it did result in it not being particularly clear like what engineering mistake he'd made.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it actually like because they got rid of so much of the science that um they it got confusing. I was like, if I hadn't read the book, I wouldn't understand what's happening right now. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01It's as for like the movie cutting out a lot of the hard science, it seems really hard to adapt to me because it's so internal. And I think it was smart to have him doing video logs like that. That really worked for me. Like you know, the Marshall's video logs are amazing. Yeah, at some point, Gosling's gonna have to explain what he's doing, and that was really nice. Um, but man, that that's a really hard task. It's such an internal novel with one character on page.
SPEAKER_00So I'll do I'll do you know, roses and thorns. That's a thorn. The rose for me is like I thought they did a really good job, practical effects. Like apparently Rocky was a puppet and stuff, and like and it's like here was his voice, yeah. Yeah, it's just like it's like cool, it looked really realistic. Some of the additions, I thought the movie room was really cool, like the that was awesome. I really liked entertainments, you know, which it makes sense, and then try to oh Carl, Carl and the whole like astrophagy testing scene, those are those were fun.
SPEAKER_01I saw some people complaining about the Home Depot scene, which yeah, I don't know, I get it because it was a lot of corny already, but like I don't know, I was having a good time. Yeah, I was eating chicken nuggets, man.
SPEAKER_00Um question for you how do you feel about karaoke?
SPEAKER_01A weird song choice, I would say. If my boss chose to sing Harry Styles' first uh first single as a solo artist, I would be confused.
SPEAKER_00Especially when you think about in the book her tall glass of gin.
SPEAKER_01Dude, man, if I were a consultant, I would insist on cup of gin. Strat, what are you drinking? Gin. Yeah, yeah, weird, weird choice of song. What would you have had her sing?
SPEAKER_00Like the Dutch national anthem or something.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I try to think. Uh Memory from Cats. Oh my god, did you see that they make Gosling wear a bunch of cat themed shirts, including one from Cats, the musical?
SPEAKER_00I did not. I saw his Fox cardigan, which I really wanted, but apparently it's from a Michigan like fabric maker, and you have to sew it yourself.
SPEAKER_01Oh. Um, so they uh they did quietly make uh Grace a cat person in the movie, uh which obviously is right, that's correct.
SPEAKER_00Of course.
SPEAKER_01Um and two, Shadow Cats 2019.
SPEAKER_00Never gonna see it.
SPEAKER_01One of the better movies I've seen.
SPEAKER_00Never gonna watch it. Not at all.
SPEAKER_01Dude, when you visit cats it could happen. Yeah, I would never see memory. Oh no, no one. Yeah, memory would be good.
SPEAKER_00I I would say um uh what's the what's the stupid David Bowie space song or whatever? We could be heroes! Yeah, yeah. Some like that's that's more what I was thinking.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, you're thinking life on Mars. Is that even what it's called?
SPEAKER_00I don't know. What I was thinking is yeah, exactly. What's the you remember the flight of the Concords?
SPEAKER_01Business socks?
SPEAKER_00It's business socks. They had a great bowies and space. I would have died if she just whooped out a flight of the concord song.
SPEAKER_02It's business time!
SPEAKER_01Yeah, they really there was a moment for comedy there and they just didn't take it. Pink bony. All of these are better than Sign of the Times, Harry Styles' 30th most popular song. Gross. You know who would have been a decent Ryland? Who? Harry Styles.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, probably. I mean, you just need some like happy-go-lucky kind of guy, you know.
SPEAKER_01Charming, handsome guy.
SPEAKER_00Also, I liked uh when he wakes up from the coma and is just incredibly muscular and fit.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00It's like cool.
SPEAKER_02What was up with that?
SPEAKER_00They made a joke at one point. He's like, he writes on the the whiteboard as he's figuring out everything. He's like, muscles?
SPEAKER_01Like why was he buff? Because he wasn't training to go on the mission.
SPEAKER_00Was he buff in the book? I think it was just they cast Ryan Gosling and they're like No, no, no.
SPEAKER_01In the book, right when he wakes up, he's like, I'm jacked. What's going on?
SPEAKER_00Um, that might be Andy Weir is writing himself into the novel a little bit. He is jacked. Yeah. It's like I want to be sexy space boy.
SPEAKER_01I wonder if it was like the robot, you know? Like they're they're pumping him full of uh trend.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01But I'm pretty sure somebody and trend.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'm pretty sure waking up from your coma slurry liquid diet after 12 years, you're you're not you're not gonna. And me burgers. You forgot about the me burgers.
SPEAKER_01No, I I didn't forget about them. I just didn't want to talk about them. I like the meeburgers. You know what? I thought the me burgers sort of makes sense because it was a we I was thinking, I was like, how are they gonna feed this fucker?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I actually misinterpreted it. I had to read it twice because when I read Mii Burgers, I thought he made Talmoeba burgers. Like, and then turns out no, it was him cloning his own flesh and eating himself every day.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense.
SPEAKER_00Also cool. Um what's your rating? What's your overall rating? Book and movie.
SPEAKER_01We don't do ratings.
SPEAKER_00I know.
SPEAKER_01Um on a on an Iridian three finger scale, I'm gonna give the book uh two fingers and the movie three fingers.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think that's I think that's pretty fair.
SPEAKER_01Can I talk about a couple other movie changes? I know we're kind of in time here. Um I really liked that they showed the probes getting back to Earth.
SPEAKER_00Yes, I'm I was I felt really left out that we didn't get a little bit of closure in the book. And seeing just at least even a little hint that the world still existed made me feel good.
SPEAKER_01It would be it would be really at odds with the tone of the end of the book if um Earth collapsed and the space the probes exploded in space, rest in peace ringo. Um but it was nice just like to see that confirmation. Like I think that worked. The one thing that rubbed me about the movie was Grace's ending, where he's he's on the Iridian home planet, and you know, they say, like, we we've got the Hail Mary pretty much ready to go. Like, are you gonna go? And in the book, they have like a really nice conversation where you know you talk about relativity, and he's like, I haven't aged that much, but like everyone back home has. Also, like you're my friend, and I don't really have a lot of friends. And I thought it like sort of made sense. You know, we've joked about this character who's barely a character, but like, you know, it sort of worked. Um, and they cut that conversation, and I wish they had kept that in because I just thought it was a really nice way to end the book. And I think, you know, just two, three more lines of dialogue, I think could have put like a slightly better bow on it.
SPEAKER_00But yeah, and it's I think that's a byproduct of them never actually explaining time dilation in the movie, you know, because then that's like you're not actually really set up to do a scientific expose in that heartwarming end scene if you didn't already understand relativity of time. Um but I but I agree. I think it would have been they missed out on a little thing because they it it created like a glib moment where he's like, why don't I stay a little bit longer? You're like, ha ha ha. But it you're right, it missed out on like this really real cap to the character developments that happened in the book.
SPEAKER_01And and I think the movie just like there was a lot of I think emotion in the story that didn't make it onto the page. You know, just like like we said, like this character is like a little underbaked, the tone is very glib the whole time. Like, and I found Andy Weir a lot of the time was just like, and then I really started crying, big old crocodile tears. But like he he was not really making an effort to make you feel any emotion. It's a lot easier to do that on screen and just like have a great actor like doing that. Like the scene where Rocky like offers him fuel to to go back home was like such a tearjerker, and it was so good in the movie that I think it just it brought out a lot of the emotion that I wish I had felt in the book. Um, it was really nice.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. Good movie, great movie. Also, it's kind of caused me to rewatch scenes from The Martian, also a fun movie.
SPEAKER_01Never seen it, and I intend to watch it after I finish Porco Rosso time.
SPEAKER_00I think you'd enjoy it. Oh, a little Porco Rosso time. Yeah, that's time. Anime boy.
SPEAKER_01I know, I'm on a thing right now. Um, but yeah, I think it was really good, man. I liked it.
SPEAKER_00I'm really happy we did a bang bang, a book movie duo.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's great. I would love to do this more. Next next big adaptation that comes out.
SPEAKER_00Uh it'll be Stephen Colbert's Lord of the Rings Hobbit sequel.
SPEAKER_01Oh, what is it called? The coming ball or something. I just don't even have the I I still have a foul taste in my mouth from uh Rings of Power.
SPEAKER_00I know, I didn't finish it.
SPEAKER_01Um, it's crazy that they made a Lord of the Rings show that was so bad that neither of us watched it.
SPEAKER_00I know, it's actually really sad. How did that be? And it was so high budget. Oh you know what we should if we ever if we ever get down this path where we want to get back into space stuff, we should do the expanse. Like read and watch all hundred books or Firefly, which is my favorite short sci-fi station. People love that show, yeah.
SPEAKER_01It's I mean the expanse is fantastic. I saw the first two seasons for no real reason, but it's great. Um okay. Any parting thoughts here?
SPEAKER_00I had a great time. I really like that we got a visual adaptation. It almost makes me wish like maybe if it'd be nice if there was like a um visual novel or like a comic adaptation of whatever series we're reading next. I don't know, it'd be fun. I want I want to see like a little it's fun mixing up the mediums a little bit. Um but I had a great time with this. I'm right, I'm actually really excited to dive back into traditional norm core fantasy.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, fantasy ass fantasy. Boys with swords from small towns. Yes. Yeah, yeah. We've done a lot of we've done a lot of sci-fi, we've done a lot of realm. Let's get let's get back to bread and butter.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we've done like space and weird magic systems. I'm I'm ready to like beat up a bad guy.
SPEAKER_01I want to drink some mead.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, fuck yeah. I want to go to Ardana and find the sword of power, you know.
SPEAKER_01Well, let me tell you, that's gonna happen. Oh man. Okay, well, thank you all for listening. We appreciate you. Let us know if you have any thoughts on the book or the movie, or honestly anything else. We're around. Travis doesn't have a lot of friends, and he likes talking to you guys.
SPEAKER_00I do. I love emailing people. So should be. Oh god.
SPEAKER_01And I think we're going pretty much straight into Ryan Cahill.
SPEAKER_00I think we'll have it in like two weeks. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Um, yeah, so we'll do two to three episodes on that book, and then we'll keep chugging through that series. I don't know if we're gonna do something between. We'll probably have a pause at some point, but if you want to get the if you want to get a jump on reading, uh, now's the time. Get your tracking voice.
SPEAKER_00You got 200 pages. That's our homework, and that's your homework.
SPEAKER_01Okay. Well, um I'm gonna say goodbye in Iridian for you.
