Project Hail Mary and the Covert Pretension of Sci-Fi Readers

I, like many others, saw Project Hail Mary last week. It was one of my favorite books of 2021, so I had followed the development of the movie closely. It was both a wonderful movie in its own right, and, I feel, a good adaptation. It fell well within all the parameters that I’m looking for in a book adaptation, and I have very generous expectations in that regard. The part that made me most nervous (how they’d portray Rocky) came together better than I could have imagined.
Here’s the thing, though. There’s a very interesting reaction to the book in a lot of the sci-fi reading groups I’m in. I regularly see it called “popcorn sci-fi,” referencing the idea of a “popcorn movie.” The common connotation being something light that you really shouldn’t think about too hard but is really fun to watch and has an otherwise high entertainment value.
Now I love popcorn movies. Particularly popcorn sci-fi movies. I saw Moonfall in theaters and had the time of my life. And that’s sort of where that breakdown is happening in book reading communities. Roland Emmerich is the platonic ideal of popcorn media. In book form, the equivalent is way closer to something like Ice Planet Barbarians or Surfing Samurai Robots than anything that Andy Weir writes.
Project Hail Mary, instead, presents as a book with accessible broad appeal. This is something a lot of “hardcore” science fiction readers struggle to hold in the same esteem as what they deem “complex.”
First, we have to establish how we’re defining these various aspects of a piece of media. “Popcorn” media, in theory, is inherently more accessible with a broader than average appeal. That’s part of what defines it. However, it’s also typically not asking you to perform any major intellectual rigor. Part of the process is showing up and turning your brain off. That is the variable that makes a popcorn movie what it is, and the same can be applied to books.
Something like Project Hail Mary, despite being decidedly approachable, still demands that you pay attention to it. It’s attempting to ask complex questions about humanity and our place in the universe. Whatever surface inaccuracies and highly fictionalized methodologies, it’s still heavily integrating science and technology (both real-world and speculative) into its narrative in a cohesive, analytical way. It’s not just throwing robots at each other and telling them to fight.
So why could this perception be occurring in some of these reading groups I’m in? At it’s core, it sort of comes down to pretension and a lot of the ways sci-fi readers perceive intellectual complexity. There have been so many times where I’ll see a review of a book that describes it as “mind-bending.” I’ll then read it (or DNF it), and while the author is working with some very high-level ideas, the narrative the narrative doesn’t bring the same energy to the table. You’re left with the impression that they had a really cool concept but didn’t necessarily know what to do with it in a practical sense.
And that’s fine if those are the kinds of books you like reading. Those can be very interesting and fun books in their own right depending on what you’re looking for. Too many members of the sci-fi reading community, however, think that those are the objectively “best” books. The only ague they’re using for how “good” a book is is how intellectually challenged they felt. And unfortunately that doesn’t necessitate a well-constructed intellectual challenge. A book could present high concept ideas very poorly and the fact that they have to spend time thinking about it still ticks the boxes.
It always seems to me that many science fiction readers are more concerned with feeling smart than good storytelling.
Project Hail Mary is a soft story. It’s served by science but not driven by it. The underlying current is a “human” story about about how we react to both an existential threat and unearthly obstacles. There’s a prevailing theme of acting on instinct versus logic versus perception and the science acts as the methodology of exploration.
And it’s that anthropological element that makes it more approachable for inexperienced science fiction readers. They don’t need to track all of the complexities of the science and technology to enjoy the bulk of the story.
Yet, that seems to be the thing that makes some science fiction readers relegate the book to a lesser status. When that’s simply not the case when you’re comparing intellectual engagement compared to the content.
Project Hail Mary isn’t less clever than Solaris by Stanislaw Lem or any of the myriad tales of the Hainish Cycle by LeGuin. It’s just asking a different set of questions in a different context at a different evolutionary stage of the genre.
Implying this covert hierarchy where “approachable” science fiction is gently pushed to the bottom implicitly gatekeeps new readers out of the genre.