Project Hail Mary
This is a book that had been recommended to me for a while by people like Kiichiro Yanashita as an interesting piece of science fiction. It was around the same time as 'The Three-Body Problem,' and while I started working through that trilogy, this one sat on my 'to-read' pile for a long time. In the meantime, the movie release has been approaching, and after agonizing over whether to watch or read it first, I decided to use the year-end and New Year holidays to read the novel, so I started it. Once I began, I couldn't stop, and I finished both the upper and lower volumes in about a week. It was fascinating! It seems to deal with the same subject matter as 'The Three-Body Problem' but from a different stance, and both are interesting.
There are broadly two reasons why 'Project Hail Mary' is so interesting. The first is the excitement and joy of discovery that scientists feel. Starting from noticing unnatural discrepancies in numerical values through observation and experiments, they formulate hypotheses, conduct further experiments to verify them, and so on, repeating this process until they reach the truth. This might be the daily activity of scientists and researchers, but it is expressed in a way that allows us to feel how exciting it actually is. Isn't this the very essence of science fiction?
The other reason—and from here on, I will be getting closer to the truth of the movie (those who intend to watch the movie without reading the original work should stop here)—is that it is an 'alien contact story.' There are two types of aliens or extraterrestrial organisms, and both appear in this work. One is a non-intelligent organism, the 'Astrophage,' which is the cause of the sun's temperature dropping. The protagonist is sent to a star system to find the cause to stop its reproduction, and there he meets Rocky, an 'Eridian' who came to investigate for the same purpose because the star in his own system was being affected by Astrophage. From the point where two individuals with different living environments, different habits, and different languages attempt to make contact and communicate, and then work toward the same goal, it becomes a 'buddy story.' The situation regarding how different intelligent life forms meet is in contrast to 'The Three-Body Problem,' which assumes hostility. This friendship is quite moving.
By the way, as of now (January 2026), the movie trailer has been released, and it seems that people are being advised, 'Don't watch the trailer!' Apparently, it contains quite a few spoilers regarding the latter point mentioned above, namely, the 'alien buddy' aspect. At the same time, given the length of the movie, I suspect that this is about as much as can be expressed in one film, and the 'joy of science' might not be portrayed very well. In that sense, I am glad I read the original work first.
I will go to see the movie without expecting too much.