For as long as science fiction has existed, it has grappled with big questions about ethics, humanity, and the future. H. G. Wells, among the first and greatest of science fiction authors, paired his famous speculative novels like The Time Machine and War of the Worlds with over a dozen books of contemporary political commentary and social critique. Since then, many of the best science fiction works have contained some sort of philosophical thought, from Dune to Blade Runner.

This brings me to the subject of today’s blog post, Andy Weir’s 2021 sci-fi novel Project Hail Mary. Since its release, the book has dominated the bestseller charts and attracted widespread praise from figures as varied as Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk. 

I don’t do book reviews here. For what it’s worth, I thought the book was entertaining and well-written. But I still have a huge issue with the novel.

What sets Project Hail Mary apart from most science fiction is an apparently conscious effort to say as little about politics as possible. But in that attempt to remove politics from the plot and themes, the book treads into far murkier territory. Wouldn’t it be so much easier, the book seems to imply, if we just let scientists run everything? 

The Story

The book’s story is more or less Interstellar with amnesia. The protagonist, Ryland Grace, wakes up on a spaceship in a distant solar system with no memory of what he’s doing there. Over the course of the story, he gets flashbacks that gradually reveal that he’s been sent on a last-ditch mission to save humanity. You see, alien microbes are causing the sun to grow dimmer, so in order to prevent an ice age, Ryland Grace must become part of a huge mission to another star system to find a solution.  

But in order to launch the mission, the world governments must put on an unprecedented (and perhaps implausible) show of unity. To ensure the mission succeeds, they appoint a woman named Eva Stratt, to organize the space mission. Stratt has almost godlike authority, and she knows how to use it. 

Over the course of the story, Stratt strongarms her way across the world, drafting the most talented scientists to assist her project, testing the DNA of thousands of astronaut candidates, covering the Sahara desert with solar panels, and even setting off hundreds of nuclear weapons in Antarctica in order to accelerate the greenhouse effect and buy humanity a few more years of warmth. 

A lot of the book’s humor comes from the way Stratt casually bulldozes any irritating barriers to her ultimate mission of saving humanity. Take one scene in Chapter 11, where Stratt dismisses a lawsuit by fussy intellectual property lawyers. 

“I assure you, Ms. Stratt, you will comply with the law,” said the justice.

“Only when I want to.” Stratt held up a sheet of paper. “According to this international treaty, I am personally immune from prosecution for any crime, anywhere on Earth. The United States Senate ratified that treaty two months ago.”

She held up a second piece of paper.

“And to streamline situations like this, I also have a preemptive pardon from the president of the United States for any and all crimes I am accused of within U.S. jurisdictions.”

However, there’s a point at which Stratt’s high-handedness crosses the line from humorous to disturbing. Consider the way the same scene concludes: 

She grabbed her satchel and put the tablet inside. “I’ll be on my way.”

“Hold on, Ms. Stratt,” said Justice Spencer. “This is still a court of law,and you will remain for the duration of these proceedings!”

“No, I won’t,” said Stratt.

The bailiff walked forward. “Ma’am. I’ll have to restrain you if you don’t comply.”

“You and what army?” Stratt asked.

Five armed men in military fatigues entered the courtroom and took up station around her. “Because I have the U.S. Army,” she said. “And that’s a damn fine army.”

Now, I’ll freely admit that moments of crisis can call for more streamlined and efficient executive authority. History is full of leaders seizing authority in emergency scenarios. But even emergency power generally comes with strict limits, and for good reason.

In the darkest days of World War II, one of the few moments where it could be said without hyperbole that the fate of humanity hung in the balance, the response of the world’s democracies was not to appoint a temporary dictator, as the Roman Republic would have. Instead, free elections continued, and the gears of democratic governance ground on. Indeed, Winston Churchill was voted out of office before the end of the war. 

There are a hundred reasons why democratic societies would want to hold onto their liberal values even in the more dire of crises. Sometimes even benevolent dictators make mistakes. Sometimes a dictator’s solution to a crisis brings on other crises. Sometimes a crisis persists for years, and the muscles and sinews of democracy weaken and atrophy until they are unable to once again receive the burdens of power.  

I would have no problem with Stratt’s plotline if the story acknowledged both the promises and pitfalls of authoritarian governance. But here’s the central problem: Andy Weir’s book isn’t particularly interested in politics at all. 

High Modernism

Now it’s time to digress into a very different book, Yale historian James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State. The book, despite it’s coyly vague subtitle (“How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed”) is about a very specific trend in history — the many failures of centralized, scientific planning, from China’s disastrous Great Leap Forward (which killed an estimated 30 million people) to the failures of modern forestry.

In Scott’s theory, several elements need to exist for disastrous centralization projects to occur. Firstly, a government entity needs to have huge amounts of power, and secondly, it needs to be willing to use that power to sweep aside local and traditional interests. Does any of this sound familiar?

But there’s also another crucial element to the disasters Scott chronicles — a particular intellectual framework. Scott calls this philosophy “high modernism.”

[High modernism] is best conceived as a strong (one might even say muscle-bound) version of the beliefs in scientific and technical progress that were associated with industrialization in Western Europe and North America from roughly 1830 until World War I. At its center was a supreme self-confidence about continued linear progress, the development of scientific and technical knowledge, the expansion of production, the rational design of social order, the growing satisfaction of human needs, and not least, an increasing control over nature (including human nature) commensurate with scientific understanding of natural laws.

Seeing Like A State, page 89-90

It’s important to distinguish high modernism from what I guess you could call normie modernism. Everyone can appreciate the many uses of science, but high modernists don’t just value science, they see it as the solution for pretty much all of humanity’s problems. Too much urban crime? Design the city’s architecture to have fewer alleyways. Not enough lumber? Plant huge forest of trees like they’re cornstalks. Obesity levels too high? Mass-produce drugs like Ozempic.

Project Hail Mary exemplifies high modernism, both in the solutions Stratt ends up implementing (like coating the Sahara desert in solar panels to create rocket fuel) and in the underlying ideas. You see, Andy Weir loves writing about science. Andy Weir’s first book, The Martian, is mostly about the protagonist, Mark Watney, finding creative, Randall Munroe-esque science solutions to lengthen his survival on an abandoned Mars base. As Andy Weir has said in an interview: 

Any time you have a clever person doing clever things, it’s a joy to read. I almost feel like I’m cheating. It’s such an easy formula.

Andy Weir isn’t just a lover of science. I would argue that he is himself, to some degree, a high modernist. As he said in another interview:

“Pick a technology that, overall, you feel has done more harm than good to humanity. Because it’s very difficult to think of a technology that has done more harm than good. And the reason is because technology is a tool, and, I believe, humans are inherently good….

Try to name a technology that’s done more harm than good. You say nuclear bombs; I say nuclear power. How much coal dust is not in the air? How much pollution and emissions are not in the air because nuclear power plants exist?”

Now, I’m not a high modernist, so to me, this claim stretches credulity to the breaking limit. Even leaving aside the tradeoff between nuclear power and nuclear weapons, can we really be so quick to say that all modern technology, from iPhones to AI, is unambiguously good? I think that a healthy skepticism is warranted, but that skepticism just isn’t part of high modernism.

Science Without Politics

I have no issue with Weir’s optimism when it’s applied to narrow questions of science, like Mark Watney figuring out how to grow potatoes on Mars. The issue is that in Project Hail Mary, the problem being solved isn’t just spacecraft maintenance or finding fuel leaks. Instead, the characters are grabbling with questions of global politics.

And the fact is, Weir just isn’t that interested in politics. He seems to see political issues as a problem to be solved with a single-minded precision that denies any room for subjectivity or nuance. As Stratt says, when justifying the decision to detonate hundreds of nuclear warheads in Antarctica: 

“When the alternative is death to your entire species, things are very easy. No moral dilemmas, no weighing what’s best for whom. Just a single-minded focus on getting this project working.”

The willingness to sideline anything not directly related to the projects outcomes is another aspect of high modernism. as James C. Scott writes, “high-modernist ideology thus tends to devaue or banish politics.”

And perhaps this is where I reveal my bias as a dyed-in-the-wool humanities major. I think we lose something when we see global problems with a purely scientific rationality. When you strip away the geopolitics and “weighing what’s best for whom”, you’re stripping away all of those little inefficiencies like human rights, freedom of information, consent, and the like.

For Ryland Grace, (and perhaps Andy Weir), all of Stratt’s executive control is to be admired, because she is the only person who can make the project work. As Ryland thinks once he’s on the ship:  

[Stratt] was (is?) a really domineering person. But gosh darn it, I’m glad she was in charge of making this ship happen. Now that I’m aboard it and all. Her attention to detail and insistence on perfection are nice to have all around me.

Ryland Grace may be a brilliant scientist, but he’s certainly not much of a political theorist. 

Towards the end of the novel: we have the big twist: it turns out the Ryland Grace didn’t choose to be on the ship at all. Stratt had forced him into the suicide mission, then drugged him to make him forget that he was there against his own will. 

But instead of reflecting on the downsides of giving complete authority to a single individual, afterward, Grace thinks the following about Stratt. 

What ticks me off the most is that she was right. Her plan worked perfectly. I got my memory back, and now I’m so committed to the mission I’m still going to give it my all.

Stratt’s plan worked. Humanity will be saved. The ends justify the means. And Ryland does’t even blame her for the decision.

But if James C. Scott’s book is any guide, Stratt’s bulldozing high modernist approach would very likely have failed. The problem with unchecked high modernism, Scott argues, is that central planners get stuff wrong. Societies, climates, and even forests are so complex that people in authority can’t hope to fully understand them. But when authorities act with unearned confidence, disastrous unintended consequences often follow.

Maybe this is all just a histrionic overreacting to a pop science fiction book. But as I said at the beginning, science fiction is all about exploring big ideas about humanity. I don’t think Andy Weir is as conscious in his ideology as H.G. Wells was, but his ideas, intentionally stated or not, have meaning. The unfettered high modernism that Andy Weir sympathizes with is ascendent in 21st-century thought, but in the 20th century, it caused millions of deaths and incalculable harm. That fact, if nothing else, means we should take Project Hail Mary seriously.

Science Fiction

What annoys me most is how unnecessary all this is. It’s not as though authors have to choose between writing about science and writing about society and politics. The Expanse series and the Red Mars trilogy, for instance, are also hard science fiction stories set into the near future. However, these stories that blend interesting scientific problem-solving with a concern for how people use different political means to solve their problems.

The books can be frustrating because they don’t provide any definitive answers. The authors don’t claim to know the most effective ways to organize people. Scientists make morally ambiguous decisions, and some of them end in disaster.

Taste is subjective, but I much prefer books don’t just examine how the science works, but also take a look at what happens to people when the science doesn’t work.