The problem with Project Hail Mary is that the audio book is good but the book is not. First read the book and then listen to the audio book and you know what I mean.
Weir doesn’t write characters, or dialog to speak of, but he writes decent prose and well thought out engineering puzzles. I enjoy his books for the imaginative exercise.
That's interesting. I found Project Hail Mary to be once of the most disappointing second novels ever written and am surprised at its reception. Is the audiobook meaningfully different?
For pedantry's sake, "Project Hail Mary" is not Weir's second novel. I think "Artemis" followed after The Martian. It's a story set on the Moon with a strong female character, but I can't remember much else about it. :D
Yeah I also didn't like the book at all, it read like a cash grab. However, just listen to a sample of the audio book, it's just hilarious how much effort Ray put into making the characters become alive. Certain significantly improving the lack of writing, of course it can't fix the writing.
Please be kind; being an author is an incredibly hard career, and people do it for the love of creating and sharing a story. It is not a cash grab, and if you don't like his writing style, just don't read his books. Books are deeply personal and no reason to make a personal attack because it isn't a match for your desired book style.
The great thing about opinions, as youve pointed out with books, is that you can disregard them. Personally, I agree that PHM was not particularly good compared with The Martian, but to each their own.
I thought PHM was a fairly well crafted nerdy action book, like a classic B-movie catered to a more educated audience. It's good at tuning itself to its target audience and maintaining interest with pacing and interesting, fun ideas.
What's frustrating is the number of people that list it as the best sci-fi of the last decade and try to elevate it as doing something truly groundbreaking. I don't really understand where that's coming from.
In my opinion Andy Weir is not a very good writer anyways, he is ok. When the story is interesting enough that is typically fine, like in The Martian. Hail Mary is too long certainly, characters a little flat, however, Ray can fix the flat characters in the audio book a little with his good voice acting.
I can understand people preferring to have things narrated to them, but I fail to see how narration can make a book from something you don't like at all into something you like. Ultimately no matter how good the narration is, either you like the story or you don't.
I also found the film of The Martian way better than the book. I got so sick of reading about concentrations of gases and stuff in painful detail. So yeah, good story, but not so good writing. If Project Hail Mary is anything like that then I'll give it a miss.
If you didn't like the 'painful detail' in The Martian, you will positively hate Project Hail Mary. Much more of the 'painful detail' as you call it with much less interesting characters. If you loved The Martian (like I did) and enjoy lots of random science-ish tangents and pseudo-engineering problem solving, you'll find stuff to like in this book. But it is a too long, worse written version of The Martian, with a less interesting protagonist.
Weir tries to make the story more interesting by adding an extra mystery to solve (the main character wakes up with amnesia and has to piece together where he is and what he has to do), but to me it really didn't work.
It's difficult to explain without spoilers... one of the characters feels significantly more fleshed out and real because of some artistic choices in the voice acting.
I am not sure I'd go as far as GP and say that the book is not good, but this is one of the cases where the audiobook feels more like a "production" and not just a book in a different medium.
I found the audiobook to be a superior experience to reading the book as well. It think PHM is an excellent primer on that type of SF for someone who hasn’t read something like it before. My daughter, who never reads hard SF, loved the audiobook.
I once commented on Twitter that the Anansi Boys audiobook read by Lenny Henry was better than the book. Neil Gaiman responded, “I agree”.
This post is sooo symptomatic of people who have too much time and don't seem to be educated beyond their field. Overthinking something that maybe not that complicated after all. The egos of software people is just bigger than it should be. Also mythical thinking like "10x bla bla" is symptomatic.
Your comment is basically a personal attack of the character of the author. Totally unnecessary. Additionally, I completely disagree with your assessment. It's clear the author has spent a lot of time thinking about this and you framing it as "over thinking" and "not educated beyond their field" and "big ego" is downright mean spirited, wrong, and reductivism.
Of course it is a personal attack on the character of the person. That is the only thing guard-railing spreading nonsense. Software people need to work on their character.
Who care who thinks what, a tweet, really? As if we have to agree on some pointless statements. In certain areas it is used, in others not. Now what?
I really don't know what the point of such posts are. It is only relevant for people who want to go into scientific computing, and even there you have some GPU rewrites going on. So not everyone is using it but physicist etc. do. Also the legacy code is huge, like with C++.
Strange discussion here. I'm a developer in everything for 20 years and the last 7 probably in large JS/TS applications.
I switched to Blazor Server for the last year in a new company and it has a montrous amount of benefits.
First of all, do not pretend that you are Google or Facebook. This is a repeated mental illness that developers suffer from. No won't face any performance issues. The contrary, Blazor is blazing fast.
However, there are couple of issues when it comes to interactivity with javascript frameworks. Until .net 7 you could use every JsRuntime.JsInvoke... something like that to invoke JS function.
In .net 8 they changed something and you cannot use it like that anymore or you get strange subtle errors when you get "too" dynamic. I'm figuring it out right now. But other than that you have a gigantic .net stack with build-in support ORM, RateLimiter, Caching, Distributed-Caching, MVC, WebAPI, ... The list of features is infinite.
I like the Leptos approach more.
Smaller binaries,lessoverhead, website already works completely during loading WASM and turns on client side rendering once it is loaded.
IMO it's because the stock photo of "the 1%" is a superyacht or a private jet, which makes people like HNers think that they themselves are far below the threshold.
A private jet in the case of this article. I bet that's not how HNers would illustrate us as a group. Quite a nasty rhetorical trick, really.
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