Tangentially related, is this book worth the hype? I don't read a lot of genre fiction, but don't like to miss out on the exceptional (just finished and loved Flowers for Algernon, as an example).
Edit: Sounds like an enjoyable, low commitment book. Will give it a try, thanks for the feedback.
pjerem · 6h ago
The hype, absolutely not. I found the writing to be very poor. However I enjoyed it. The story is refreshing and straightforward.
To be fair, I read it months before the movie announcement and it really felt like reading a movie plot. If you prefer, I thought that the author had a great story idea but cared very little about writing a book, like he already knew this was for Hollywood.
I think with good production it’s going to be a better movie than the book.
Never read the Martian but I was told it was the same thing.
diggan · 6h ago
Obviously subjective, but I had seen The Martian before I read the book (many years after seeing the movie), and liked the book way better than the movie. Read Project Hail Mary right after finishing The Martian, and enjoyed that one even more. I guess the writing is a bit dry, but it kind of makes sense and I quite like it. I'm cautiously optimistic about the new movie.
ericol · 6h ago
> Never read the Martian but I was told it was the same thing.
That's the very feeling I had when I read 'The Martian'.
While I was reading it I actually thought something to the tune (It's been years now) "This reads like a movie".
Guess that explains why the movie is so faithful to the book.
loteck · 7h ago
Almost nothing is worth the hype but the book is an enjoyable page turner if you like space adventures and speculative science. Audiobook also got some extra attention, I'd go with that if you like audiobooks.
GolfPopper · 7h ago
This. It was fun and very readable, but not something I have any desire to go back and read again.
_qua · 6h ago
It's a fun read but, just like his other books, very one-dimensional characters with no depth. Not really remarkable literature, more of a bunch of Wikipedia articles strung together.
Latty · 6h ago
I agree that I really don't like Andy Weir's character writing: his dialogue in particular is rough, but despite normally characters being what I'm there for in stories, I give Project Hail Mary a bit more credit than this. The story has some interesting ideas and I think Weir's strength is the mystery of process: you see a challenge, and then you get to enjoy the competence porn of someone successfully going through the process of finding a solution, and I think he nails doing that in a really engaging way.
I do think the movie will probably end up better than the book: having a screenwriter go over the dialogue alone will do a lot, I think.
mritchie712 · 6h ago
if Project Hail Mary isn't a good sci-fi book, what is a good one?
moomin · 6h ago
Children of Time
There’s lots of answers to this depending on taste, but you also get into arguments about whether such and such is space opera or planetary romance. Children of Time is hard SF the way a reader from the 1960s would have understood it.
dwedge · 4h ago
Iain M Banks Culture series
The Mote God's Eye
Anything by Asimov
Also there's a lot of great short stories in this genre. For example the road not taken by Harry Turtledove
drexlspivey · 6h ago
I liked Daemon by Daniel Suarez, I read it many years ago but it’s more relevant now than ever (the story is about a rogue AI).
gwill · 5h ago
Dune, Children of Time, Neuromancer and Blindsight.
for "sci-fi" that reads like fantasy, the Sun Eater series is really fun.
cylinder714 · 5h ago
I just saw an Apple TV teaser for Neuromancer!
mrgaro · 6h ago
Depends a lot what you are after, but look for writers like Dan Simmons, Arthur C Clark or Alastair Reynolds.
sbelskie · 7h ago
If you don't read/like much genre fiction, I would say probably no. The pacing is well done and I genuinely find story compelling, but the writing while solid-ish is not exactly of high literary quality.
Additionally, in terms of genre I actually find Weir's books to be more like detective novels than sci-fi, though obviously lots of sci-fi elements in them.
jetbalsa · 7h ago
I've found and some have proven that sci-fi is just a setting of sorts, a background to the story at hand. For instance the Backyard Starship series is 100% a detective / cop novel set in space. Asimov did one called The Naked Sun that was pretty much a murder mystery and from what I understand written to prove a point that sci-fi really is just a setting to what ever main genre you want out of it.
jowea · 3h ago
I have the same opinion, likewise for fantasy. But a lot of scifi and fantasy stories really have similar tropes and plots, even if it is possible to write say, a romantic book with scifi trappings. There are also some books like I, Robot that really are about the scifi and not just another genre in a scifi setting.
sbelskie · 6h ago
Yea that makes a lot of sense. The first Expanse novel (at least Miller’s storyline) fits here as well.
jetbalsa · 6h ago
I also think anime is in the same boat, there is a ton of different stories you can tell and how they are animated. its a shame it gets all lumped together like it does
konsalexee · 7h ago
It was really enjoyable to read. And I also do not read a lot of fiction, with my last book being the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy series.
My verdict is that Project Hail Mary was way much more engaging in terms of story-telling. The concepts were cool, and tbh I look forward for the movie and see if the adaptation will be nice
jowea · 7h ago
I liked the audiobook a lot, but I'm a SF aficionado, so my opinion may not be relevant. The other comment may be correct about the "serious literary critic" opinion.
woile · 5h ago
Yes, it's a nice book. Especially if you are not a native English speaking and you are looking to practice your English reading skills. I enjoyed the book and so many of my friends. It's very easy read, and it falls under the hard sci-fi category.
I also enjoyed the expanse books!
lucb1e · 6h ago
I enjoyed The Martian even more, but perhaps only because I wasn't prepared for how good it was. I was bored in Stockholm airport and thought "haven't I heard of this book oh HN?", flipped a few pages, and decided to buy it. It quickly became clear that I had a new favorite book (and it still is)
PHM, from the same author, I was very much expecting to be very good to amazing. It delivered, but it's a different feeling when you see it coming
JonoBB · 7h ago
I typically prefer somewhat deeper and more thought-provoking material, but I enjoyed this book. It’s a light page-turner, written-to-be-turned-into-a-movie type book. Overall, I would recommend it.
trey-jones · 6h ago
It's funny, I would not put this or the Martian into made-to-be-movie category, mainly featuring a single protagonist alone with his thoughts of how best to effect survival. I haven't (and probably won't) see the movies. I preferred the Martian very much compared to PHM, but I did enjoy it. Just had a problem with suspension of disbelief to do trivialization of language learning and communication (especially alien).
Andrew_nenakhov · 7h ago
It was on my reading list for a while, and after the movie trailer was released, it finally nudged me and I read it. Took a few hours. It is very easy to read, quite enjoyable being a 'plausible' sci-fi. Though, spoilers ahead, alien part of the story was somewhat disappointing, by being not alien enough.
izacus · 6h ago
If you can handle the terrible Gary Sue main character, it's a fun summer read.
AngryData · 7h ago
I thought it was a pretty good book as someone who reads a lot of sci-fi. It has a few unique ideas and plot points I haven't seen before, is an accessible read to anyone, and has a satisfying conclusion.
ItsHarper · 7h ago
Admittedly I am a sci-fi fan, but I loved it so much. The science fiction aspects are not the best part.
Don't watch the trailer for the movie though, it's very spoiler-heavy.
ecshafer · 7h ago
No. Any Weir anything is not going to break into the tier of exceptional. Its YA fiction level writing with a bit of science sprinkled in.
kyleblarson · 7h ago
It is a super fast, super fun read.
UltraSane · 6h ago
The audio book is very very good.
mystified5016 · 7h ago
Yes, absolutely.
It's maybe not a literary masterpiece and it's suspiciously similar to The Martian if you squint. But not many books can get me laughing out loud the second or third time through.
It's a really fun read and I find the aliens particularly compelling in a way that most Sci-Fi doesn't get right.
FeepingCreature · 7h ago
Please remove that spoiler.
bananapub · 5h ago
andy weir is the dan brown of this genre
K0balt · 6h ago
Meh, to me it failed to engage. Characters very one dimensional, I’d call it young adult level sophistication . Some cool ideas though.
TBF I am trying to write fiction for the first time in my writing career, and I also suck at characters and non contrived story engagement, so I’m not trying to throw stones here. I do hope, however, to do better in my first published fiction.
chubot · 7h ago
Hm I feel like I jumped into the middle of something and don't understand the conclusion.
What's the beef between PlanetScale and Neon? Benchmarking, uptime, vibe coding?
The quote at the end doesn't really help me. Which one is good for what?
PhilippGille · 6h ago
To make it shorter than OP's reply, from my understanding of the offerings:
- PlanetScale for predictable load. You pick a config (CPU, memory) and if you don't have traffic it sits idle, and if you have traffic it's limited by the config you picked.
- Neon for scalability. You pay for compute hours, so if your traffic is spikey (e.g. concert ticket sales), you don't pay for idle resources during low traffic, and get all the compute you need during high traffic.
konsalexee · 7h ago
Long story short, I didn't want to make that analysis/distinction because it would miss the point.
They excel in their respective areas based on the architectural decisions they've made for the use cases they wanted to optimize for.
PlanetScale, with their latest Metal introduction, optimized for super low latency (they act like they've reinvented the wheel, lol), but they clearly have something in mind going in this direction.
Neon offers many managed features for serverless PostgreSQL that were missing in the market, like instant branching, and with auto-scaling, you may perform better with variable workloads. From their perspective, they wanted to serve other use cases.
There's no reason to always compare apples to oranges, and no reason to hate one another when everyone is pushing the managed database industry forward.
twoodfin · 7h ago
Well, I imagine at least the emotional aspect of this squabble had more than a billion reasons injected via Databricks.
sinnickal · 7h ago
Edelman PR
akulkarni · 6h ago
I agree with the overall sentiment of this post.
I’ve learned (sometimes the hard way!) that every design choice comes with real trade-offs. There’s no magic database architecture that optimizes every dimension (e.g., scalability, performance, ease-of-use) simultaneously.
Social media often pushes us into oversimplified "winner vs. loser" narratives, but this hides the actual complexity of building great infrastructure.
Recognizing and respecting these differences makes us smarter engineers, better community members, and frankly, just more enjoyable people to chat with.
PS Thank you for helping me add a new book to my list :-)
bitbasher · 6h ago
I don’t get it. Sending a query to a remote server is going to be much slower than sending the query to local database. When has Postgres not been enough on its own?
abroadwin · 5h ago
For me it's all about the branching Neon provides. Being able to instantly and automatically have a branch of my production data for every dev branch is incredibly useful.
Edit: Sounds like an enjoyable, low commitment book. Will give it a try, thanks for the feedback.
To be fair, I read it months before the movie announcement and it really felt like reading a movie plot. If you prefer, I thought that the author had a great story idea but cared very little about writing a book, like he already knew this was for Hollywood.
I think with good production it’s going to be a better movie than the book.
Never read the Martian but I was told it was the same thing.
That's the very feeling I had when I read 'The Martian'. While I was reading it I actually thought something to the tune (It's been years now) "This reads like a movie".
Guess that explains why the movie is so faithful to the book.
I do think the movie will probably end up better than the book: having a screenwriter go over the dialogue alone will do a lot, I think.
There’s lots of answers to this depending on taste, but you also get into arguments about whether such and such is space opera or planetary romance. Children of Time is hard SF the way a reader from the 1960s would have understood it.
The Mote God's Eye
Anything by Asimov
Also there's a lot of great short stories in this genre. For example the road not taken by Harry Turtledove
for "sci-fi" that reads like fantasy, the Sun Eater series is really fun.
Additionally, in terms of genre I actually find Weir's books to be more like detective novels than sci-fi, though obviously lots of sci-fi elements in them.
My verdict is that Project Hail Mary was way much more engaging in terms of story-telling. The concepts were cool, and tbh I look forward for the movie and see if the adaptation will be nice
PHM, from the same author, I was very much expecting to be very good to amazing. It delivered, but it's a different feeling when you see it coming
Don't watch the trailer for the movie though, it's very spoiler-heavy.
It's maybe not a literary masterpiece and it's suspiciously similar to The Martian if you squint. But not many books can get me laughing out loud the second or third time through.
It's a really fun read and I find the aliens particularly compelling in a way that most Sci-Fi doesn't get right.
TBF I am trying to write fiction for the first time in my writing career, and I also suck at characters and non contrived story engagement, so I’m not trying to throw stones here. I do hope, however, to do better in my first published fiction.
What's the beef between PlanetScale and Neon? Benchmarking, uptime, vibe coding?
The quote at the end doesn't really help me. Which one is good for what?
- PlanetScale for predictable load. You pick a config (CPU, memory) and if you don't have traffic it sits idle, and if you have traffic it's limited by the config you picked.
- Neon for scalability. You pay for compute hours, so if your traffic is spikey (e.g. concert ticket sales), you don't pay for idle resources during low traffic, and get all the compute you need during high traffic.
They excel in their respective areas based on the architectural decisions they've made for the use cases they wanted to optimize for.
PlanetScale, with their latest Metal introduction, optimized for super low latency (they act like they've reinvented the wheel, lol), but they clearly have something in mind going in this direction.
Neon offers many managed features for serverless PostgreSQL that were missing in the market, like instant branching, and with auto-scaling, you may perform better with variable workloads. From their perspective, they wanted to serve other use cases.
There's no reason to always compare apples to oranges, and no reason to hate one another when everyone is pushing the managed database industry forward.
I’ve learned (sometimes the hard way!) that every design choice comes with real trade-offs. There’s no magic database architecture that optimizes every dimension (e.g., scalability, performance, ease-of-use) simultaneously.
Social media often pushes us into oversimplified "winner vs. loser" narratives, but this hides the actual complexity of building great infrastructure.
Recognizing and respecting these differences makes us smarter engineers, better community members, and frankly, just more enjoyable people to chat with.
PS Thank you for helping me add a new book to my list :-)