Hacker News Reader

Comment by rcarmo | Hacker News Reader

Well, he did take a different tack on Project Hail Mary. No spoilers here other than the protagonist figures out the darkest, most reflective aspects as he goes along, which is a great counterpoint to the escalation in the story and evens things out a great deal.

View on HN

I recently heard Project Hail Mary mentioned. I didn't know Andy Weir wrote a third book until that moment. It's a great novel on par with The Martian, and after the success of The Martian, I'm surprised I didn't hear about Project Hail Mary sooner.

I use an adblocker and don't watch TV comercials. Does anyone know if Project Hail Mary was advertised? I guess that's one downside of not seeing ads.

I usually get my list of "to read" from either; Goodreads (yes, I know... Amazon data capture) or John Scalzi's "Whatever" blog - but, I have never seen TV commercials for books, even before I went streaming platform only.

I learned about it via an ad on my Kindle lock screen. One of the only ads I can remember that led me to a purchase. Great book!

I wish I could somehow obscure your comment from everyone at Amazon.

I use an e-ink tablet, Android stock, due to eye strain. The kindle app is such a bloated pile of ad laden junk, it is barely usable.

Not only that, but it won't let me get rid of whitespacing around the text, and more, eating tonnes of real estate.

Meanwhile, every other app, eg moon reader, etc, is fast and slick.

Impressive, Amazon!

I buy what I can elsewhere, due to this, but sometimes have no choice... and I imagine losing a few sales is offset by more buy in due to the horrid ads?

Why do you have to use the kindle app? Because of books in azw format? If you use calibre you can convert it to other formats.

Newer kindle formats require all sorts of work, and constantly change. I also need to keep a window vm around, it is as annoying as the kindle app.

Thanks for the mention though, and I know calibre is quite convenient for some.

I run calibre on mint.. VM for the kindle app?

Yes, I've not seen docs pointing to any other way...

At the same time, you could tell that he deliberately didn't include those moments in The Martian because he's not comfortable writing from that standpoint. In Project Hail Mary, those moments seem shoehorned in and the voice turns back into being aloof and impassionate in the next sentence. Even the end of the book presented two options and he took the less emotional one.

I think the less emotional ending was pretty much a given. The whole book also hinted at that as it was a redemption for the character's earlier behaviour. Having him choose the other option would have been really dark especially because of the consequences for the 'other team' (obfuscated a bit because of the lack of spoiler tags here)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com