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Comment by dhosek | Hacker News Reader

I saw the title and imagined a scenario where someone combined the idea of "The Martian" with interstellar travel. Basic idea: interstellar colony ship with colonists in cryo-sleep. One of the colonists is inadvertently awakened mid-journey and has to attempt to survive the multi-year journey in solitude without jeopardizing the whole colony's travel.

Feel free to write this if you like, any of you. Ideas are cheap and I have more than I'm likely to use in what remains of my life.

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Andy Weir, the author of the Martian, just came out with a new book called Project Hail Marry. It’s premise is similar to what you are describing. If you liked the Martian, I highly recommend it. It’s one of the best books I have ever read.

Seconded. The Martian is still my favorite, but Hail Mary is #2 now, pushing Daemon from Daniel Suarez to third place.

Have a look at Passengers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passengers_(2016_film)

And here's an alternative take that might work better:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gksxu-yeWcU

When passengers ends, if feels like a cheap-o movie. Hollywood but with only two main actors and in total three actors for the whole film. So empty, no ensemble, no people. Only the two actors, production, special effects and the movie making machine.

Not to mention both actors look like Ken and Barbie and has extreamly predictable personalities. That movie could have been great if actors would have been like genuine people. Instead it became plastic and meaningless.

That musical vignette...

The movie could have been great if it was oriented around the female passenger waking up and not knowing what had already happened before instead of the audience knowing everything linearly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gksxu-yeWcU

I liked the first 3/4 of that movie, the ending could have been way better.

Warning Spoilers: It would have been much better had Pratt died in the fusion exhaust pipe, and the movie ends one year later showing JLaw standing over another cryopod, internally conflicted if she should wake up another passenger, and only then finally forgiving Pratt.

Dang. That would have been an amazing ending.

Also has shares some elements with the earlier Pandorum (2009):

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1188729

This is actually a similar idea to the latest novel by Andy Weir (Author of "The Martian"), "Project Hail Mary", which is great and I highly recommend if you liked "The Martian".

Never realised he had another book out - thank you. After being less interested in the drama presented in Artemis, I'm thrilled he seems to have another problem->fix type book I can read.

Note that Hail Mary is much closer in plot and style to Artemis than The Martian. I loved The Martian (9.5/10), but only passably liked Artemis (6/10) and Hail Mary (5/10).

YMMV: I liked Hail Mary just as much, if not more then, The Martian. It had the same "solo dude using science and cleverness to solve an impossible problem" with a massively more ambitious plot.

Also, the plot twists in Hail Mary are very well delivered. The book ends up being completely different then you're expecting when you go into it.

I think the Martian was great the first time through, but re-reading it isn't as much fun when you know what's going to happen. I didn't enjoy Artemis as much the first time, but I think it holds up better at being interesting and entertaining even when you know what's about to happen.

Hail Mary I haven't read twice yet, but my take is that it fits somewhere in the middle.

Interesting. For context I loved The Martian and quite often use bits of the audio book to fall asleep to. Artemis wasn't bad, but there was a lot of interpersonal and stupid decision making in the lead up to critical events which I found a little annoying and contrived.

Hail Mary I started reading last night at my first comment. 7 hours later I'm about 50% of the way through and absolutely loving it. So far we seem to be doing the problem->fix cycle in the small and large scales with an interesting overarching plot. Looking forward to continuing.

Children of Time has this vibe. Though it’s not just one person out of cryo working to save what’s left of humanity (or what they think is left…)

Do you mean the sequel? Children of Ruin?

Passengers (2016)

Also Pandorum (2009).

This movie was way more incredible than it had any right to be

That could have been so much cooler of a movie if they'd shot it from Jennifer Lawrence's POV but they probably didn't want to have Chris Pratt being super creepy (which in the story he's not a good guy).

The character is super creepy anyway. Passengers is essentially Stockholm Syndrome: The Movie.

Yeah but it wouldn't have been tempered by growing attached to Pratt's character and we would get to experience the same feeling of confusion as JLaw's character.

NerdWriter on youtube has a good video on how the change would look, does a better job of selling it than I ever could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gksxu-yeWcU

Funnily enough, I thought the script was better than the movie itself. I read the script back in 2014 or something and it was way better than how the movie turned out.

There was a story I read in the 1970s where a guy woke up in the transit and had a plan to "unfreeze" the females one by one and basically do bad things to each for one year then off them to pass the time.

Spoiler...

The second woman he unfreezes offs him.

It was both representative of the male dominated era of science fiction, and a big progressive.

The second woman he unfreezes offs him.

I was disappointed when this wasn't the ending to Passengers.

What a twist that would've been :D

Also (kind of) Cordwainer Smith's "Think Blue, Count Two".

It's only similar to your premise, but I enjoyed Mur Lafferty's "Six Wakes", which is a scifi murder-mystery aboard a colony ship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Wakes

This is part of the plot of Allen Steele's 2002 SF novel Coyote.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coyote_(novel)

One book of the Revelation Space series has an interesting take on this.

Though it's not just a single person, colonists in cryosleep (or more precisely their mass at braking time) are definitely involved. ;-)

Oxygen (2021)

You spoiled the plot :-p

Boy, if you think that's a spoiler, don't watch the trailer. "Spoiler" != "Plot Summary".

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