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Comment by _s_a_m_ | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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.

I liked it, he has his own style, and I love the "productivity porn" vibe of it. Sometimes I need that in this wild world.

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

I am curious, is the audio book abridged and the book far too long? Or what else could it be?

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.

Without getting into spoilers, the very high quality narration makes the story better.

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.

Audiobooks can do a lot to give _character_ to characters that are otherwise quite flat.

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.

>worse written version of The Martian, with a less interesting protagonist

That is actually impressive if true. Watney was by far the worst thing about the book.

>the audio book is good but the book is not

I don't know how that can possibly make sense.

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”.

The performance can make a big difference. There are books I like more as audiobooks and books I like more as visual books.

I read PHM and didn’t love it; my friends who listened to it all loved it. Maybe I should give it a try.

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