Project Hail Mary (Andy Weir)

Project Hail Mary
Andy Weir
Ballantine Books
Fiction, SciFi
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Dr. Ryland Grace wakes on a spaceship with no memory of how he got there, let alone why he's there at all. Two corpses are all that remains of the rest of the crew. When he discovers that the nearest star isn't the sun he's known all his life, things get even stranger... but as fragmentary memories surface, he realizes just how dire his situation is.
It all started when the sun began dimming inexplicably. When the culprit was discovered to be a form of microscopic life entirely unlike anything seen on Earth, a top team of experts recruited Ryland - once a prominent scientist who wrote a controversial thesis on hypothetical extraterrestrial life possibilities, now a middle school teacher who shuns academia - to study the "Astrophage" and, hopefully, find a cure before reduced sunlight triggers a mass extinction event. But he was never supposed to be out here alone, especially not with fragmented memories.
Then he sees the flare of another engine, and he learns that he's not as alone as he thought he was... nor is Earth the only world in danger.

REVIEW: The movie based on this book, starring Ryan Gosling, has been dominating the box office and gets little but positive buzz everywhere I look, but I hear many people who read the book first grumble at what was trimmed. I have not seen the movie yet, but I just finished the book... and I have to say that there's quite a bit that could be cut that might've improved the reading experience, page-eating tangents that made the first half drag so bad I nearly gave up.
From the start, there's a certain "Gary Stu" vibe to Dr. Ryland Grace that, along with Weir's love of long scientific tangents into minutiae that seems to exist largely to show off how much thought he put into the intricacies of his ideas, overshadows the overall story and what should have been a gripping premise. The man can "science" anything better than anyone else, yet nobly prefers teaching children to pursuing academic accolades. When the world needs saving, though, he's plucked from obscurity as one of the earliest members of what will become Project Hail Mary, the desperate plan to save humanity (and a fair chunk of Earth's essential biome) from the effects of a dimming sun. Even here, among the best of the best, he shines as a top star despite insisting he's just an "everyman" scientist... and that was before he found himself literally as Earth's last, best hope.
Between working out his current situation on the spaceship and flashbacks to the origins of his predicament, a metric spitload of theories and experiments and science and tangents await... and when Ryland encounters the intelligent alien "Rocky" (not really a spoiler, given the movie trailers everywhere, and it's not the main twist anyway), he wastes yet more time and page count ensuring that the reader understands just how much consideration Weir put into designing a truly alien alien, not a green-skinned humanoid with a few bumps on their head. Thankfully, Ryland considers Rocky to be essentially another guy (the alien species doesn't actually have male or female sexes), dodging an old pulp cliché, though there's a bit of a "guy's club" undertone to the book that I couldn't quite guarantee was there yet couldn't quite not see, if that makes any sense.
As all this crawls across the page, past the halfway point, I found myself just picking at the book, not devouring it like I recall devouring Weir's The Martian - which also featured a fair bit of science but stayed focused on astronaut Mark Watney's survival predicament more than Project Hail Mary stays focused on that irrelevant little subplot of saving the planet. It's like there was half a story that was padded out with tangents.
Later on, the story (almost despite itself) builds up a decent momentum. Ryland actually makes a few humanizing mistakes. The scientific tangents focus a little more on the problem at hand, for all that I found myself skimming a few paragraphs now and again to get back to the plot itself. It comes down to a fairly solid wrap-up that leaves the door cracked for future developments.
The overall ideas should've earned Project Hail Mary four stars at least. Weir presents some interesting ideas and hypotheticals, and clearly put a decent amount of thought into things beyond "it looks cool" (not that there's anything wrong with that sort of story). One also has to admire a book that celebrates the possibilities of science, especially in an era where too many people (particularly those in power, despite how much of that power only exists because of science and the advancements in civilization that it creates) are actively rallying against it. But the book just could not overcome the slog of the first half when it came time for me to rate it.

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March Site Update

March apparently ends today, for anyone keeping track. Accordingly, the main Brightdreamer Books site has been updated with the month's reviews.

Enjoy!

Pulling the Wings Off Angels (K. J. Parker)

Pulling the Wings Off Angels
K. J. Parker
Tordotcom
Fiction, Fantasy/Humor
**+ (Bad/Okay)

DESCRIPTION: When a struggling, sinning clerical student gets in deep with local thug Florio, the bully demands an unusual form of repayment: hand over the angel his grandfather is rumored to have trapped and hidden in a place even the Almighty Unconquerable Sun cannot see. It's all just a rumor, certainly. Despite his vocation, the cleric doesn't really believe in physically manifesting epiphanies or angels... until Florio breaks open the hidden vault and they're both standing face-to-face with the impossible. This could be their ticket to the life and afterlife of their wildest dreams... or it could be the sin that reserves their spot in the eternal fires of damnation.

REVIEW: This very short novella was likened to The Good Place in the blurb on back, which was one of my favorite shows of all time; the humor was sharp, the characters flawed but trying, and the ultimate message - that change was possible, that justice could be achieved, that broken systems can be repaired - was hopeful and uplifting. So, despite being an atheist-leaning agnostic myself, and admittedly influenced by the free-to-me price, I decided to give Parker's little jaunt a try.
As one might surmise from the rating, I did not enjoy it.
This novella promises petty cruelty and bullying right in the title, and the book delivers throughout. There's just a mean-spirited nature to the whole story that put me off almost from the start and never went away. Everyone in it is slimy, conniving, selfish, cruel, and utterly unaccountable to anyone but themselves. God is a bully running a rigged system, the angel's a jerk, and the story natters around in theological paradoxes where all the answers end in damnation and hopelessness. Is a world without a supreme deity pulling the strings better than one lorded over by a rat bastard who openly admits there's no way to win His inherently contradictory game? Not really, no, and any justice or vindication is hollow and short-lived. Instead of The Good Place's optimism, I got a bunch of snarky and unpleasant people being snarky and unpleasant and ultimately damned no matter what they do or don't do, so why bother.
Maybe if I were more of a theology student myself and were more personally invested in the religious debates and their histories (which Parker was obviously parodying in this alternate world), I'd have found it more amusing. But I'm not, and I didn't. This one can't go in the giveaway bag fast enough...

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Damsel (Evelyn Skye)

Damsel
Evelyn Skye
Random House
Fiction, YA Fantasy/Media Tie-In
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: The rest of the world may consider the drought-stricken duchy of Inophe to be backwards and worthless, but to Elodie and her father it is beautiful in its own stark, strong way. Despite being noble born, the young woman is not above building shacks or digging latrine ditches if that's what her people need of her; that's what being a leader is, after all, working hard to ensure the success of the people you lead. When her father announces that he's arranged a marriage with Prince Henry of the prosperous island nation of Aurea, she doesn't hesitate but accepts it as her role, her way of ensuring Inophe's survival. Besides, after several months of exchanging letters, it's clear that he's an educated, intelligent young man who respects her, so perhaps the marriage that saves her nation might also spark genuine love. When she and her family arrive at Aurea, they find green forests and purple mountains, great fields of amber barley and scarlet berries, orchards of silver pears, and a gilded castle, plus Prince Henry is every bit as cultured and handsome as Elodie could have imagined. It's so much like a fairy tale it's hard to believe it's all happening to someone like her!
Then, on her wedding night, Henry's mother escorts Elodie to a secret ritual... a ritual that ends in a mountain chasm where a great dragon dwells. The beast's power enables the great bounty of the island, but in exchange it demands sacrifices - and she's just become one.
But Elodie is not the first to be thrown to the cunning, cruel beast beneath the mountain. Those who came before left more than charred bones and melted tiaras; they left markers, maps, and blood that whispers of their thoughts and fears and what they learned in their final days. With their help, perhaps Elodie of Inophe will manage to be the first to escape the dragon's wrath...
Based on the screenplay by Dan Mazeali for the Netflix movie Damsel.

REVIEW: I remember seeing the teasers for the Netflix movie and being intrigued, though mixed reviews and a general lack of time kept me from watching it. But I found this book, an adaptation of the original screenplay, for free at my old work place, and figured it would be worth a try. Having finished it, I don't think I'll be moving the movie into the viewing queue any time soon.
In its favor, Damsel reads fairly fast; I polished off nearly half of it during a long wait at the tire shop while my car was serviced, and finished the rest by the next evening. It establishes reasonably strong women, and after a meandering setup (even if I hadn't known the sacrifice "twist" from the movie trailers, the blurb on the cover gives that away, so drawing out the reveal grows mildly tedious as Elodie notes yet dismisses a string of yellow, orange, and finally glaring red flags over Prince Henry and Aurea) it delivers on the horror-like premise of a lone young woman trapped in a cavernous labyrinth with a taunting, teasing monster. Everywhere she goes, she finds marks and bones to remind her how many have tried and failed to survive the wyrm's wrath, how many have been betrayed by the Aurean royal house over the centuries. The terror is heightened when Elodie discovers that touching the bloodstains of previous victims lets her experience memories of their final days... but those stains, along with notes scratched into the walls, also provide a record of everything the previous victims over the past eight centuries have learned in their efforts to elude the dragon. Building on their progress, from mapping the maze of caverns to translating the wyrm's archaic language, Elodie might stand a slender chance of escape... but will getting away from the beast only make things worse? You don't just break a centuries-old system (or aggravate a centuries-old dragon) without significant collateral damage that may just kill you and everyone you love anyway.
There is no easy answer to the problem, not for her or the people of Aurea, many of whom are deeply troubled by the secret of their nation's wealth but haven't had the courage to fight back until now. If the parallel to Ursula K. Le Guin's classic story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" isn't obvious, the book hammers home that point more than once (if not using the words), even as it emphasizes how good intentions and gray areas get smudged into black by small steps and willful blindness compounded over years and generations, no single drop of water willing to take responsibility for, let alone attempt to stop, the rising flood. Even the dragon is trapped in its own way by the bargain made generations ago, though that does not make it an ally of Elodie's efforts to survive the royal family's betrayal; it just makes the beast that much more enraged and dangerous, not to mention that much more experienced in the hunting and killing of problematic princesses.
As for the beast, the dragon draws on elder traditions in the vein of Smaug, a clever yet cruel beast whose rage cannot be reasoned away and whose scales and sheer power have bested fully armed knights, let alone princesses with little but stones and the fraying remnants of their wedding finery. At every turn, it taunts its prey, and Elodie (and, by proxy, the reader) can never be certain when she has truly outsmarted it or when it's merely toying with her by letting her think she's outsmarted it, only to surprise her with flames and sulfurous smoke and terrible threats. This is not a case of every other knight and princess being a total dunderhead or wimp until she comes along; it is very little wonder that nobody else has outwitted or outlasted the dragon's games, making it a truly formidable opponent even to a plucky young woman like Elodie.
Where the book lost ground in the ratings is towards the end, where it started feeling like it was stretching out the tension, only to pull a resolution out of its tail that felt unsatisfactory given all that had gone before. The story also, after going out of its way to establish how it was women who ultimately found empowerment to challenge injustice, then fell back on a tired trope that knocked the legs out from under their independence by essentially intimating that a woman's ultimate drive, whether for good or ill or in between, is dependent on motherhood in some form or another, without exception. (I can't get into more details without spoilers, but it really flattened what had been a batch of strong characters.) It all just felt like such a letdown after everything the characters went through to get there. The earlier promise and the terror of the cat-and-mouse (or dragon-and-princess) chases through the mountain caverns managed to barely keep the rating above a flat three stars, but it was a close call.

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Carl's Doomsday Scenario (Matt Dinniman)

Carl's Doomsday Scenario
The Dungeon Crawler Carl series, Book 2
Matt Dinniman
Ace
Fiction, Fantasy/Humor/Sci-Fi
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: Coast Guard veteran Carl and his cat companion, Princess Donut, along with Donut's new dinosaur pet Mongo, have made it to the third level of the dungeon in the "game" that will determine humanity's fate on the planet they used to call home. They, and the diminishing number of other "crawlers", now have to decide which race they'll transform into (if they don't opt to remain human) and pick a class, decisions that may directly affect their odds of survival. But Carl and Donut both know by now that many of the choices in the game mean little when the powers behind it, and the greater field of galactic politics, are really pulling the strings. Even as they have no choice but to play out their roles, fighting monsters and gaining levels and figuring out the ever-evolving game mechanics, Carl and Donut are still determined to do everything they can to hold onto their decency and, if possible, break the system that's trying so very hard to break them.
This book also contains the second installment of "Backstage at the Pineapple Cabaret", an ongoing bonus story set elsewhere in the dungeons.

REVIEW: I never expected to enjoy the first book in this series as much as I did, and happily the sequel both lives up to the promise of the first one and builds on it brilliantly. Carl and Donut have both changed since they first ventured down the stairwell into the first level. Donut's intellectual evolution since gaining the ability to speak continues, as her thoughts grow more sophisticated, though there are still several blind spots, particularly regarding Carl's ex Bea (whom Donut still hopes will turn up someday and they can all be a family again, even as Carl knows the truth). Mongo, Donut's new pet, is also growing and leveling, becoming a useful asset to their little team. Their trainer Mordecai finds his role transformed from a mere trainer to someone who can provide more support, though he still has secrets related to his own run as a dungeon crawler and he may have his own agenda. And Carl himself struggles to juggle the many hats and obligations foisted onto him: celebrity dungeon crawler, co-conspirator with Mordecai, object of a creepy foot fetish by the dungeon-running AI (which might be going rogue), and (hopefully) survivor of a system so rigged that not a single "crawler" from a single species subjected to the cruel and twisted death gauntlet of the dungeons has ever succeeded and won the promised sovereignty of their home worlds back. He also picks up a few new allies and - naturally - more rivals, both within the game and without.
The level itself manages to not repeat the first floors too much, as Dinniman introduces new game mechanics and twists. The third floor brings not only the potential to permanently change species, but also quests and the dangerous "elite" class of non-player characters - which are, in true dungeon fashion, part of much larger franchises and interests, running semi-independently of the whole death-gauntlet-for-humanity main event; becoming entangled in one of their ongoing story arcs can make things infinitely more complicated and dangerous, but it might also lead to certain advantages if a crawler manages to play their cards right, and Carl and Donut both have clued into the need to play the game outside the dungeon at least as keenly as they play the one inside. The end lives up to the title, setting up even more explosive problems for the third installment.
As for the serialized bonus story, this one continues the tale as it explores some of the behind-the-scenes manipulations and mechanics, foreshadowing even greater problems in the making should any crawlers live long enough to encounter them. Even the NPCs are victims in the dungeons, only given enough tools and freedoms to develop a hatred of crawlers and both the willingness and ability to kill them.
The very slight dip in the ratings is simply due to the fact that this time I knew what I was getting when I picked it up, and didn't have that extra kick of surprise. It also flirts with excessive entanglements with all the players, species, factions, galactic powers, and other forces and their various complicated histories, all of which become increasingly important to Carl's and Donut's survival. It remains a very readable and highly enjoyable book, with much more to it than one might expect.

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