Project Hail Mary<\/em>\u2014a space opera starring and co-produced by Ryan Gosling\u2014is shaping up to be one of the biggest films of the year, earning more than $550 million at the box office worldwide since it opened on March 20 and garnering rave reviews from critics and general audiences alike. In recent weeks, however, this seemingly innocuous movie has also become the subject of an unlikely controversy that raises questions about technoliberalism, author intent, and the politics of science fiction.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The controversy began in late March, when Andy Weir\u2014author of The Martian<\/em>, Artemis<\/em>, and the eponymous novel on which Project Hail Mary<\/em> is based\u2014appeared on a podcast hosted by conservative film critic Will Jordan, better known online as the Critical Drinker.<\/p>\n Many of Weir\u2019s fans were surprised at this appearance. Jordan, whose YouTube channel has more than 2.4 million subscribers, is a major player in the Western culture wars. He has been a guest on both Piers Morgan Uncensored<\/em> and The Ben Shapiro Show<\/em>, and Jordan\u2019s reviews\u2014which routinely accuse Hollywood blockbusters with diverse casts of spreading \u201cwoke\u201d propaganda\u2014serve as gateways to both the alt-right and the manosphere. A main theme of Jordan\u2019s content <\/span>is the anti-woke<\/span> call to \u201cmake movies great again,\u201d cultivating nostalgia for a time when most main characters in media were white, male, and unabashedly heroic.<\/p>\n More baffling to his critics than Weir\u2019s appearance on this podcast was the conversation that ensued. Talking about the success of Project Hail Mary<\/em>\u2014which Jordan attributed to the fact that the film did not try to \u201cshove, like, crappy identity politics into it\u201d\u2014the author replied: \u201cI think you and me are kind of on the same wavelength there when it comes to fiction writing. I never put any politics or messaging in any of my stories at all. There\u2019s no, you know, there\u2019s no deeper meaning; there isn\u2019t even any symbolism, even nonpolitical. There\u2019s just no symbolism at all. My books are always just purely to entertain.\u201d<\/p>\n As someone who enjoyed both the film and the book, I find this statement questionable for several reasons. For starters, there are many other possible explanations for why Project Hail Mary<\/em> is a hit beyond the apparent absence of politics, not least its gripping premise and lovable characters. Protagonist Ryland Grace\u2014a nerdy, cowardly astrobiologist-turned-middle school science teacher\u2014is shot into deep space as part of a last-ditch effort to find the natural predator of an extraterrestrial microorganism that\u2019s slowly devouring the sun. Along the way, he crosses paths with a spider-like alien astronaut he calls Rocky, whose species is in the same boat as ours. Teaming up, the two develop an unusual but strong and deeply moving friendship.<\/p>\n Further enriching the film adaptation are Gosling\u2019s star power, the irreverent humor inserted by co-directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller\u2014known for comedies such as The Lego Movie<\/em>, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse<\/em>, and 21 Jump Street<\/em>\u2014and visual effects that turn Rocky into what one outlet dubbed<\/a><\/u><\/span> \u201cthe most expressive faceless character in sci-fi.\u201d Put differently, it is not an absence of politics that makes Project Hail Mary<\/em> engaging but the combined presence of all these other elements.<\/p>\n Author Andy Weir signs copies of Project Hail Mary<\/em> at Comic-Con International in San Diego on July 27, 2025.Matt Winkelmeyer\/Getty Images<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n If anything, Weir\u2019s disinterest in exploring political themes comes across as a weakness, not a strength. Project Hail Mary<\/em> is \u201chard science fiction,\u201d a subgenre that\u2014in contrast to \u201csoft science fiction\u201d such as Star Wars<\/em> or Dune<\/em>\u2014strives to be as scientifically accurate as possible. Every fictional concept, from the fuel system of Grace\u2019s interstellar spacecraft to Rocky\u2019s metals-based biochemistry, is logically consistent and explained in detail. As a result, the story reads not like an adventure so much as a mystery, solved one hypothesis at a time.<\/p>\n This level of scrutiny does not extend to the story\u2019s nonscientific elements. While Weir devotes several pages to describing how Grace measures gravity using a stopwatch and a piece of rope, he neglects to unpack how every government on Earth has somehow put aside their mutual conflicts and worked together in the face of mass extinction\u2014something that has yet to happen in the real world. The political naivet\u00e9 of Project Hail Mary<\/em> clashes with its scientific and technological precision, resulting in a story that\u2019s engrossingly realistic on one page and implausibly cartoonish on the next.<\/p>\n Weir is wrong for other reasons too, one of these being that leaving politics out of a story is itself an inherently political decision. Weir\u2019s novel Artemis<\/em> is set on a lunar colony populated by various cultural and ethnic groups, and it features a young woman of Saudi descent as its protagonist. But while race and sex are evidently part of this world, their impact on social hierarchies goes unaddressed. Presenting this futuristic society as having progressed to a point where racism and sexism are considered history, Weir falls prey<\/a><\/u><\/span> to color blindness, the idea that equality can be achieved simply by ignoring differences, rather than facing and addressing the root causes and effects of those differences.<\/p>\n Science fiction as a genre is inherently political as well. Just as sci-fi stories can be categorized as hard or soft, they can also be labeled as either optimistic or pessimistic. Nowadays, optimistic sci-fi is often called \u201cup-wing\u201d: In contrast to \u201cdown-wing\u201d stories about dystopias and apocalypses, \u201cup-wing\u201d fiction treats science, technology, and human ingenuity as forces not of potential destruction but of boundless innovation. If The Matrix<\/em> and The Terminator<\/em> serve as cautionary tales about what happens when we lose control of the Promethean flame that is artificial intelligence, Weir\u2019s stories are testaments to what people can achieve when they really put their minds to it. In The Martian<\/em>, engineer and botanist Mark Watney knows his only hope of surviving the inhospitable conditions of Mars is to \u201cscience the shit out of this,\u201d while Grace\u2019s own \u201csciencing\u201d saves not just himself but his whole planet\u2014and Rocky\u2019s, too.<\/p>\n Both approaches to the genre have their blind spots. Just as down-wing sci-fi does not always recognize that science and technology can be used for good, up-wing sci-fi conveniently ignores the harm they cause when placed in the wrong hands. What\u2019s more, in treating human innovation as the ultimate solution to all of humanity\u2019s problems, it fails to acknowledge that many of those problems\u2014global warming, income inequality, political polarization\u2014exist because of human inventions, not (as in Project Hail Mary<\/em>) light-eating space microbes.<\/p>\n Gosling and Sandra H\u00fcller as Eva Stratt in Project Hail Mary<\/i>.Jonathan Olley\/Amazon MGM Studios<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Sci-fi writing constantly bounces back and forth between up-wing and down-wing camps, usually in response to real-world circumstances. The scientific romances of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne emerged during the Belle \u00c9poque, a time when utopian dreams of everlasting peace and prosperity had not yet given way to the chemical and mechanical horrors of World War I. Likewise, the automated surveillance states of Brave New World<\/em> and 1984<\/em> were written before and after <\/span>World War II, respectively, <\/span>when Nazism and Stalinism\u2014totalitarian movements that arose partly in response to technological modernity\u2014appeared at their largest and most terrifying.<\/p>\n Weir\u2019s own writing career is part of a larger, ongoing resurgence of up-wing sci-fi that can be traced back to a 2011 essay<\/a><\/u><\/span> by Neal Stephenson titled \u201cInnovation Starvation.\u201d In it, the author of modern sci-fi classics such as Snow Crash<\/em> (1992) and The Diamond Age<\/em> (1995) bemoaned that large-scale scientific and technological breakthroughs seemed to be occurring less frequently than in the past. Whereas his parents \u201cwitnessed the creation of the airplane, the automobile, nuclear energy, and the computer,\u201d all his generation got was thinner television screens and a few wind farms. \u201cWhere\u2019s my donut-shaped space station? Where\u2019s my ticket to Mars?\u201d he asked, listing his childhood dreams.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the techno-optimism of \u201cGolden Age\u201d sci-fi authors such as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke had \u201cgiven way to fiction written in a generally darker, more skeptical and ambiguous tone.\u201d Linking one development to the other, Stephenson launched Project Hieroglyph. Partnered with Arizona State University\u2019s Center for Science and the Imagination, this project connected scientists and science fiction writers with the aim of producing hard, up-wing stories that would inspire readers rather than unnerve them. Its first output, an anthology titled Hieroglyph: Stories & Visions for a Better Future<\/em>\u2014featuring short stories by Gregory Benford, Charlie Jane Anders, and Cory Doctorow\u2014appeared in 2014, the same year Crown Publishing Group published The Martian<\/em> and filmmaker Christopher Nolan released his \u201cUp Wing masterpiece<\/a><\/u><\/span>\u201d Interstellar<\/em>.<\/p>\n By envisioning what might happen tomorrow, science fiction influences research done today. Anecdotally, many people credit shows such as Star Trek<\/em> for inspiring them to pursue a career in STEM. Asimov\u2019s \u201cThree Laws of Robotics,\u201d a term he coined in his 1942 story \u201cRunaround,\u201d dictated early thinking<\/a><\/u><\/span> about AI safety. In Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman\u2019s OpenAI<\/em>, journalist Karen Hao traces the unicorn company\u2019s genesis back to Elon Musk\u2019s genuine fear that, if unopposed, Google DeepMind\u2019s Demis Hassabis would create a real-life Terminator.<\/p>\n That last example is no exaggeration. In a recent article<\/a><\/u><\/span>, Ali Riza Taskale, a social theorist and part-time lecturer at Roskilde University in Denmark, argues that tech billionaires such as Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen consistently leverage the fears and promises of popular science fiction to secure their hold on wealth and power. Musk has frequently credited Asimov\u2019s Foundation<\/em> series for kindling his interest in space travel and planetary colonization, but its story\u2014about a scientific institution that uses data processing to shape intergalactic geopolitics\u2014also seems to have fostered Musk\u2019s political aspirations.<\/p>\n Thiel\u2019s secretive Big Data company Palantir is named after an ancient magical supertechnology from J.R.R. Tolkien\u2019s Lord of the Rings <\/em>trilogy, where a palantir is a kind of crystal ball that acts as an extension of the dark lord Sauron\u2019s all-seeing eye. Andreesen\u2019s 2023 text \u201cThe Techno-Optimist Manifesto<\/a>\u201d not only harks back to the disappointment expressed in Stephenson\u2019s essay but also reproduces the operational logic of the fictional internet and surveillance company in David Egger\u2019s 2013 novel, The Circle<\/em>. Both, Taskale writes, combat concerns about privacy and freedom by creating a false binary: \u201cOne is either a participant in technological advancement or aligned against humanity itself.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Project Hail Mary<\/em>, for its part, presents a worldview that closely aligns with Silicon Valley elite opposition to governmental regulation and oversight. Like the dictators of ancient Rome, the person in charge of the titular project\u2014a woman named Eva Stratt (played in the movie by Sandra H\u00fcller)\u2014is granted both limitless authority and complete immunity from prosecution. Occasional attempts to stand in her way on grounds of human rights violations are not just ineffective but framed as narrow-minded and nefarious: a sometimes inadvertent, sometimes deliberate failure to see the bigger picture. \u201cYou and what army?\u201d Stratt asks in the book <\/span>when a U.S. court attempts in vain to rein her in. \u201cBecause I have the U.S. Army, and that\u2019s a damn fine army.\u201d<\/p>\n Far from apolitical, Weir\u2019s writing can be described as technoliberal to the extent that it treats accountability as a hindrance rather than a productive safety measure. Underpinning this attitude is another belief central to technoliberalism: that progress is linear and science its primary engine. \u201cTry to name a technology that\u2019s done more harm than good,\u201d Weir said<\/a><\/u><\/span> in a 2024 interview with the National Academy of Engineering. \u201cYou say nuclear bombs; I say nuclear power. How much coal dust is not in the air? How much pollution and emissions are not in the air because nuclear power plants exist?\u201d But while it\u2019s true that many technologies have a wide variety of applications (some beneficial, others destructive), Weir\u2019s technoliberal framework accepts as factual what is at its core a matter of personal opinion, morality, and judgment.<\/p>\n In this sense, his writing can also be described more broadly as an expression of neoliberalism, which\u2014as Merijn Oudenampsen explains in his forthcoming book, No Nonsense: A History of the Dutch Neoliberal Turn<\/em>\u2014presents free market capitalism as an economic necessity as opposed to a liberal ideology. Hiding behind a false air of objectivity and empiricism, both neoliberalism and up-wing sci-fi pretend to rise above politics despite being themselves highly political in nature.<\/p>\n Project Hail Mary<\/em> is many things: funny, endearing, suspenseful, thought-provoking, and uplifting. What it is not is apolitical. Insisting on the contrary does nothing except encourage uncritical consumption of the story, which is\u2014ironically\u2014antithetical to its scientific spirit.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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