Book Chain, etc, Week 8
Feb. 23rd, 2026 05:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedanther#8: A book with a cover in the same colour as the previous book
With some assistance from Talpa – a search engine associated with LibraryThing that can search books by cover features like colour or what's depicted in the cover illustration – I've settled on:
Devil in the Mountain: A Search for the Origin of the Andes by Simon Lamb.
Simon Lamb is a geologist who has spent decades studying the processes that create mountain ranges. The book is partly an explanation of what is known about those processes and partly a memoir of his field trips to Bolivia studying the geological history of the Andes. The memoir parts remind me of things like David Attenborough's memoirs of making his nature documentaries.
StoryGraph Onboarding Challenge: A book discovered using ‘Browse Similar Books’ on one of your favourite books
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.
A small crew of astronauts and scientists are sent on a desperate interstellar mission in a last-ditch attempt to find a solution to a problem that threatens all life on the planet. There's a joke I want to make here but I'm not sure if it would count as a spoiler (there's a curveball thrown in at the end of the first act that the blurb of the book just hints at; on the other hand, the trailers for the upcoming film adaptation are making it an explicit selling point).
This is science fiction of the old school, where the plot driver is "Here is an interesting scientific puzzle; watch the protagonists figure it out". There's one big central puzzle – the threatens-all-life-on-Earth problem – and a bunch of smaller ones that they have to overcome along the way. The characters have enough personality to lend colour to the narrative, but there are no real character arcs and nobody ever really does anything except to advance the mechanism of the story.
I know it's impolite to read an author's latest novel and say flatly that one preferred their first novel, but Project Hail Mary does enough things like The Martian that it kind of invites the comparison. And I spent a lot of Project Hail Mary missing The Martian, which was also full of characters solving interesting scientific puzzles but they were characters I cared about who felt like they had lives outside the narrative. And had other characters that they cared about, which is something I think is missing from Project Hail Mary; it's a significant fact about the narrative viewpoint character that he has nobody he's close to back on Earth, which is part of what makes him suitable for the space mission but also means that he spends a lot of time thinking about the current interesting puzzle and not much about thinking about things that flesh him out as a person. (There's a related quirk of the narrative voice that bugged me: his narration is in first person present tense but doesn't feel to me like it reflects his present circumstances; there are places in the book where the character is in a full-blown panic or struggling to think clearly and the narration carries on describing things as clearly and accurately as when he's fully alert.) He does eventually develop a connection with one of the other characters that's central to the closing chapters, but it takes a while to get there.
The book starts as the space mission arrives at Tau Ceti, with the backstory – the events from the initial discovery of the world-threatening problem to the space mission blasting off – being told in flashbacks interspersed throughout. The flashback sections almost all failed to work for me on a story level, because I got a strong sense of the author leaning heavily on the narrative to ensure that it ended up with the space mission blasting off with the plot-necessary people on board, rather than any of the many other outcomes that could easily have resulted. You could write an entire novel about the challenges of creating the world's first interstellar mission at short notice, but that's not the novel the author wanted to write, so any challenges that did come up got ruthlessly knocked on the head, often within the same flashback.
The early chapters made me seriously consider giving up on the book several times. Ultimately I'm glad I stuck it out to the end, but I was motivated more by abstract curiosity about what the final assembled puzzle would look like than I was by any investment in the fates of the characters.
(Looking back, one of the things that bugs me is that there's potential character stuff there that could have been brought out more strongly with just a little bit of work. There's a scene where one character calls out another on his attitude, and doesn't mention specific instances of the behaviour that demonstrates his attitude, and you can find instances if you look but I genuinely can't tell if the author deliberately left finding them as an exercise for the reader or if he didn't take conscious note of them himself.)
(And then there's the fact that he called the main character of Project Hail Mary Dr. Grace, which is a name you could do so many things with on a metaphorical or thematic level, and he does absolutely none of them. He doesn't even make the obvious pun, although to be fair, on that one thing I prefer that he had the restraint not to.)
With some assistance from Talpa – a search engine associated with LibraryThing that can search books by cover features like colour or what's depicted in the cover illustration – I've settled on:
Devil in the Mountain: A Search for the Origin of the Andes by Simon Lamb.
Simon Lamb is a geologist who has spent decades studying the processes that create mountain ranges. The book is partly an explanation of what is known about those processes and partly a memoir of his field trips to Bolivia studying the geological history of the Andes. The memoir parts remind me of things like David Attenborough's memoirs of making his nature documentaries.
StoryGraph Onboarding Challenge: A book discovered using ‘Browse Similar Books’ on one of your favourite books
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.
A small crew of astronauts and scientists are sent on a desperate interstellar mission in a last-ditch attempt to find a solution to a problem that threatens all life on the planet. There's a joke I want to make here but I'm not sure if it would count as a spoiler (there's a curveball thrown in at the end of the first act that the blurb of the book just hints at; on the other hand, the trailers for the upcoming film adaptation are making it an explicit selling point).
This is science fiction of the old school, where the plot driver is "Here is an interesting scientific puzzle; watch the protagonists figure it out". There's one big central puzzle – the threatens-all-life-on-Earth problem – and a bunch of smaller ones that they have to overcome along the way. The characters have enough personality to lend colour to the narrative, but there are no real character arcs and nobody ever really does anything except to advance the mechanism of the story.
I know it's impolite to read an author's latest novel and say flatly that one preferred their first novel, but Project Hail Mary does enough things like The Martian that it kind of invites the comparison. And I spent a lot of Project Hail Mary missing The Martian, which was also full of characters solving interesting scientific puzzles but they were characters I cared about who felt like they had lives outside the narrative. And had other characters that they cared about, which is something I think is missing from Project Hail Mary; it's a significant fact about the narrative viewpoint character that he has nobody he's close to back on Earth, which is part of what makes him suitable for the space mission but also means that he spends a lot of time thinking about the current interesting puzzle and not much about thinking about things that flesh him out as a person. (There's a related quirk of the narrative voice that bugged me: his narration is in first person present tense but doesn't feel to me like it reflects his present circumstances; there are places in the book where the character is in a full-blown panic or struggling to think clearly and the narration carries on describing things as clearly and accurately as when he's fully alert.) He does eventually develop a connection with one of the other characters that's central to the closing chapters, but it takes a while to get there.
The book starts as the space mission arrives at Tau Ceti, with the backstory – the events from the initial discovery of the world-threatening problem to the space mission blasting off – being told in flashbacks interspersed throughout. The flashback sections almost all failed to work for me on a story level, because I got a strong sense of the author leaning heavily on the narrative to ensure that it ended up with the space mission blasting off with the plot-necessary people on board, rather than any of the many other outcomes that could easily have resulted. You could write an entire novel about the challenges of creating the world's first interstellar mission at short notice, but that's not the novel the author wanted to write, so any challenges that did come up got ruthlessly knocked on the head, often within the same flashback.
The early chapters made me seriously consider giving up on the book several times. Ultimately I'm glad I stuck it out to the end, but I was motivated more by abstract curiosity about what the final assembled puzzle would look like than I was by any investment in the fates of the characters.
(Looking back, one of the things that bugs me is that there's potential character stuff there that could have been brought out more strongly with just a little bit of work. There's a scene where one character calls out another on his attitude, and doesn't mention specific instances of the behaviour that demonstrates his attitude, and you can find instances if you look but I genuinely can't tell if the author deliberately left finding them as an exercise for the reader or if he didn't take conscious note of them himself.)
(And then there's the fact that he called the main character of Project Hail Mary Dr. Grace, which is a name you could do so many things with on a metaphorical or thematic level, and he does absolutely none of them. He doesn't even make the obvious pun, although to be fair, on that one thing I prefer that he had the restraint not to.)
