Given what a shitshow Lord Miller made of Project Hail Mary, I am not holding out much hope for Bobiverse. I must merely content myself with the hope that, eventually, The Infinite Extent will be released in some way where I don’t have to support fucking Amazon to read it.
Can you imagine how awful it’s going to be to watch them try to explain the light-speed lag between events in different systems before SCUT? They might just take away SCUT’s invention and put it in Bob’s original Heaven-1 design, so that they don’t have to deal with all of the relativistic time effects.
I’m sorry, your complaint is that the book’s crew module had a touchscreen control system? Given how little the actual ship’s systems are even touched on in the movie (let alone how little they matter, compared to those in the book), that’s a bit rich. As far as astrophage being a deus-ex-machina, it is ABSOLUTELY turned into an unmitigated deus ex machina in the movie. Instead of any detail, we get several worthless minutes of Jessica Chastain singing karaoke, because that’s what we were all waiting for. In the book, the precise mechanisms and rules by which astrophage operates are explored, in excruciating detail, so that the actual solution comes logically from the problem, and all of the further problems follow from secondary-school-level scientific principles. Is it convenient? Certainly, but it earns the convenience by actually using it to explain not only how the astrophage is able to do what it does with scientific reasoning, but also neatly explains how that ties into the possibility of panspermia, and has enough detail in how it functions that the only part that isn’t fully and scientifically explained without any hand-waving is how the astrophage can allow the radiation through its phospholipid bilayer to get to whatever specialised organelle manages the mass-energy conversion (and, of course, the precise method of that conversion, which you would not expect any sci-fi writer to explain).
It seems you might be the type of person who complains that Tau Zero didn’t give you a working schematic of an Alcubierre Drive, and thus it is “simultaneously the source and solution to all of the crew’s problems”
Do you complain that Heaven’s River fails to describe the chemical structure of the ceramic used to construct a million interlocking bishop rings? Because, surely, such inconsistencies, especially in other aspects of the Bobiverse such as “subspace”, are likely to make you judderingly irate! I shudder to think what you would think of a movie set in the Bobiverse, especially one made by a production company that removes all scientific explanation in favour of handwaving and big CGI set pieces that aren’t in the original and serve no narrative purpose. Oh wait, that was my point, wasn’t it?
I only read the book because of the movie. I like both, they both work to the strengths of their own mediums. And I’m sure a lot more people read and appreciate the book because the movie exists.
It’s possible to have criticisms of the thing you enjoy. I also liked Bobiverse, even though bob is a boring self-insert protagonist, I appreciate that he mostly exists as a means to get from idea to idea.
Wholeheartedly agree that Bob is self-insert, and has precious few character flaws for the first several books aside from his general tendency to live vicariously through the other life forms he comes across (notably his “family” outburst with the deltans), and it isn’t clear just how much his attitudes are character flaws until the fifth book, when he actually has to start facing the consequences of his own choices, in his own reflections through replicative drift and the Skippy debacle.
It’s now up to six, though the sixth is currently audible-only. The fourth is, in my opinion, my favourite, and the fifth starts to explore the consequences of replicative drift and the realities of being truly immortal for a human mind.
I think Project Hail Mary was pretty good. Should it have been an hour longer? Absolutely, but what was in the movie was good. It did fine explaining things without the stuff it skipped.
In the movie version of PHM, things just… happen. There’s no explanation for why they happen, and the entire point of the book is the process by which such mysteries are solved. It is a book about piecing together truth from first principles. Every single tension and catharsis in that book comes from using what little information grace and rocky can glean with their limited tools to divine the truth, either about grace’s own journey leading up to the launch, or about the problem of the petrova line, or about stopping the taumoeba, or even the last question of how grace can survive on a planet where the entire biosphere is based on mercury and cadmium. The movie neatly severs literally every single mystery by just having the characters divine the answers, apropos of nothing, by simple guesswork. Little evidence, no reasoning, and it just works, and we are expected to clap, because they saved the day. No. It did not “do fine” with “explaining” things.
I agree! And the entire film felt like it had annoying background music in a lame “80’s straight to VHS” movie kinda way. Or a mediocre montage of what could’ve been a fine movie. I think this a choice undercuts moments of work between the two of them that could’ve been used for the tension of figuring things out.
Then again I felt the same way about Fantastic Four: First Steps.
Given what a shitshow Lord Miller made of Project Hail Mary, I am not holding out much hope for Bobiverse. I must merely content myself with the hope that, eventually, The Infinite Extent will be released in some way where I don’t have to support fucking Amazon to read it.
Can you imagine how awful it’s going to be to watch them try to explain the light-speed lag between events in different systems before SCUT? They might just take away SCUT’s invention and put it in Bob’s original Heaven-1 design, so that they don’t have to deal with all of the relativistic time effects.
The starship in the movie was more realistic than the one in the book. You’d have to be an absolute moron to design a ship you fly with a touchscreen.
also
I’m sorry, your complaint is that the book’s crew module had a touchscreen control system? Given how little the actual ship’s systems are even touched on in the movie (let alone how little they matter, compared to those in the book), that’s a bit rich. As far as astrophage being a deus-ex-machina, it is ABSOLUTELY turned into an unmitigated deus ex machina in the movie. Instead of any detail, we get several worthless minutes of Jessica Chastain singing karaoke, because that’s what we were all waiting for. In the book, the precise mechanisms and rules by which astrophage operates are explored, in excruciating detail, so that the actual solution comes logically from the problem, and all of the further problems follow from secondary-school-level scientific principles. Is it convenient? Certainly, but it earns the convenience by actually using it to explain not only how the astrophage is able to do what it does with scientific reasoning, but also neatly explains how that ties into the possibility of panspermia, and has enough detail in how it functions that the only part that isn’t fully and scientifically explained without any hand-waving is how the astrophage can allow the radiation through its phospholipid bilayer to get to whatever specialised organelle manages the mass-energy conversion (and, of course, the precise method of that conversion, which you would not expect any sci-fi writer to explain).
It seems you might be the type of person who complains that Tau Zero didn’t give you a working schematic of an Alcubierre Drive, and thus it is “simultaneously the source and solution to all of the crew’s problems”
Do you complain that Heaven’s River fails to describe the chemical structure of the ceramic used to construct a million interlocking bishop rings? Because, surely, such inconsistencies, especially in other aspects of the Bobiverse such as “subspace”, are likely to make you judderingly irate! I shudder to think what you would think of a movie set in the Bobiverse, especially one made by a production company that removes all scientific explanation in favour of handwaving and big CGI set pieces that aren’t in the original and serve no narrative purpose. Oh wait, that was my point, wasn’t it?
I only read the book because of the movie. I like both, they both work to the strengths of their own mediums. And I’m sure a lot more people read and appreciate the book because the movie exists.
It’s possible to have criticisms of the thing you enjoy. I also liked Bobiverse, even though bob is a boring self-insert protagonist, I appreciate that he mostly exists as a means to get from idea to idea.
Wholeheartedly agree that Bob is self-insert, and has precious few character flaws for the first several books aside from his general tendency to live vicariously through the other life forms he comes across (notably his “family” outburst with the deltans), and it isn’t clear just how much his attitudes are character flaws until the fifth book, when he actually has to start facing the consequences of his own choices, in his own reflections through replicative drift and the Skippy debacle.
oh shit the last time I read that series, he slammed a planet into a star to wipe out bugs, didn’t realize there had been more published
It’s now up to six, though the sixth is currently audible-only. The fourth is, in my opinion, my favourite, and the fifth starts to explore the consequences of replicative drift and the realities of being truly immortal for a human mind.
I think Project Hail Mary was pretty good. Should it have been an hour longer? Absolutely, but what was in the movie was good. It did fine explaining things without the stuff it skipped.
In the movie version of PHM, things just… happen. There’s no explanation for why they happen, and the entire point of the book is the process by which such mysteries are solved. It is a book about piecing together truth from first principles. Every single tension and catharsis in that book comes from using what little information grace and rocky can glean with their limited tools to divine the truth, either about grace’s own journey leading up to the launch, or about the problem of the petrova line, or about stopping the taumoeba, or even the last question of how grace can survive on a planet where the entire biosphere is based on mercury and cadmium. The movie neatly severs literally every single mystery by just having the characters divine the answers, apropos of nothing, by simple guesswork. Little evidence, no reasoning, and it just works, and we are expected to clap, because they saved the day. No. It did not “do fine” with “explaining” things.
I agree! And the entire film felt like it had annoying background music in a lame “80’s straight to VHS” movie kinda way. Or a mediocre montage of what could’ve been a fine movie. I think this a choice undercuts moments of work between the two of them that could’ve been used for the tension of figuring things out.
Then again I felt the same way about Fantastic Four: First Steps.
I literally only listen to soundtrack music,and I could not, if you offered me a billion dollars, pick out any part of the PHM soundtrack.