Edit: Sounds like an enjoyable, low commitment book. Will give it a try, thanks for the feedback.
There are things he does not stand out at, but those don't take you out of the story. As people work through things on Earth a lot of the nontechnical parts are, I guess, simplified, but I can't care that much; I didn't pick this up wanting a bureaucratic or psychological thriller. And he (or he + early readers and editors) usually make sure to quickly and efficiently get you through all of that to the next fun part.
To be fair, I read it months before the movie announcement and it really felt like reading a movie plot. If you prefer, I thought that the author had a great story idea but cared very little about writing a book, like he already knew this was for Hollywood.
I think with good production it’s going to be a better movie than the book.
Never read the Martian but I was told it was the same thing.
The Martian was actually originally published in a serialized form, one chapter coming out every so often.
> It didn't start out that way though. "The Martian" began as a series of self-published chapters on Weir's personal blog.
> Then Weir decided to put the book on Amazon, selling it for the website's lowest possible price ($0.99).
* https://archive.is/https://www.businessinsider.com/how-andy-...
> Having been rebuffed by literary agents when trying to get prior books published, Weir decided to put the book online in serial format one chapter at a time for free at his website. At the request of fans, he made an Amazon Kindle version available at 99 cents (the minimum allowable price he could set).[9] The Kindle edition rose to the top of Amazon's list of best-selling science-fiction titles, selling 35,000 copies in three months, more than had been previously downloaded free.[9][11] This garnered the attention of publishers: Podium Publishing, an audiobook publisher, signed for the audiobook rights in January 2013. Weir sold the print rights to Crown in March 2013 for over US$100,000.[9]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_(Weir_novel)#Publi...
Hail Mary felt like it was trying to capture the same magic but missed the mark. The plot felt constructed rather than spontaneous and I couldn't relate much to the main character at all. I agree about the Hollywood motive. I'll probably watch the movie.
That's the very feeling I had when I read 'The Martian'. While I was reading it I actually thought something to the tune (It's been years now) "This reads like a movie".
Guess that explains why the movie is so faithful to the book.
The scenario is definitely contrived to introduce interplanetary travel to a near future setting.
The amnesia parts of of the book are not very coherently written.
However what Weir IMHO excels at is having fun self insert characters solving problems. When you get past the cruft and get to the "This is a book about troubleshooting in space" sections, it takes off.
I do think the movie will probably end up better than the book: having a screenwriter go over the dialogue alone will do a lot, I think.
There’s lots of answers to this depending on taste, but you also get into arguments about whether such and such is space opera or planetary romance. Children of Time is hard SF the way a reader from the 1960s would have understood it.
His two most recent, Shroud and Service Model, are bloated, uninspired, and borderline unreadable. I guess he's now subject to that curse of established authors, where editors are scared to mess with their manuscripts and trim the fat.
Stories of Your Life and Others; Exhalation (Ted Chiang) - both are short story collections vs novels, though
Dissolution (Nicholas Binge)
Too Like the Lightning (Ada Palmer) and sequels (wordy, philosophical, interesting future society)
Tell Me an Ending (Jo Harkin) - more near-future and grounded
Void Star (Zachary Mason)
Daemon isn’t about a rogue AI in the sense it was designed that way. Also you need to read the sequel “Freedom” to really get the true sci-fi philosophical message.
I personally enjoyed the sequel Freedom because it really explores the idea of a crypto-DAO like society that embraces human nature to build a more sustainable and fair society. It was ahead of its time as I don’t think DAO’s had been created yet.
Suarez’s later books also build on the themes in interesting ways.
If you want "sci-fi your dad would like", Scalzi is your bet.
If you want hilarious, but heartwarming deconstructions of common scifi tropes and protagonists, Martha Wells' Murderbot is your bet.
If you want a comforting read, you'll want Becky Chambers.
If you want a wild romp of science fantasy, you want Tamsyn Muir.
If you want math-as-magic-scifi space opera, you want Yoon Ha Lee.
And of course the most wildass mililitary scifi, Kameron Hurley is the queen.
I have personally been going through and enjoying Alex Gonzalez's "> rekt", which is a novel about chilling brainrot.
So, I should more ask you, what is your definition of "great"?
The Mote God's Eye
Anything by Asimov
Also there's a lot of great short stories in this genre. For example the road not taken by Harry Turtledove
John Scalzi is probably my favorite sci-fi author for excellent characters. His “Old Man’s War” is genius.
Roadside picnic (and its less Russian counterpart, Annihilation), left hand of darkness, Solaris are all excellent.
If you want culturally influential, surely Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange land, anything by HG Wells, 1984/Brave New World, Frankenstein (duh)
The characterization in Hail Mary is just so damn weak, even space opera stuff like Bujold
for "sci-fi" that reads like fantasy, the Sun Eater series is really fun.
It's my point-to book for friends asking about science fiction as a genre.
Additionally, in terms of genre I actually find Weir's books to be more like detective novels than sci-fi, though obviously lots of sci-fi elements in them.
Check out Dragon’s Egg while you’re at it. It’s like Project Hail Mary’s much nerdier older brother.
My verdict is that Project Hail Mary was way much more engaging in terms of story-telling. The concepts were cool, and tbh I look forward for the movie and see if the adaptation will be nice
If you enjoyed The Martian (book or film), then this is just more of the same.
PHM, from the same author, I was very much expecting to be very good to amazing. It delivered, but it's a different feeling when you see it coming
Don't watch the trailer for the movie though, it's very spoiler-heavy.
The story is also just sentimental enough in an unusual enough way that I fell into it enough to be moved where it counts.
If you want to read it for anything resembling hard science concepts though, forget about it maybe. Weir lays on just enough of his usual technical babble to give a richer scifi feel to the book, but much of the core events are hand-waved into existence well away from anything resembling realism. That's okay though, because realism isn't really the point of the book anyhow.
In "The Martian" I thought the technical stuff was closer to touching on realistic details, since it was about a comparatively simple Mars mission gone wrong. Here though, we're talking about using near-current technology -with a clever plot device for an exotic fuel source- being used to zip around nearby star systems at just a hair under the speed of light, and most of that is complete, utter fantasy in disguise.
I'll give this to Weir though, he's damn imaginative at crafting a lot of very plausible sounding, deeply detailed technical talk, despite it mostly being completely invented.
I enjoyed Artemis-- can't find too much fault in any book whose main character writes an extended love letter to welding-- but I enjoyed PHM much more.
Also the main character is a tough girl which is nice.
I liked the Martian but it was a bit too cheerful for a pretty rough situation. And the characters a bit one dimensional. Artemis is a bit grittier.
Project Hail Mary didn't quite resonate with me somehow. It's ok but not a rereader.
It's maybe not a literary masterpiece and it's suspiciously similar to The Martian if you squint. But not many books can get me laughing out loud the second or third time through.
It's a really fun read and I find the aliens particularly compelling in a way that most Sci-Fi doesn't get right.
TBF I am trying to write fiction for the first time in my writing career, and I also suck at characters and non contrived story engagement, so I’m not trying to throw stones here. I do hope, however, to do better in my first published fiction.
Definitely read The Martian if you haven’t already.
Listening to audiobooks is still 'reading'. It's very uncommon to get abridged auto books now, so every word is still being consumed. It's just a difference in which sense you are using to consume it.
You get a very different experience with text compared to audio and it changes how the book is written. You can tell the author was trying to make an audio book. Like how TV TV and Netflix TV are very different because they have to conform to their format. The best written books are often ones where I find myself slowing down, rereading, or doing research in the middle and none of this is possible if my hands are occupied.
What's the beef between PlanetScale and Neon? Benchmarking, uptime, vibe coding?
The quote at the end doesn't really help me. Which one is good for what?
- PlanetScale for predictable load. You pick a config (CPU, memory) and if you don't have traffic it sits idle, and if you have traffic it's limited by the config you picked.
- Neon for scalability. You pay for compute hours, so if your traffic is spikey (e.g. concert ticket sales), you don't pay for idle resources during low traffic, and get all the compute you need during high traffic.
So if you get at least one request every five minutes, neon will charge you for 24 hours of compute a day.
It is not that RDS dont work well. I think it is AWS being too greedy with their pricing and we have finally reached a point where it breaks our mental model on cost evaluation. And people are starting to look at alternatives.
Sam Lambert tweeted this [1], which may or may not (I genuinely have no idea) have been poking at Neon, or maybe just the idea of vibe coding in general.
IMO, reading [0], Neon (and most of the industry tbf) is suggesting bonkers ideas. “Oh, did the AI accidentally give you SQL Injection? No problem, we’ll catch it.” Maybe - just spitballing here - if you don’t know how to prevent the most basic of attacks, you have zero business putting anything into prod, and need to spend time learning fundamentals.
[0]: https://neon.com/blog/oops-proof-your-vibe-code-with-neon-be...
They excel in their respective areas based on the architectural decisions they've made for the use cases they wanted to optimize for.
PlanetScale, with their latest Metal introduction, optimized for super low latency (they act like they've reinvented the wheel, lol), but they clearly have something in mind going in this direction.
Neon offers many managed features for serverless PostgreSQL that were missing in the market, like instant branching, and with auto-scaling, you may perform better with variable workloads. From their perspective, they wanted to serve other use cases.
There's no reason to always compare apples to oranges, and no reason to hate one another when everyone is pushing the managed database industry forward.
I’ve spoken to them personally, and didn’t get the impression at all that they think they’ve “re-invented the wheel.” More like they realized that separating compute and storage was a god-awful idea, and are bringing back how things used to be in the days of boring tech.
Also, re: branching, PS MySQL definitely has that. I assume they’ll bring it to Postgres.
Separating compute and storage means that if you ever have to hit the disk - which is every time for writes, and depending on your working set size, often for reads as well - you’re getting a massive latency hit. I’ll use Amazon Aurora as an example, because they’re quite open with their architecture design, they’re the largest player in this space, and I’m personally familiar with it.
Aurora’s storage layer consists of 6 nodes split across 3 AZs. For a write to be counted as durable, it needs to be ack’d by 4/6 nodes, which means 2/3 AZs. That’s typically a minimum of 1 msec, though they do get written in parallel, which helps. 1 msec may not sound like much, but it’s an eternity for traditional SSD access.
MySQL is even worse with Aurora, because of its change buffer. Normally, writes (including deletes) to indexed columns (secondary indices) results in the changes to the indices being buffered, which avoids random I/O. Since Aurora's architecture is so wildly different than vanilla MySQL, it can't do that, and all writes to secondary indices must happen synchronously.
Given most SaaS companies' tendency to eschew RDBMS expertise in favor of full-stack teams, and those teams' tendency to use JSON[B] for everything, poor normalization practices, and sub-optimal queries, all of this adds up to a disastrous performance experience.
I have a homelab with Dell R620s, which originally came out in 2012. Storage is via Ceph on Samsung PM983 NVMe drives, connected with Mellanox ConnectX3-Pro in a mesh. These drives are circa-2013. Despite the age of this system, it has consistently out-performed Aurora MySQL and Postgres in benchmarks I've done. The only instance classes that can match it are, unsurprisingly, those with local NVMe storage.
In fairness, it isn't _all_ awful. Aurora does have one feature that is extremely nice: survivable page cache. If an instance restarts, in most circumstances, you don't lose the buffer pool / shared buffers on the instance. This means you don't have the typical cold start performance hit. That is legitimately cool tech, and quite useful. I'm less sold on the other features, like auto-scaling. If you're planning for a peak event (e.g. a sales event for e-commerce), you know well in advance, and have plenty of time to bring new instances online. If you have a surprise peak event, auto-scaling is going to take 30 minutes to 1 hour for the new instances to come online, which is an extremely long time to be sitting in a degraded state. This isn't really any faster than RDS, though again to Aurora's credit, the fact that all instances share the same underlying cluster volume means that there is no delay when pulling in blocks from S3.
Finally, Aurora’s other main benefit, as I alluded to, is that its shared cluster volume means that replication lag is typically quite low; 10-30 msec IME. However, also IME, devs don’t design apps around this, and anything other than instantaneous is too slow, so it doesn’t really matter.
Thanks for the breakdown!
And I suppose they are eating the cost of worse latency to allow for more scalability?
The privacy / security constraints stay the same whether you are branching or not.
Anonymizing data is the biggest part of such a workflow. Most prevalent use case that requires production data is for debugging. I guess there is some value in branching non-prod databases for feature development.
Most security teams do not allow prod data in non prod environments, anonymized or not l.
I’ve learned (sometimes the hard way!) that every design choice comes with real trade-offs. There’s no magic database architecture that optimizes every dimension (e.g., scalability, performance, ease-of-use) simultaneously.
Social media often pushes us into oversimplified "winner vs. loser" narratives, but this hides the actual complexity of building great infrastructure.
Recognizing and respecting these differences makes us smarter engineers, better community members, and frankly, just more enjoyable people to chat with.
PS Thank you for helping me add a new book to my list :-)