Project Hail Mary—a space opera starring and co-produced by Ryan Gosling—is 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.
The controversy began in late March, when Andy Weir—author of The Martian, Artemis, and the eponymous novel on which Project Hail Mary is based—appeared on a podcast hosted by conservative film critic Will Jordan, better known online as the Critical Drinker.
Many of Weir’s 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 and The Ben Shapiro Show, and Jordan’s reviews—which routinely accuse Hollywood blockbusters with diverse casts of spreading “woke” propaganda—serve as gateways to both the alt-right and the manosphere. A main theme of Jordan’s content is the anti-woke call to “make movies great again,” cultivating nostalgia for a time when most main characters in media were white, male, and unabashedly heroic.
More baffling to his critics than Weir’s appearance on this podcast was the conversation that ensued. Talking about the success of Project Hail Mary—which Jordan attributed to the fact that the film did not try to “shove, like, crappy identity politics into it”—the author replied: “I 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’s no, you know, there’s no deeper meaning; there isn’t even any symbolism, even nonpolitical. There’s just no symbolism at all. My books are always just purely to entertain.”
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 is a hit beyond the apparent absence of politics, not least its gripping premise and lovable characters. Protagonist Ryland Grace—a nerdy, cowardly astrobiologist-turned-middle school science teacher—is shot into deep space as part of a last-ditch effort to find the natural predator of an extraterrestrial microorganism that’s 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.
Further enriching the film adaptation are Gosling’s star power, the irreverent humor inserted by co-directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller—known for comedies such as The Lego Movie, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and 21 Jump Street—and visual effects that turn Rocky into what one outlet dubbed “the most expressive faceless character in sci-fi.” Put differently, it is not an absence of politics that makes Project Hail Mary engaging but the combined presence of all these other elements.
Author Andy Weir signs copies of Project Hail Mary at Comic-Con International in San Diego on July 27, 2025.Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images
If anything, Weir’s disinterest in exploring political themes comes across as a weakness, not a strength. Project Hail Mary is “hard science fiction,” a subgenre that—in contrast to “soft science fiction” such as Star Wars or Dune—strives to be as scientifically accurate as possible. Every fictional concept, from the fuel system of Grace’s interstellar spacecraft to Rocky’s 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.
This level of scrutiny does not extend to the story’s 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—something that has yet to happen in the real world. The political naiveté of Project Hail Mary clashes with its scientific and technological precision, resulting in a story that’s engrossingly realistic on one page and implausibly cartoonish on the next.
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’s novel Artemis 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 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.
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 “up-wing”: In contrast to “down-wing” stories about dystopias and apocalypses, “up-wing” fiction treats science, technology, and human ingenuity as forces not of potential destruction but of boundless innovation. If The Matrix and The Terminator serve as cautionary tales about what happens when we lose control of the Promethean flame that is artificial intelligence, Weir’s novels are testaments to what people can achieve when they really put their minds to it. In The Martian, engineer and botanist Mark Watney knows his only hope of surviving the inhospitable conditions of Mars is to “science the shit out of this,” while Grace’s own “sciencing” saves not just himself but his whole planet—and Rocky’s, too.
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’s more, in treating human innovation as the ultimate solution to all of humanity’s problems, it fails to acknowledge that many of those problems—global warming, income inequality, political polarization—exist because of human inventions, not (as in Project Hail Mary) light-eating space microbes.
Gosling and Sandra Hüller as Eva Stratt in Project Hail Mary.Jonathan Olley/Amazon MGM Studios
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 Époque, 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 and 1984 were written before and after World War II, respectively, when Nazism and Stalinism—totalitarian movements that arose partly in response to technological modernity—appeared at their largest and most terrifying.
Weir’s own writing career is part of a larger, ongoing resurgence of up-wing sci-fi that can be traced back to a 2011 essay by Neal Stephenson titled “Innovation Starvation.” In it, the author of modern sci-fi classics such as Snow Crash (1992) and The Diamond Age (1995) bemoaned that large-scale scientific and technological breakthroughs seemed to be occurring less frequently than in the past. Whereas his parents “witnessed the creation of the airplane, the automobile, nuclear energy, and the computer,” all his generation got was thinner television screens and a few wind farms. “Where’s my donut-shaped space station? Where’s my ticket to Mars?” he asked, listing his childhood dreams.
Meanwhile, the techno-optimism of “Golden Age” sci-fi authors such as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke had “given way to fiction written in a generally darker, more skeptical and ambiguous tone.” Linking one development to the other, Stephenson launched Project Hieroglyph. Partnered with Arizona State University’s 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—featuring short stories by Gregory Benford, Charlie Jane Anders, and Cory Doctorow—appeared in 2014, the same year Crown Publishing Group published The Martian and filmmaker Christopher Nolan released his “Up Wing masterpiece” Interstellar.
By envisioning what might happen tomorrow, science fiction influences research done today. Anecdotally, many people credit shows such as Star Trek for inspiring them to pursue a career in STEM. Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics,” a term he coined in his 1942 story “Runaround,” dictated early thinking about AI safety. In Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, journalist Karen Hao traces the unicorn company’s genesis back to Elon Musk’s genuine fear that, if unopposed, Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis would create a real-life Terminator.
That last example is no exaggeration. In a recent article, 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’s Foundation series for kindling his interest in space travel and planetary colonization, but its story—about a scientific institution that uses data processing to shape intergalactic geopolitics—also seems to have fostered Musk’s political aspirations.
Thiel’s secretive Big Data company Palantir is named after an ancient magical supertechnology from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, where a palantir is a kind of crystal ball that acts as an extension of the dark lord Sauron’s all-seeing eye. Andreesen’s 2023 text “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” not only harks back to the disappointment expressed in Stephenson’s essay but also reproduces the operational logic of the fictional internet and surveillance company in David Egger’s 2013 novel, The Circle. Both, Taskale writes, combat concerns about privacy and freedom by creating a false binary: “One is either a participant in technological advancement or aligned against humanity itself.”
Project Hail Mary, 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—a woman named Eva Stratt (played in the movie by Sandra Hüller)—is 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. “You and what army?” Stratt asks in the book when a U.S. court attempts in vain to rein her in. “Because I have the U.S. Army, and that’s a damn fine army.”
Far from apolitical, Weir’s 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. “Try to name a technology that’s done more harm than good,” Weir said in a 2024 interview with the National Academy of Engineering. “You 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?” But while it’s true that many technologies have a wide variety of applications (some beneficial, others destructive), Weir’s technoliberal framework accepts as factual what is at its core a matter of personal opinion, morality, and judgment.
In this sense, his writing can also be described more broadly as an expression of neoliberalism, which—as Merijn Oudenampsen explains in his forthcoming book, No Nonsense: A History of the Dutch Neoliberal Turn—presents 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.
Project Hail Mary 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—ironically—antithetical to its scientific spirit.
