Project Hail Mary

"With Andy Weir, you’re always going to get a great story, and then a little bit of science. The reason I like his books is because they’ve also got a great sense of humor. It starts with someone who is a survivor in a spacecraft who doesn’t remember anything—what a great setup! Then you’ve got lots of characters involved in the tale. So Ray Porter, who narrates the book, gets to play and have fun with a great text with a sense of humor, and then do a lot of different characters. I do. I’m more of a thriller person, but that’s one of the reasons I really love audiobooks. I’m much more willing to be experimental with audio. I tend to read thrillers and some literary fiction with my eyes, but not much nonfiction or science fiction. I listen to a lot of things that I don’t read with my eyes (which doesn’t mean I don’t listen to a lot of thrillers too). With audio, I’m more willing to give myself over to what the narrator’s doing, especially with science fiction where, oftentimes, there are made up words. With my eyes, I’ll just skip over those. I like listening to science fiction because the narrator does some of the work for me. Yes, you’re not just going to sit down for five minutes and listen to it. It’s a commitment, although not as long as one of the others we’re going to be talking about today. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter"

"This one is probably one of the most famous on my list, and it’s also one of my favourites – I’ve read it three times, I think it’s wonderful. It’s not a romance – it’s about friendship, and this is part of our theme of bringing human emotions to sci fi. The setup is that a new thing has been discovered that eats stars, and it’s been discovered in our sun, in the very near future. At first this doesn’t seem like a huge problem, but then it very much is. Scientists, including the main character, realise that the sun is going to go out unless they can find a way to kill these things – they’re called astrophages, a very cool name. The book opens with the main character, Ryland, waking up from a stasis sleep on a ship with no idea who he is or how he’s got there. Again, it’s one of those old tropes, but it really works. As with all Andy Weir’s characters, he’s really funny and he responds to terrible bad luck and confusion with this endless good cheer, which I would love to imagine that I would have in similar situations – but I wouldn’t. I’d be a weeping heap in the corner and die, instead of solving mathematical equations with equanimity like he does. “Great science fiction will show you the full span of human emotion” The great friendship in this story is between Ryland who is from Earth, and this fantastic alien character called Rocky, who is like a geological space spider. He’s this big thing of rock, from a superheated world. He is also from a civilization that is suffering from the effects of these things that eat stars, and he’s also on a mission to try and find a solution to it. He communicates with a kind of music – he sings. It’s utterly engaging, the way they learn to communicate and how they get on. And how little culture clash there is, because they’re both engineers, is just so uplifting and wonderful. It’s also got the best ending of any sci-fi book I’ve ever read. I’m not going to tell you what it is, but it’s brilliant. He gets dialogue – quite quickly, the narrator manages to understand what he’s saying, and they both become more and more fluent. So we get transcript of what Rocky says. I don’t think there’s a meaningful difference between telling the stories, but I think there is a very great difference in the readership for those stories. When people are looking for a book to read, they often have something very specific in mind; they want something to make them feel a certain way. Reading friendship versus reading quite steamy romance makes you feel very differently, depending on your state of mind. But to write, these things actually play out very similarly. They have their narrative arcs, and you have to build up the relationship in the same way, almost exactly. In fact, the trajectory is identical up to the point that it becomes romance. So to write these are really similar; to read, I think that the perspective is hugely different."

"Without giving too much away, because Andy Weir is wonderful at preserving a surprise in the book… Essentially, a fellow named Ryland Grace wakes up completely disoriented, not knowing where he is, and in short order figures out that he’s on a spacecraft. Through the book, he has to piece together what is going on. Things start to come back to him slowly. And ultimately, it’s about saving the Earth, but it’s also about so many more things, and I don’t want to say anything more in case I give anything away! I will say that it is one of my favourites that I’ve gotten to narrate. It was one where I was running to the microphone every day, looking forward to recording, and I was deeply, deeply sad when it was finished. I enjoyed that book so much. The audiobook does incorporate some audio production, for reasons that I can’t go into that would give things away, but they help lift the text and the story. Andy just wrote a great book here – which is currently being made into a movie. (Of course I’d rather you listen to the book than watch the movie, or listen to the book first, then go watch the movie.) It was wonderful – you know the feeling as a reader when you open a book and you just kind of fall into it, and you feel held up by it, you’re in that world? It was completely immersive in that way. I loved it. There’s a lot of different paths to telling a story in an audiobook, and a lot of different narrators use a variety of tactics to get there. There are some who really research each character and mark out who’s who before they start, and they’ll pre-read the book a couple of times before they do it. Earlier in my career I tried that, and it didn’t go well for me. This is only for me – I’m not saying this is the way to do it – but for me, I found that the least amount of prep is best. I know it’s like I’m telling you, “Yes, I put my socks on over my head”, but it is – it’s more immediate. I once made the analogy that I felt like I was serving reheated vegetables when I over-researched a book. When something in the story is affecting me, it’s affecting you simultaneously, that’s the goal. Now that means I make a lot of mistakes. It means I really have to check the pronunciation guide, if one is provided, and I need to ask the author or the producer, “How do you say this?” Once you have all of that stuff taken care of, then you just allow the story to carry us. You, the listener; me, the narrator; we go on this journey together. That’s my philosophy of doing it. Lots of other narrators work differently, and they have great success with it. Yes, I did improv with the Groundlings for a time. They say the gold is in the grey area. Doing improv, if you have a plan, it’s going to fall down dead, so you have to be open to everything. And that is kind of how I approach telling a story, which worked great for this book, because the character is very much like that: he’s taking in information and then responding off that. There is no overarching plan. So it helps to have that kind of style. Now, had I been doing Dune , that would be a very different situation. You do what the book requires, I think is the best way. But for me, yes, it’s been very much seat of the pants. It means I mess up all the time, and I’ll get notes. And the way the process works, without going too deep into this, is that you finish the book, you send it off, they proof it, and then send you back an Excel spreadsheet, basically, of where you screwed up – where you said something wrong, if there was a noise, whatever. Then you re-do those, send them off, they punch them in, and they make a nice, clean, tidy audiobook for people to listen to. So I have had things where I’ve mispronounced something consistently in spite of my best research, and I’ll have 1700 pickups, and it’s all just that one thing I mispronounced. So you have to be very careful about things like that. The nice thing with something like Hail Mary is it’s all new, and ultimately the setting is less important than the relationships between the characters. That story needs to be told. Then you can be anywhere, sailing ship, spaceship… Well, you get real used to it, you know? You’re like, “Well, okay, I didn’t get that right. All right, thank God there’s someone watching!” The last thing you want is for that mistake to get out, because you will hear about it online."