This piece contains major spoilers for both the book and film versions of Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary. I also include a brief plot summary in a textbox below.
There is a pessimistic worldview in which we live on a planet with limited resources and are—and always will be—engaged in a struggle for control over those resources. The most important divides here are sociopolitical—between haves and have-nots, oppressors and oppressed, workers and bosses, indigenous people and settler colonialists, whitefellas and blackfellas, Israelis and Palestinians, your tribe and my tribe—all the familiar binaries that have most recently been framed in the fashionable language of critical theory but that ultimately go all the way back to humanity’s origins. The most important questions facing us, in this light, are about how to husband and divide up our world’s scant allocations of space and energy, questions that will be decided largely through power struggles.
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