Did you read Project Hail Mary with our book club, and find yourself fascinated by the science, wanting to know more about it? Or maybe you watched the movie and wanted more information on some of the amazing visuals you saw? Maybe you loved both, and you want more space and science? Well, I've got you covered! Here are three books that I would highly recommend you check out if you want to get more information on the topics covered in Project Hail Mary!

Alien Earths: The New Science of Planet Hunting in the Cosmos

Lisa Kaltenegger

Lisa Kaltenegger is the Director of the Carl Sagan institute, and did some pioneering research on how we would go about searching for life out in space. At the time she started her research, we did not even know for sure that exoplanets existed, so it really was visionary in scale and scope. In Alien Earths, Kaltenegger discusses the history of our search for life in the cosmos, the first discovery of explants, and the fundamental principles of what it takes for there to be "life" in the universe (and, in fact, how we even define life). These topics are obviously a huge part of Project Hail Mary, and there is even an entire section in one of the last few chapters where she specifically discusses the book and the related topics it covers. Obviously Project Hail Mary revolves around life outside of earth, and you probably noticed in the book and movie how different the exoplanets and life outside of our solar system were. She also discusses space time, relativity, time expansion with travel from earth, and how interstellar travel would work. This one is written in a very approachable way, and the author does a great job of explaining more difficult topics in a very approachable way. She also gives some cool backstory as to how she got into the field, and what she has specifically done with her research.

Pale Blue Dot: A Vison of the Human Future in Space

Carl Sagan

Most of us are familiar with Carl Sagan. He was a visionary in the world of space exploration and research, and an excellent communicator of science and scientific principles to boot. His series "Cosmos" was a hit adaptation of the book of the same name, and was later re-adapted for TV by Seth McFarlane (yes, the Family Guy dude) and Neil DeGrasse Tyson. In Pale Blue Dot, Sagan discusses how space travel, and ultimately leaving earth, will be crucial for the survival of humanity. This is clearly one of the critical themes of Project Hail Mary. Whether it's climate change, dwindling resources, or natural disasters from earth or space, at some point humans may need to leave our lovely blue home for our species to survive. This, of course, is why Ryland Grace wakes up in another solar system. Additionally, Pale Blue Dot has one of the most beautiful descriptions of our planet, why we should care about it, and why so many of the things we worry about are so inconsequential in the grand scheme of things:

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

Copyright © 1994 by Carl Sagan, Copyright © 2006 by Democritus Properties, LLC.

The Real Science Behind the X-Files: Microbes, Meteorites, and Mutants

Anne Simon

Now I've mentioned a few times before that I spent four years working in a virology research lab. Dr. Simon, the author of this great book, was my research mentor! She grew up in California and was family friends with Chris Carter, who created the X-Files. When he made the show, he reached out to Dr. Simon and asked her to be the show's science advisor. While the X-Files of course deals with alien life, and how aliens might interact with the world, I think this book will be really interesting for Project Hail Mary fans for a different reason. Whenever a book or movie comes out like Project Hail Mary, scientists everywhere are quick to jump up and down and point out what was not correct, or fudged, for the sake of the story (my wife and I both audibly gasped in the movie when Dr. Grace set up a centrifuge in a very unbalanced way - guilty!). While the science and the X-Files may be a bit out of date (this books was published in 1999), what I think Project Hail Mary fans will find most interesting are the discussions about why we cannot always portray the science exactly right for movies and TV shows (the science is excellent as well of course). Anyone who has ever worked in a research lab knows that the work is painstaking, takes months to years, and sometimes does not give us the result we had hoped for. So of course, we cannot always show this process faithfully in books and movies. So if you found yourself wondering how and why such liberties with the facts are taken, I think you'll find this a really interesting read.

Let us all know down in the comments if you have any other great recommendations for books for fans of Project Hail Mary. And if you enjoyed this, consider becoming a member for more great bookish content, whether paid or free! Our paid members get early access to YouTube videos, weekly reading update videos, get to pick a book for me to read each month, and a private channel on our Discord server for priority chats!