Dying Suns and Cosmic Catastrophe: Project Hail Mary and the Return of Solar Sci-Fi
Project Hail Mary is a fun movie with a bleak premise. A mysterious microorganism begins to consume the Sun, threatening to plunge Earth into a new ice age. Despite its futuristic premise, its core theme, the perils of an unstable sun, feels weirdly old.
Speculative fiction is my creative cup of tea, and I also research climate change, heat stress, and thermal injustice. So no surprise I’ve got a soft spot for dying sun stories. This subgenre of sci-fi first appeared in the nineteenth century and became popular in the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s.
By the 1850s Physicists had begun to understand stellar evolution, that the fuel in stars eventually burns out. An unnerving double vision of Earth’s demise emerged. The Sun might fade and freeze the world, or blaze brighter to boil the oceans, strip away the atmosphere, and burn all life to a crisp. As predictions of cosmic cooling or “heat death” unsettled Victorian culture, dying-Sun and dying-Earth sci-fi was born.
Leslie Stone’s story, When the Sun Went Out” (1929) brings to life such societal fears. As the Sun dies, humanity retreats underground. “The dying Earth lay wrapped in its dismal coat of what was soon to be the complete darkness of a sunless world.”
It’s a deeply eery tale. Humans ascend to the earth’s surface to witness the last flickering ray of the sun. “Then the light was gone. Only a faint grayness persisted, but that too died. Several minutes more and the darkness gathered in, a darkness that was never to be dispelled again.”
Today, solar catastrophe sci-fi seems to speak directly to the perilous possibilities of climate change. But I don’t think Project Hail Mary is having a pop-culture moment because it resonates with our current climate emergency. I think it’s such a seductively feel-good story because it allows us to escape climate change’s thorniest problems.
Fossil fuels confront us with a knotty set of issues we just can’t seem to solve: human responsibility, collective action, and political will. Project Hail Mary, by contrast lets humanity off the hook for harms wrought upon our atmosphere. The source of climatic disaster is an inter-stellar enemy. Humans get to be the heroes, not some murky mix of victims and villains.
A similar innocence is found in Clare Winger’s 1928 story The Menace of Mars. Earth faces chaos when a sentient Mars begins to move stellar objects for its own survival. Extreme heat and drought ensue. Humans heroically try to survive beneath a “mammoth sun, its rays death‑dealing in their intensity.”
Project Hail Mary holds up a mirror to the best and worst human responses to our climatic crisis. The protagonist Ryland is a relatable mix of courage and cowardice. The Hail Mary Project reflects humanity’s capacity for international cooperation in solving wicked problems, a possibility that seems wildly farfetched in today’s global (dis)order. Yet the movie also foreshadows violence and social chaos are ever-nearer threats. Hope and peril are unnervingly close bedfellows as we wrestle with the existential threat of an uncertain future.
John Hawkins’s serialized story, Ark of Fire (1938) confronts us with humanity’s capacity for cruelty and dehumanization in the face of environmental ruin. Set in 1980, an evil scientist named de Spain shifts Earth’s orbit towards the Sun. He is determined to ‘cleanse’ the human race. In his underground ark of hand-picked survivors, he explains his plan. “The Ark is the cradle of a new race. A superior race. Here scientific propagation will ensure a race of supermen. There will be no weaklings, no fools.”
Hawkins lived and wrote in 1930s America. Eugenics and scientific racism were on the ascendancy. On the eve of WWII, dying Earth sci-fi offered one prophetic lens to imagine the horrific consequences of racist ideology and ecofascism.
In Hawkin’s tale, a dogged group of heroes return earth to its orbit. Likewise, many solar catastrophe stories imagine the restoration of habitable climates. But others portray permanently hostile worlds and the search for refuge, safety, and retreat.
In Project Hail Mary, Ryland and his alien friend Rocky create separate habitable atmospheres to work together. Overcoming their separation and staying safe requires ingenuity and a good-faith curiosity to know the Other.
Ray Bradbury’s story from 1946, Frost and Fire, offers a much darker take on separation, refuge and the Other. Humans are marooned on a planet that oscillates between incinerating heat and deadly cold. Human growth is so accelerated that a lifespan lasts only days. In a place where “sunlight undressed their flesh from bone,” deadly conflict and selfishness rule people’s short, brutish lives. War allows a few extra days of life in the sanctuary of caves.
Each time I read this bleak tale I think about the possibilities of climate justice. Will the climate sanctuaries we build be premised upon limited resources or new modes of reciprocity? On borders that protect and contain those on the inside, or on hospitality and the extension of safety?
For a century, solar catastrophe stories have offered ways to imagine life under planetary-scale threats. Project Hail Mary joins the tradition, an enjoyable, epic tale that manages to reimagine the political impasses of our current moment.
I wish our own climate predicament could be solved by a lone human hero, a cute alien, and a singular, stunning scientific discovery. But it won’t. It necessitates a thousand tiny actions taken in concert and the fraught work of building political alliances. Not a gripping story, but our story, perhaps.
