Each year, I
Search for
Interesting
Hollywood
Aliens (
2025 SIHA). The main question that is addressed in my annual SIHA is if Hollywood can produce a story about space aliens that I want to watch. Ideally, that would be a movie released in the current year, but I'll settle for an interesting alien on television. Some years I punt and simply honor a Hollywood alien from some previous year. Last year, the 2025 SIHA imploded and I devised an imaginary science fiction television series titled "
Intervention" that I selected as my SIHA winner.
Alien Invasion. "Project Hail Mary". I have no confidence that the Wikipedia article about the novel titled "Project Hail Mary" is accurate. However, when an author's own website describes the novel as being about an "impossible scientific mystery", I begin to suspect that what is written on Wikipedia might actually all be true.
Impossible Biology. I was spoiled when I discovered published science fiction through the work of Isaac Asimov. Asimov wrote stories in many literary genres, but I grew up enjoying his hard science fiction. According to Wikipedia, Andy Weir's 2021 novel "Project Hail Mary" is
hard science fiction. The Wikipedia article about hard science fiction mentions Larry Niven as an example of someone who has written "hard science fiction". I've previously commented on the "
profound ignorance of biology on the part of science fiction story writers who had training in the physical sciences" (
see). A classic example of this is when Niven imagined that you could "breed human beings for luck".
I've also previously commented on Harry Clement Stubbs and his attempt to imagine a form of life that could live inside a star. Clement had degrees in astronomy and chemistry, but he seemed to have a blind spot when it came to biology, making his fictional life forms seem implausible.
It is the end of the world! What about the alien microbes in "Project Hail Mary"? The Astrophage are described as "single-celled organisms which consume electromagnetic radiation" and they have come 12 light years from Tau Ceti in order to feed on the carbon dioxide of Venus. The plot thickens. There is also a mysterious "dim infrared line from the Sun to Venus" and the Sun is dimming. Apparently, the Astrophage have plugged themselves into the Sun and soon they will cause Earth to enter into a "catastrophic ice age within thirty years".
Rocky. Based on reviews of the film I've seen (
1)(
2)(
3) star-eating microbes are a plot element of the movie. Since an alien microbe might be hard for a film audience to relate to, the "Project Hail Mary"
film is apparently a buddy film that depicts a friendship between Ryan Gosling and an intelligent alien he names 'Rocky'. I like to imagine that computer-generated images can be used for aliens, but apparently there was need for a Rocky puppet.
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Tarima in the white dress.
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Telepathy in Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. I've long been obsessed telepathy as a science fiction plot device and since
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy has a telepathic cadet,
Tarima Sadal, it might be predicted that I would investigate this case of telepathy in Hollywood. Tarima is an alien
Betazoid. I've never understood how aliens who evolved on various exoplanets of the Star Trek fictional universe are all so similar biologically, often being able to produce hybrid offspring.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy also includes a mysterious "psionic wall" that can protect star systems. Since this is Hollywood science fantasy, I suppose we are not supposed to concern ourselves with the question of how Star Trek telepathy works. Tarima has trouble controlling her telepathic abilities and one episode of the show depicts her as being able to use her telepathic abilities to kill some
Evil Aliens™ who threaten her fellow cadets.
“Disclosure Day”
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Next: my edited version of Chapter 6 of "Plūribus ē Spatium".
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