Klavans on the Culture: Project Hail Mary | Ep. 1

Brian Gosling gave a very funny interview where they asked him if he learned anything. He said, "No, I didn't understand anything I was doing." And I had to I had had to have a bug in my ear so that Andy Weir could tell me what to write on the blackboard. You know, because Andy Weir wanted it to be realistic, you know, Yes indeed.

This is Clavens on the culture. I am one claven Andrew Claven here with another person randomly selected because his name was Claven Spencer Claven. No relation. We >> they had a lottery actually just took >> we all got got together at the Claven convention and they decided that was the thing. >> Exactly. Grabbed you after the first 10 the 10th person in the door named Claven. We grabbed him off the street. >> There were balloons, alarm bells. It was the whole thing. It was really remarkable. >> It was an amazing event. Unfortunately, we didn't get this on camera. >> I wish everybody could have been there, but we're not. We're here now though for a show.

This is a new show we're testing out where two clavs talk about the culture. We talk about the arts. This is the uh project Hail Mary edition. We're going to talk about the new film starring Ryan Gosling based on the Andy Wear bestseller. And uh you know, we hope this is going to be a show about the arts that's not a show about complaining. This is my vision for it is that we're not going to be complaining the fact that everybody's leftwing. >> Oh, I was told there'd be complaining. >> There's no complaining. >> I'm out. We'll do this on your own. >> We may have some complaining, but we're going to stay away from what some stupid left-wing actor said. We're not only going to like things that are leftwing, we're going to like things for their aesthetic value, and we're going to talk about that. And uh this will be about this episode will be about this movie and about science fiction in general. Uh what what are you hoping for? What are we what are we supposed to do besides complain?

>> Oh, I beats me. No, I actually I I totally agree with this. There's there's this great line, one of the many great CS Lewis lines where he says something like, "We need less Christian art and more art made by Christians, more Christians making art." Right? And but what you mean by this is we need less art that kind of uses the poetry or the movie or the book as like a delivery system for an ideology and more art that is informed by the truth that is informed by what we see to be the truth. And I think what I'd like us to do on this show uh is, you know, we need less uh right-wing culture criticism and more culture criticism by right-wingers. In other words, I think like you know conservatism is true and so its vision of the world is true. Um, but that doesn't mean that every work of art has to put forward conservative ideas in order to be good. And I think it's really important if we're thinking about how to speak meaningfully into the culture that we be able to recognize art that works, art that succeeds, what's good about stuff even when we don't agree with the ideas. Uh cuz that's just the sort of thing that like otherwise you it gets incredibly boring and it is suffocating when you hear people talk about a movie uh or an actor or whatever whose ideas they don't like and then they just become blind to the virtues and the values of art in and of itself. Art for uh its own kind of beauty which I think is something that we we kind of need to appreciate more and understand more in order to understand the the its value to civilization and society. The arts, the arts are for people who love them. We love them. I've been writing novels my and some movies my whole life. Uh you are a doctor in the Jill Biden sense of the word of uh of classics. That's right. >> Oxford. I'm an I'm a doctor in Biden actually. That's my my PhD. >> You have a PhD in the class. >> No, it's an ancient Greek languages and literature which uh you know is I spend most of my time reading science fiction. So it should be perfect for this. >> Absolutely. And you know if you need a doctor because you have some ancient Greek disease, you're the person at the first to have the speed doctor. >> Call call me on the phone.

>> All right, let us talk about the new film Project Hail Mary starring Ryan Gosling. This is as I said based on the bestselling novel by Andy Weir, who wrote The Martian. Uh it is a story of a man who wakes up in space with no memory, alone in space with no memory, and slowly realizes he has been sent there to try and save the world. We're not going to give anything away that's not in the trailer. So, we're going to try to stay away from real spoilers, but anything that's in the trailer, we will include it. It's directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who have done uh they do the Spider-Verse uh stories, the Spider-Verse movies. They've done the Lego movie, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. It's written by uh Drew Goddard who is has done who did The Martian first of all, the last Andy Weir film and Cloverfield and World War Z and other films as well. Let's get started. What did you think?

>> You know, I thought this movie was a triumph. I have to say I think that people who really love the book might have some objections to it because of the way it changes the structure, the way it kind of uh mutes the science. Um, but I actually think that this was the most impressive thing about this movie is the way it takes a hard sci-fi book. So, you know, in in science fiction, you have this distinction between hard sci-fi where the science really is the point and it's trying to imagine actual scientific kind of uh things that you might be able to do in space versus like something more like Star Wars or just kind of a space opera, right? Was bigger on the fi than on the sigh. Uh, and this book, you know, which I also loved, is unquestionably hard sci-fi. I mean, the whole thing is like a long word problem basically about how to solve all of these issues that the character is coming up with. And it's the main guy is this adorably nerdy sort of science teacher, a lot like the main character in The Martian. Um, and what they do really interestingly in this movie is it's kind of like a master class in adaptation. So you don't get these long digressions on like what's the gravitational constant and how can I make sure that that like squares up with my the chain that I'm building to and all of this stuff gets kind of very quickly moved over and even some of the big plot twists that work really well in in the book um centrally the one that they gave away in the trailer which is the fact that there's an alien out there in space who becomes kind of Ryan Gosling's buddy you know as they try to save the universe from this parasite that's that's eating all the stars. Um, even that gets kind of given to you off the bat. And so they emphasize very very different aspects of this movie. It's much more kind of heart heart driven, a lot more about the relationship between these two, you know, guys. Uh, they're kind of two nerd dudes, but from different species. And so it's it's a kind of about like the universal power of nerd nerdy dudeness, like moving from galaxy to galaxy. Um, and I just thought that was a that was a clever move because on the one hand I missed a lot of the things that made me most excited about the book. But on the other hand, I think these guys who, as you mentioned, have done a lot of like kind of family movies understood what could and couldn't make it onto the screen. So, I I I was impressed. What did you think?

>> Yeah. No, I I thought it was a ve first of all, it's an incredibly sweet movie, which is something you don't see very much. It's a It's a family film in the sense that it's rated PG-13, but I think a a mature 10, 11year-old would enjoy it. It's not frightening. It's got no curse words in it. It's it's got this kind of a decency and joy about it that Hollywood has entirely lost, has not been able to figure out how to how to put it in. Uh that and as you say, it warms the book up. There's no question about it. It takes the character who is played by the fantastic, probably the best actress alive, I think. Uh, Sandra Huler, I think her name is. Is that how you pronounce it? Uh, >> oh man. I I don't know. But this is the the lady that comes in to sort of take over everything basically. >> She takes over the world. And in the book, she's a very cold, hard uh person. In the movie, they warm her up. Uh the actress is a lovely actress has a beautiful smile and on top of everything you know Andy Weir has famously said that he's an agnostic but on top of everything it's a about a guy named Grace in a ship called Hail Mary asked to sacrifice himself to save the world. You know I think we can safely say this is a Christian allegory. that is infused with Christian with true Christian love and principles and ethics and the idea that there is something in us that that wants to help other people and it just makes you feel good. You know, it's it's like a you know, it it's you're happy to be with everybody. Ryan Gosling, you know, I know he's a big star on the one hand, but he's kind of underrated on the other. He's really uh able to be he's a real movie star in the old Jimmy Stewart sense of the word in that he can bring Ryan Gosling and make him all kinds of different things. He was a tough guy and Drive which I really liked. He played Ken and Barbie. He was in La La Land. He's can do romance and music and all this stuff. And here he plays a nerd and he's very convincing. And I just thought, you know, I I walked out thinking and you know, I I had the same feeling you did. We both read the book first and I have to always warn myself. I like books better than I like movies just in general. And and the one thing I have to say about this as somebody who works in the field is the plotting is the best plotting I have read in an entertainment since Silence of the Lambs. The >> it's like 90% plot twist. >> It's 90% plot twist and they're good and it holds together and even though he uses some triedand-rue things like amnesia and all that, there's nothing wrong with tried and true. There's a reason it's been tried and found true. Uh it it all really clicks and works and it has a uh you know not things that I won't give away but like all stories have a hinge moment. This is one of the best I've ever seen in the book that doesn't come across as as powerfully in the movie but still as you say the movie is filled with a warmth that the book doesn't have and I just think they did a great job.

>> Yeah. And to the point about adaptation the thing that this actually reminded me most of in this way was the Lord of the Rings movies. Obviously very very different kind of content but you know the Lord of the Rings movies I think some of the best adaptations in to come out in my lifetime. Some of the best movies to come out in my lifetime and they equally make fans of the book a little angry sometimes because they cut out all this stuff. Most famously like Tom Bombadil this beloved character from the first book isn't in the movies at all. And people get upset about this but these are the necessities of adaptation. forms are different from one another. A novel is a different thing than a movie. And one of the essential things about art is that the form and the content are intertwined in this beautiful way. And so you're going to lose things. Things are going to change. I do think that the warmth you're describing is there in the book, but you're right, it's like buried under all of the the science. Like I wouldn't say that the the book is cold. In fact, I whenever I tell people they have to read this book, I always say like this is a book that I wanted just to cuddle up to my chest and like hug because there's something so yeah moving about it and and the plot twist. It's like somehow this book is the only work of science fiction I've ever read that made me feel like maybe I had an inkling of what it feels like to be in outer space. Something about it just captures the vastness of it. uh the kind of the scale, the wonderment and the terror. Like the the kind of classical term we might invoke here would be the sublime, right? Just this this sense that the universe is enormous. It's uh incredibly intricate. It's scary. But and this is the most important thing, it's not empty, right? In fact, there are other creatures out there. And to your point about God, which really becomes kind of more I think important in the in the movie. Um it has a certain kind of uh it's not value neutral. It's not just like anything goes. We actually believe in the power of the mind and of humanity. Um and there's a wonderful scene in this movie that really I thought hit just the right note where uh Ryan Gosling, the main character, uh who's as you say his name is Grace. He's talking about they're about to make this hailmary pass to save the world there. Everybody's on edge. He goes up to this woman who is kind of shut down and she has to take over like all the government institutions and he says basically do you believe in God and she says it's better than the alternative you know she's so which is kind of the Andy Weir attitude and yeah it just opens up this possibility that we're not it's not just kind of a fun joy ride. This is actually an expression of the human spirit in uh allegorical form which is the best thing the sci-fi does.

>> Interestingly, her response was the only line in the picture. For some reason, I could not hear. I had to text you as I was walking out of the theater and say, "What did she know she say? You're in you're in another city and I had to text you to find out." But but no, that that is an addition. It's not in in the book. Uh he doesn't deal with that that question at all. As I say, you can't avoid the fact that the guy's named Grace. He's in a Hail Mary. is doing a very Jesusy thing and you you can't avoid that. But what what is important and I think this is you know one of the big arguments uh that you'll hear in in God debates is that the mind you're in this vastness of space you know there's everything is so complex at the small level incredibly unimaginable at the big level and yet the human mind can crack the problems and this is the that was the the u thesis behind the Martian this is the you know this is in many ways the same story uh he likes to put an isolated person in this sciency situation and watch him science him his way out of it. As you said, I I thought they did an excellent job of tossing the science out because every every sentence in it and yet, you know, you do miss it for the simple reason I won't say that Andy Weir has invented a subgenre of science fiction, but he is part he's a leading voice in a new subgenre of science fiction, which is that in in the past at at its inception, I mean, if you go back all the way to the first real science fiction novel, which was Frankenstein, But you can go up through there through jewel jewels ferns and all this is that >> they would take a scientific proposition and then they would start to speculate. You know what would happen if you could put a person body parts together and create a new person. But this is like the threebody problem of a novel you liked a lot more than I did which I in which there really are no characters. They're only problems. The >> that is the hardest of hard sci-fi by the way. It's like an example of what we're talking about. >> Yeah. But the plot itself is science. The plot is all the plot points are how do you get you know this creature to do that and how do you get from here to there and how do you break through this kind of uh cell structure to this sort of cell structure. All of those are the problems and weird tends to make them uh has the talent of making them very interesting, very gripping and and also kind of inspiring that yes, you can figure this stuff out and what's >> well as you point out I just want to say like this that idea is a theological idea. Like when you start talking about, you know, is there God in this sci-fi movie? It feels like we've had the kind of Star Trekification of sci-fi, the Gene Rodenberification of Sci-Fi where everything is this like, you know, secular humanist vision of the universe. There's really no governing order out there. There's just like liberal enlightenment values, right? Um but actually as you as you point out right the genre the idea of the universe uh and exploring the universe and kind of using the human imagination to branch out into like what's possible is a much older genre than Star Trek. It goes right back in some ways to the kind of earliest fiction. And when you when you combine it with the idea of science, right? This this thought that the human mind can understand the universe, it becomes theological even if you don't mean for it to.

>> Well, this is this is the entire Yeah. >> This is one of the ways that Star Trek the uh Star Wars goes ary in the later films. This starts out with the force and we get there's an evil force and a good force. And like I think any Christian can understand that. I think any spiritual person can understand that. But in the sequels, they said, "Well, it's really this these kind of atoms. It's this very materialist thing that they're just manipulating >> mediclorans." Okay, Boomer. Boomer, I have to just interrupt you here for a second because you're talking about Star Wars. Committed a cardinal sin. You said Star Wars. >> I Well, I corrected myself. I I hope I Oh, I'm sorry. Okay. >> It's so long ago I've forgotten now. That's how old I am. >> Exactly. You were right. Yeah. But but yes, the Metlorans become this like scientistic kind of materialist explanation for the Force. >> Yes. And you know this this is a a really interesting thing to me and I'm it's interesting in two ways. I'll just start with the first way is that like I said the the original science fiction was this might happen and therefore what would that look like? This is not that. This is you know there is there's speculation. They do things that we haven't done yet that we probably uh won't be doing for a long time. So there is speculation but there is also what would the science be and and uh Ryan Gosling gave a very funny interview where they asked him if he learned anything. He said no I didn't understand anything I was doing and I had to I had had to have a bug in my ear so that Andy Weir could tell me what to write on the blackboard you understand because Andy Weir wanted it to be realistic you know. Um but but this is this is new because the original kind of line of of Frankenstein is there are some things that man was not meant to tamper with and this is the opposite of that that like everything is there for man to tamper with and it's all solutions all the way down and that is a spiritual uh point of view I think.

>> Wow that's a remarkable point. I mean, there's one way that I think the movie does retain the science which the capital S uh which hasn't people haven't noticed as kind of a meta point but this movie is filled with practical effects. So again, in a work of adaptation, right, the the the alien is not a CGI creation. It's a it's a puppet, right? And so the whole movie is kind of a giant science project in a really like appealing way in this era when everything is sort of fake like digitized AI or CGI inventions. This is not that at all. This is a like a living, breathing, working science project. And yeah, as you say, the cautionary tale element is really not there. The the big bad in this movie, which is this like microorganism that eats starlight basically, um it didn't come into being because humans like used too much water in their data centers or like it's not it's it's not global warming. It's not something we did because we like chopped down too many trees. It's just part of the problem set of the universe and the premise. Andy Weir's I think guiding premise is that problem set is there for us to solve us and anything else that might be out there that has the kind of mind structure that that we have and then you know he ends up basically like uh teaming up right with this other creature that's out there in the universe and like figuring out how to how to how to resolve this. Um, and I think like to to regain some of that optimism, uh, is really essential in this movie. Like the Gene Rodenberry Star Trek idea, the Star Wars idea, kind of the old like boomer sci-fi, uh, that saw the universe as like just endlessly amanable to liberal enlightenment values, um, has has really started to crumble and fall apart. And you see it in uh the threebody problem which they made on Netflix and it's this you know Chinese sci-fi um where actually the universe does not make sense. In fact we might just be like ants crawling on a tombstone. That's the metaphor that Shishin Leo the author of that book uh gives us for what human beings are. We're these sort of in poorly equipped biological um evolutionary accidents or quazi accidents that are uh shaped we we have been honed by natural selection to understand our immediate surroundings but totally unequipped to grasp the logic that governs quazars or you know the the vastness of space which is what you would expect if there were no god guiding evolution right um but in fact there's a bigger idea behind western science um which is that our monkey minds, our cantaloupe brains are not just for our immediate surroundings. They're not just for survival. They're also for exploration and they are keys to the order of the whole universe. And that's kind of the in the background,

>> you know, going going back to what you said about the practical effects as opposed to CGI effects. the I think it was the Hollywood Reporter wrote this classically perlind I mean this these are the trade papers that they have in Hollywood and you know Hollywood they say Hollywood is in a bubble but it's not it's in an iron lung it's in like a place where they cannot they cannot think beyond their own >> sensory deprivation chamber >> and they said they said four >> like 11 you know four lessons that we should learn from the fact that this is a big hit because this film is a very big hit and especially a big hit for a film that's not in a franchise so it's it's Amazon's first real uh smash. It is the biggest hit that's not in a franchise since uh Oppenheimer, which is quite a different uh kind of picture. And it said let's four lessons. And the first lesson I think was was use practical effects or something like that. It was it was technical. And I thought, you know what, there's only one lesson here. Great story, good values, good good actors, talented people being put to work, you know, and and tell a story that people want to hear instead of lecturing us about things you know nothing about. You know, that that's it. But but the practical effects actually do speak to something important because all we're hearing is about AI and you've just written a very good article about this for the Daily Wire. We're hearing about what AI is going to do and you know I bumped into a screenwriter friend not so long ago at one of your appearances as a matter of fact where I said how are things in Hollywood and he said well everybody's afraid all the screenwriters are afraid of being replaced by AI. And I said, "If the screenwriters can be replaced by AI, they should be because they should be doing something so creative that AI can't catch up." Well, here we have >> I bet he loved that. This is why he Exactly. He was not He was not too happy about But but all we hear about is how it's going to do this and how it's going to do that. Well, we have techniques for doing special effects that are incredible. I mean, just wild when you see what they did with Game of Thrones and how it was really just two people standing on a, you know, a platform and everything else was green screen behind it. You know, it's it's amazing. But they didn't do that. They went back to the basics of doing puppets of, you know, kind of having things move around and all the sets are real and all this stuff and it's better. And so for all that technology, it looks it looks incredible.

>> This movie looks great. And CGI has gone gone through this really interesting trajectory where when it was first introduced, you got some of the most beautiful movies I think ever made with CGI like in the early days. And I remember you uh had a friend and you took me out to his little studio because he was working I think on the Lord of the Rings movies and she showed us how like he would put in painstakingly adjust what the computer was doing, you know, with Gollum and with all these creatures and it was this fusion of human artistry with machine capabilities, right? >> You fast forward however many years, right? And you look at the threebody problem on Netflix, it looks like garbage. It's be and it's because the the CGI became the art. It was like people thought they could just make the computer do the work for them and they thought they could use to cut corners and everything. the practical >> I wonder whether I mean I wonder whether AI will go through a similar thing because you have now as you say these dinguses who I meet every day online saying well you know you're all having a moral panic over books being written by by AI but soon all books will be written by AI and you're like the only person who would ever say that is somebody who has never read any books of any value at all like you literally must be the least cultured person in the universe to think that because of the thing the thing that this the practical effects say tell you is that the humanity is the point the point of listening to stories is to comm connect with another human being about the state of being humans so what's the point of having everything be done by machines even if they do it well it has no point the other point thing I want to talk about though about science fiction in general that that I think is really interesting here and this is I don't want this to sound like a criticism of either the book or the movie because I thought the book was wonderful. I thought I thought the movie was wonderful in its own way and and so I'm not criticizing it but but art does tell us about where we are as a culture and it tells us about where the human mind is. I mean art is about the human spirit in time. That's what it's about. The eternal human spirit in time. And so it it tells us things and this tells us something and I don't want this to be taken as a criticism because it's not. But when when science fiction starts out, and I wrote about this in in my book, The Truth and Beauty, it starts out with this idea of a a man making another person without the help of a woman. And Mary Shel, the author, says it's about somebody replacing God. And yes, it is about somebody replacing God in the sense that God is the only person who has ever made a human being without the help of a woman and a man doing this. And and what is that monster? What does the monster Frankenstein want from his creator? He wants a woman. He wants somebody that a bride, right? And and so much of science fiction and horror is about horror at the female body. If you take The Exorcist, it's about it's really about a woman's girl's first period. Basically, Carrie is about that. Uh, you know, Rosemary's baby is about obvious birth. The omen is about birth. And and so much of science fiction is about like eliminating the woman. Like Terminator is the guy comes back not to kill the hero the hero who's fighting him. He's back to kill the woman who gives birth to the hero who's fighting him because she has the power. Her power is she's a woman. She's cute. She's silly. You know, she just wants to go out and party and but she's the mother. She's the the problem.

>> And if the hero dies, she can make more, right? Like this was one of the That's right. So So Ter, you know, Terminator is like that. The matrix which a word related to the word for womb is about you know people being put away and losing their power of creativity.

>> What is really interesting to me about Andy Weir and about this story and the difference between the book and the movie is Andy the book has no sexuality in it whatsoever to the point where I started to miss it. I mean I I want to know you know it's about a nerd. He's he's got as somebody says to him at one point, you don't even have a dog. You know, he doesn't have he has no relationships. And that's part of the point. I mean, that's is part of what Andy Weir was writing about and it's part of what the movie is about. But in the in the book, there is actually no sense of what does he do with his sexual feelings. You know, is he looking at porn? Is he doing, you know, anything? But, you know, he he says in the film, I can't remember if this is in the book, whether he has has had a girlfriend, but he has nothing in his life. And the only time a sexual relation comes in is kind of comical uh as kind of materialist and comical. Somebody's saying, "Oh yes, we're having sex and it's lots of fun to have sex and how much fun is sex." In the movie is very much changed. The movie there are, you know, uh there are relationships that are forming around and they're forming for very human reasons. And the woman who runs the um who runs the entire mission is who's named Eva by the way. So that's she's also part of this this story that we're hearing. Uh is is much warmer. I mean I I had to laugh. Sandra Huller is basically cashing in on this magical year she had when she made two films, two of the greatest screen performances I've ever seen. Uh you know, one one was The Anatomy of a Fall and the other was the uh the Zone of Interest where she played two entirely different characters but just brilliant. She's a German actress and she but she acts in French and and in English and >> I did not remember that she was in um the Anatomy of a Fall. That's really interesting. Yeah. So, she's just like one of the greats. >> She's one of the great. Yeah. Absolutely. And what what I always love about American actors is they train to do Hamlet and they go to acting class and they rip their hearts out and then if they're really really successful they end up on TV carrying a gun and going let the girl go, you know. So, >> yeah. Yeah. Yeah. or like shooting shooting ray guns out of their arms in a Marvel movie. Yeah, exactly. So, here's Hunter Huller gets to cash in by making an American film and her basic job is to be stern but to smile with this incredible feminine warmth that just bl you know it's like all beautiful European actresses. She's an actual real person. She doesn't look like a a Barbie doll. She looks like a real human being. She just blows you away. But but she warms this character up and they even give her a scene that I won't give away, but I mean it just makes her a very very human uh kind of she's she's just the mean mommy in the book. She's the nice mommy.

>> Yeah. Yeah. We agree we agree we would prefer if you did not die, right? Like this great lines >> and and and all I want to say about this is that like there is no sexual place for for women in these these stories. um as as companions, as wives, as mothers. It's it's behind the scenes, but I I feel that there's something in the culture that has not yet been solved on this issue that we haven't figured out. Um, you know, I' I've talked a lot about the fact that the last really great art that sprang up was all about men who were manly men, but they were manly men because they were outlaws. So, it was Breaking Bad and the Sopranos and The Shield. and one one of these things after another and I said it's because they're the culture is looking for what is a good man and can't find out because they're afraid to say what is a good woman because they're afraid of the feminist so they can't figure they can't figure it out and this this is just an instant instantiation of that idea in some way

>> it's interesting like the other male female relationship that we get in the book and the movie is between the aliens right so the alien's name is Rocky and he has a mate he says at home called Adrien. And I wonder if like that is a easier way for Andy Weir to get into like a core male female relationship as if it's not even human at all because we've screwed up human sexual relations so badly and they're so complicated that we can kind of imagine like on another planet things act operate a little bit more naturally. And even though he really like this alien is a very human alien like he's also kind of an animal, right? Like there there there's comparisons between him and a spider in the book. Like he obviously the part of the point is wow our bodies are so different but we're able to share and communicate kind of these these core like scientific principles, right? And there's even a lot more made in the book about the aliens language which they kind of again mute in the movie because it would just be too complicated to understand. I think it would be like the that movie Arrival uh which is another sci-fi about al is all about alien language and you have to kind of do something like that to to get it across. But you know he has a totally different sensory apparatus, totally different system. But the idea is there's something eternal. There's something kind of pure that they can convey even though they have to translate it in in all these different ways. They have to translate their language back and forth. They have to translate different ways of seeing and thinking, right? But they ultimately like the ideas endure and they are again they're everywhere throughout the universe. And so I wonder if like the the way of a man with a maid as as they say like the kind of reproductive male female sexuality is one of the things that Andy Weir is like trying to get at in the same way that he's like putting forward math as like a universal constant of the universe. He wants to say like men and women are also a universal constant of the universe, but he can only really say that about aliens. He can't actually say it about humans yet. There's something. Yeah.

>> One of the very few things I disliked about the book was that it it toys with this idea of panspermia. That maybe one of the reasons that these two creatures can talk with one another is because we all come from the same source, which is another one of these things like the multiverse is created. It's it's science of the gaps. It's created to close the gap where obviously God is is living and they leave it out entirely in the movie. And it leaves you with this idea that oh yes if you live you know there is something about you that can connect with something else that lives. I mean something that we all know if we have a pet or a dog or something we can connect. There is something between us and and and also when you get to a certain level of development there's something even greater than that that is connecting. It's really >> they are rational animals. The classical philosophical way of putting this forward would be to say that man is a rational animal and he's the only rational fully rational animal that we know on earth. He's the only creature with a body and appetites and you know that eats food and breathes air but also has this connection this like mainline to the order of the universe the logos they would call it in Greek. And one of the things that science fiction tends to do, even though they don't talk about it in these terms all the time, is they imagine what it would be like for other rational animals to exist out there. And the the work that really gets this is um CS Lewis's space trilogy, which is this work of science fiction, you know, out of the silent planet, Perilandra, that hideous strength um about space travel. And it not many people notice this cuz Lewis was so good at like hiding his classical knowledge like under the surface. Um but there's a there's a language in uh that trilogy as well, a madeup language called old solar. And in old solar there is a word now which means rational animal. And so they say like I'm not human but I'm now right. I'm I have this same thing. And now that's kind of what's going on in this relationship between uh Ryan Gosling and the alien is that they are discovering what is essential to being a rational animal. Um and it's one of the most profound things that thinking about aliens does for us. It's why like thinking about outer space is is an ancient idea that's like the planets are named after the Greek gods. The angels are thought to live in space in Dante. like Paradise Lost, Milton's poem is full of, you know, outer space angels and and demons and all of that. And it's because when we start to think about what might be out there, we think like what is the spirit of man that is contained in his body? And this alien Rocky is like a totally different physical object than the man. But what's so touching and moving is that expressed in that language is all the same stuff including male female relationships but also logic and science and reason and all of that

>> and this coming from the man who wrote the language that is in uh pen dragon the >> descended the Atlantean in Pen Dragon is descended from old solar so you will find in fact yes >> so I want to stop here we want to move into a final section of of the show about where we talk about stuff we like and we're going to talk about today we'll talk about science fiction stuff we like since that's the genre we're in. But let me just say that this is an experimental show. We don't know how often we'll do it. We will do it as often as you like it. If you the more you like it, the more we'll do it. Uh so let us know. Turn up, tell your friends, send it around and uh if you enjoyed the show, tell us if there's something more or different that you'd like, tell us that and we will try to construct the show that you would like to see. So let us talk about we each picked something that we liked and my my pick was in fact uh that hideous strength and by CS Lewis and I have to say it's this is important because I I love CS Lewis. His non-fiction is some of my favorite reading. I think he's the one the most brilliant men of the 20th century. I don't like his fiction like JRR Tolken. I don't like the uh you know the lion the witch in the wardrobe books. I I you know I always think he's a little sentimental. I always think that his god solves too many problems. The minute the lion comes in in any of those Narnia books, everything is is, you know, basically settled. Uh and and and yet with that hideous strength which was written toward the end of World War II and CS Lewis had been in World War I, he he understood horror. He understood the ugliness that really arises from evil in a way that some of his other books uh just represent for children. And that hideous strength is a story that you read it the the first five page. I didn't like the other two books in the in the trilogy. In fact, they're mostly just theology buried in an outer space story. But this is a great story. And the minute you start to read it, >> it sounds like today. I mean, it's an organization called NICE that is doing nice things that are really satanic. And it is based on um you know, the things that he was reading about in the newspaper that are so not so much different. And I just want to point out one thing and then we'll move to yours is that he does deal with this question of Saxon in a very very brave way. He has he has a woman who is being basically haunted by feminist desires. And he has this line that I underlined here where he says uh you know she finds it infuriating when people found her sweet and fresh when she wanted them to find her also interesting important but she wondered had they simply been right and perceived the sort of thing she was that her fruitfulness and her loveliness and her uh the the fact that she is a creative entity are the best things about her. And the book basically shows the God side as being the side of fruitfulness and sex and love and creativity. And that I think is a brave thing that CS Lewis did in that hideous strength. Uh >> yes. Well, also to the point of again adaptation, which has been I think like a theme of our conversation, you're right. I mean, I have more time for the first two books of the space trilogy than you do. I cuz I like hard sci-fi and thought experiments and it's not it's it's more space opera but it it still has like a lot of philosophical thought experiments in it. But one of the things that gives Lewis's fiction that quality you're describing is he's always using his fiction to dramatize his non-fiction ideas. So if you've read essays by Lewis and if you've read his books about theology, you'll always encounter those ideas like sometimes just stated outright by characters, which is what's when it's less successful. Um, and so he has his own interesting problem of adaptation, which is how do you take like philosophical propositions and turn them into narrative because they should speak to life and they should be vital. and he doesn't quite ever I don't think crack that code until that hideous strength which is basically the abolition of man his wonderful series of speeches turned into as you say a horror story and there's other elements in there there's speeches like uh that the inner ring is very much kind of driving the main character Mark Stoddock in that book but also as you point out he makes it so vivid and this again ancient idea that the evil is ugly and and ugliness is a kind of distort deformity emerges out of sin is like very just potent in that in that book and it's just such a rip roar and >> is a I could talk about this but we could do an entire show about

this book, but let's let's what is stuff you like in the science fiction?

Real. Okay, so I also have science fiction. This is again, more of a kind of allegorical thing, but it's really easy to read. Short pages, long. Yeah, free online. It's called "The Ones Who Walk Away" by Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the, uh, science fiction fantasy writers. Her fantasy trilogy, or I think it's a quartet actually, on on Earthsea is is beautiful, but this is a very, very short. And fantasy does tend to get a bit prolix, verbose, like it's too long. Um, this is so tight and so carefully written. Um, and it's basically, I don't really want to give away, like, the the key twist in it, but it's it's about a paradise where there's a dark secret at the center. Um, and it just has, just to give you a flavor of how beautiful this the writing is and how much is packed in here. I I really love this passage. "We have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual. Only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist, a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain." I mean, it's so good and it's such a complicated, morally complicated parable, um, that I don't want to spoil, but I just think that's like one of the greatest, uh, short stories.

You know, I I am not, you you're a bigger fan of of sci-fi than I am, and I I don't turn to it right away unless somebody recommends it to me or it's a classic that I want to pick up. But my my major complaint about science fiction is that people don't create characters. So that, you know, if you read a book that that I actually liked, I love the sci-fi TV show of "Childhood's End," you know, that you and I watched together, actually. Uh, the characters in it are absurd. They're just very cardboard characters. But with "Project Hail Mary," uh, with the Ursula K. Le Guin book, with, um, "That Hideous Strength." Here are stories that are science fictiony, that are, you know, go into fantastic things, deal with, uh, science, and yet are incredibly human and filled with real living people and living ideas. And you know, my my favorite scene in that "Hideous Strength" is in when they're trying to convince somebody to join the bad guys, they put them in the objectivity room. And the objectivity room is a room meant to teach you that your feelings mean nothing. That you're, you know, uh, they that basically, you know, your impressions of the world are just random instead of that you were are made with a purpose and therefore are made capable of seeing the unseen world in a real way.

All right, we got to wind this up. I mean, this for me this went by fairly quickly, but.

Flew by. Have to say, um, that that I I we again, we want to hear what you have to say. As as I said before, I am a lifelong novelist. Spencer is a uh has a PhD in, what did you say your?

I'm a lifelong dork. I'm a lifelong nerd. Uh, no, my PhD is in is in Greek languages and literature. And can I add, uh, yeah, we want to hear what you think of the show. Also would love to know what you think of the movie. So send us your notes about the picture or the book because it's just it would be really fun to keep the conversation going.

Yes. And and, uh, and as I say, the more of you turn up, uh, the more we'll do the show because we don't want to, you know, we can talk to each other anytime.

Go to all the trouble of filming it with this camera because I don't have to bother other people and get them involved. So yes, please give us an excuse to do this.

So do you have a final 30 seconds that you want to say in general about the the show or the arts or anything?

Uh, boy. Well, I will just say that there's a moment in, uh, that the first book of the Space Trilogy when the main character finds himself in space, looks around and realizes space isn't empty. It's filled with light.

And I think if there's a, a sense of light that suffuses this this book and this movie, um, it's because the era of space pessimism, the era of spiritual pessimism is over. It's played out. It's done. The thing now is to find the truth of light, right? The goodness that suffuses the universe, uh, despite all of its flaws and darkness. And so, I think that's part of our project.

Yes. Especially, I mean, as you see, that all Hollywood can make that actually attracts people is horror. And horror is cheap. So that's one of the reasons they make it. But it's also the only way many people can experience the spiritual. They can only experience the spiritual in terms of of horror and the supernatural. And in some ways, it's true of the arts, too, that the only way people can experience them is by complaining about them. And that's what we're trying to get away from. I've been saying for years that if we're going to redeem the arts, it's going to be the arts are going to be redeemed by people who love them. We love them. And we want to talk more about them with you on Clavens on the Culture. Thank you for listening.