I have a half baked thesis that most sci-fi stories that take place in space fall into one of two camps:
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Stories that involve space travel or exploration but treat it as no different from traveling or exploring on Earth. There’s no claustrophobia of a spaceship, wrapped in the agoraphobia of infinite emptiness. You simply scoot from one locale to another. Think Foundation, Hitchhiker’s Guide, or Star Trek.
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Stories that show you how small we are and how vast “out there” is. These usually impart some kind of existential dread, or at least minor discomfort. Think the human POV from Children of Time.
Project Hail Mary does something special in how it roots itself in that vastness, lets the reader feel its dread, but then tells us that everything is going to be alright. It doesn’t tell you that the fundamental size of the universe is false, nor the fundamental size of ourselves in comparison. But it succeeds in flipping our emotional response to that reality. It doesn’t have to be scary. It can be a warm blanket.
The only other piece of media that changed my perspective like that was Outer Wilds. Admittedly, it’s a bleaker message but still not a pessimistic one. I’m hungry for more books that will make me feel this way; both series and standalones are good.
by benuchadnezzar
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You might want to check out Stephen Baxter’s _Manifold_ “series.” His approach to optimism is not something I’ve really encountered before. It’s a series in that a handful of characters are the same across the books and they explore related themes, but each book is standalone and basically existing in a separate universe, so they can be read in any order.