Fair warning, Dear Reader. Today's musing meanders. We'll take the winding path. And when we come upon a fork in the trail, we'll choose the one that looks least hospitable every time. You may feel lost. You may wonder if I have a point. I do. I promise.
D. K. Wall:But to get there, I need to go back, way back, and throw the long bomb. A Hail Mary, if you will.
D. K. Wall:Like many of you, I've been a reader my entire life. My earliest memories live on the shelves of the books that shaped them. The magical lyrics of Doctor Seuss, a visit to Where the Wild Things Are, a long hilarious residency on Klcikitat Street with the one and only Ramona the Pest.
D. K. Wall:I was blessed with parents who encouraged reading, which meant I had my own library card and was free to choose my own books, not just from the children's and young adult sections, but from the towering mysterious aisles of adult fiction. No guardrails, just possibilities.
D. K. Wall:For years, I've told you the story of how at the ripe old age of 11, I made a sharp turn. The new release shelf at my local library was trumpeting the second novel of an author I had never heard of. Stephen King. All I knew was that the book featured vampires, catnip for an 11 year old boy. So, I checked out Salem's Lot and read it straight through the night.
D. K. Wall:Not the brightest decision for a couple of reasons. First, I had school the next day and had barely slept. Second, an 11 year old imagination at three in the morning hears every creak of the house and interprets each as mortal danger.
D. K. Wall:But here's what I've left out of that story, the years between Ramona and King. And in those years, Dear Reader, I devoured science fiction and fantasy. Perhaps because at the age of five, I witnessed the impossible.
D. K. Wall:We didn't have the internet, cell phones, streaming services, or even cable TV. We had five whole channels on the family television, and changing them required someone, namely one of us kids, to get up, walk across the room, and turn the dial.
D. K. Wall:Each channel change also meant adjusting the rabbit ears, which was its own art form, nudging the antenna a fraction of an inch while someone across the room shouted, there. No. Go back.
D. K. Wall:But through that grainy picture, we watched a man walk on the moon.
D. K. Wall:It's nearly impossible to explain to someone who didn't live through those days how it felt. It was all we talked about, all we dreamed about. We ran outside afterward, lay in the grass, and stared up at that bright disc, pretending we could see them up there. We waved, hoping they would wave back. One small step, maybe, but for us kids, it blew the doors off the universe.
D. K. Wall:That moment ignited years of imagining other worlds, real and fictional. I went down the hobbit hole with J. R. R. Tolkien. Ray Bradbury's short stories mesmerized me and led me to two of my favorite characters in all of fiction, Will Holloway and Jim Nightshade, running for their lives through the autumn dark of Something Wicked This Way Comes. I grokked Robert Heinlein. I puzzled over Asimov's robots.
D. K. Wall:But the author that matters for today's musing, Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke is probably most remembered for 2001: a Space Odyssey, largely because of Stanley Kubrick's mesmerizing film. Though its ending, as beautiful as it was on screen, left audiences bewildered if they hadn't read the book.
D. K. Wall:My favorite Clark novel, though, was Rendezvous with Rama. The premise is deceptively simple. A massive cylindrical alien object enters our solar system, and humanity sends a crew to investigate. What they find inside is an entire world turned inside out, its surface lining the interior of the ship.
D. K. Wall:As a vessel hurtles toward the sun, its environment wakes. Heat triggers a colossal accelerated genesis. Frozen rivers melt. Storms rage. Flora springs to life, and bizarre biological creatures emerge.
D. K. Wall:The crew scrambles to study this baffling silent intelligence all while trying to answer the one question that matters. What does it want?
D. K. Wall:The answer revealed only at the very end, landed like a thunderclap in my young mind. A haunting testament to how small we are in this universe. That idea buried itself deep in my brain. I pull it out and examine it every few years, turning it over like a strange artifact, and it still hums with power.
D. K. Wall:No. I won't spoil a fifty year old novel for you by revealing its conclusion. I encourage you to find a copy and feel it for yourself.
D. K. Wall:So why, you may reasonably ask, am I telling you about a classic sci fi novel from 1973? Because the ghost of Rama followed me through every single page of Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary.
D. K. Wall:I'll admit, I rarely read hard science fiction these days, but Weir has earned a permanent place on my shelf. His discovery story alone is remarkable. He published his first novel, The Martian, as a serial on his personal website before it became a bestseller and a hit movie starring Matt Damon.
D. K. Wall:Project Hail Mary is only his third novel, and it may be his best. The setup of the tale is monumental. Scientists discover that our sun is dimming. An extinction level ice age is coming, and it's coming fast.
D. K. Wall:But they notice one star that isn't suffering the same fate. A desperate mission, Project Hail Mary, is launched to find out why and hopefully send the answer home before it's too late.
D. K. Wall:Now nearly everything I just told you is technically a spoiler, though it will not take away from your enjoyment of the story. The novel begins with our hero waking up on a spaceship alone, with near total amnesia. He doesn't know his own name, let alone that he is humanity's last hope.
D. K. Wall:The why unfolds through flashbacks as his memory returns, piece by piece and the effect is like assembling a puzzle where each new piece makes the picture more terrifying and more wondrous.
D. K. Wall:As I turned those pages, my mind kept reaching back to Rama. In Hail Mary, we visit another star. In Rama, other beings visit ours.
D. K. Wall:In both, secrets are unveiled layer by layer. Each revelation shifting the ground beneath you. In both, the sheer scale of the universe isn't just a backdrop. It's a character, one that quietly reminds us of our place in it.
D. K. Wall:And the ending of project Hail Mary? Well, just like with Rendezvous with Rama, I didn't see it coming. Not even close. I sat with the book closed in my lap for a long time afterward, feeling that old familiar hum. I suspect Project Hail Mary has found a permanent home in my mind right next to that alien ship.
D. K. Wall:You may have heard that the movie adaptation starring Ryan Gosling has arrived to glowing reviews. I think Gosling is an excellent choice for the role of Rylan Grace, and odds are good that I'll see it eventually.
D. K. Wall:But I'm glad I read the book first. There's something about discovering a story on the page, alone, at your own pace, building the universe inside your own head that a screen, no matter how spectacular, can't quite replicate.
D. K. Wall:That said, I'm grateful the movie exists because it will carry Andy Weir's story to millions who might never pick up the book. And some of them, maybe just a few, will be intrigued enough to read it. Then maybe they will feel that hum.
D. K. Wall:Which brings me at last to the question at the heart of this whole meandering walk through the woods.
D. K. Wall:What books have left that hum in you? What stories buried themselves so deep that you still pull them out years later and marvel? I'd love to know. Tell me.