Project Hail Mary

06/27/23 • 37 min

A lone astronaut.
An impossible mission.
An ally he never imagined.

Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission - and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish.

Except that right now, he doesn't know that. He can't even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.

All he knows is that he's been asleep for a very, very long time. And he's just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.

His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it's up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery-and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.

And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he's got to do it all alone.

Or does he?
It was great fun this week to record with Mark Shapiro, host of the pheomenonally successful podcast Explore the Space https://www.explorethespaceshow.com/ which has a mission of "Examining the interface between healthcare & society, with thought leaders from across the spectrum."
This was one of the first Sci-Fi genre novels I've ever picked up and I admit I was well out of my comfort zone with a lot of the theoretical physics (which Mark tells me I don't need to understand, just believe). Project Hail Mary is at its heart a book about connection and about the value of saving our planet, and humanity. I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation about the amazing community of practice that is #MedTwitter, the joy of reading, accidental CPD, equity, climate change and so much more.
Follow Mark on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ETSshow

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A lone astronaut.
An impossible mission.
An ally he never imagined.

Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission - and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish.

Except that right now, he doesn't know that. He can't even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.

All he knows is that he's been asleep for a very, very long time. And he's just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.

And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he's got to do it all alone.

Previous Episode

Time to Think

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Nancy Kline's Time to Think is probably the non fiction book which has most changed my clinical and teaching/mentoring practice ever. It was a huge treat to discuss it with Martin Billington and to discover it had had a similar effect on him.
Focussing on the principles that "The quality of everything we do depends on the quality of the thinking we do first. The quality of our thinking depends on the way we treat each other while we are thinking" has change both of us for the better (though we did acknowledge that if we both listened intently and didn't say anything the podcast wouldn't be the most interesting thing to listen to!)

Next Episode

Cat Brushing

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It's a big "welcome back!!" this week to Charley Baker, Associate Professor of Mental Health at The University of Nottingham and self confessed "book pusher".

We're talking about a fabulous collection of short stories titled Cat Brushing written by retired Psychotherapist Jane Campbell.

We talk about the invisibility of older women, taboo subjects, the darkness of imagination and why short stories are the perfect way to get back into reading if for some reason your concentration isn't what it might be