News What to Watch What to Watch and Read This Weekend: The Real Project Hail Mary Was That Time We Threw Gophers Into a Volcano Plus: Space operas and why we’re not joking about that gopher thing By Molly Templeton | Published on March 20, 2026 Screenshot: Amazon MGM Studios Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Amazon MGM Studios This accidentally became a space-themed roundup, and the whole time I wrote it, I was thinking, “Yay, going to space! But not like that.” Not in the “abandoning our planet and everything on it in order to live in bubbles for the wealthy on otherwise uninhabitable planets” way that certain wealthy parties seem to find so interesting. Gah. More in the “telling stories about how we’re going to have to do some pretty drastic shit to save this planet, maybe?” way. Or the metaphorical and dizzying way. Or the really cool starfighter action sequences way. Here’s a bonus piece for the weekend: “Elon Musk Just Doesn’t Understand the Sci-Fi Visions of Iain M. Banks,” by Reactor contributor (and one of my oldest friends) Tobias Carroll. If you are somewhere with blooming cherry blossom trees, I hope you get to go admire them this weekend. Spring is sproinging, and literally every star magnolia I walk past gives me a little bit of hope. Get some fresh air, call your reps, and then maybe go to space? The good way, though. Project Hail Mary: Is Everybody Going to Space this Weekend? I am slightly reluctant to say anything about Project Hail Mary, because I wish I had known less about Project Hail Mary before I saw Project Hail Mary. This is my own fault; I didn’t think I was going to see it, so I made someone tell me a lot of what happens. But! Here’s the thing: even if you know what happens (to some degree or another), there is still a delightful alien by whom you may be extremely charmed. This is not a spoiler. This is the point. Even if you think “Ryland Grace” is a ridiculous name; even if you did not love The Martian (sorry, I did not love The Martian); even if you have stayed away from a lot of the movies in which The Men Seem Sad in Space, you may find something to adore in PHM. I have some nits to pick—composers, please let me have a feeling you’re not screaming at me about—but I still found it a very enjoyable two and a half hours in space. (Side note for sensitive sci-fi fans: There was a point in this movie where I was like, no thank you, this is too upsetting. Just, you know, FYI.) Gopher (Not Groundhog) Day at the Volcano There’s science fiction, and then there’s science, and when I say science, in this particular moment, I mean gophers. The most delightful thing I read this week was going to be this Smithsonian piece about the long history of typos (which is still worth a read). But then I discovered the gophers. The gophers, to be a bit more specific, that were let loose on Mount St. Helens three years after its 1980 eruption. As Popular Mechanics writer WHOMST writers, “Faced with a devastation that would take the local environment a substantial amount of time to recover from, scientists were open to unorthodox ideas that might speed the process along. So they did what any reasonable person would decide to do and tossed a couple of gophers at the issue. Seriously.” Said scientists were hoping said gophers would kick up good bacteria and fungi while they were digging. And they did! The very good gophers did their job for a single day, and 43 years later, the benefits are still apparent. The next time you see a gopher hole, I hope you think of these little guys. Actually, There’s Really Something About This Weekend and Space I’d like to wish a very happy 17th birthday to the series finale of Battlestar Galactica, which aired on March 20th, 2009, and which—okay, yeah, the series finale was … polarizing. I cried, I groaned, I stayed up too late watching it a second time to see if I liked it better when I knew what was happening. (Jury’s still out.) For years I have been trying to find a video I saw once in which someone had edited Starbuck’s disappearing act so that it just keeps happening, and Lee just keeps looking confused. I cannot explain how funny this video was. But I needed something pure after that finale.  Polarizing finale aside, I would sure like it if we had a new space opera on the small screen. We had The Expanse, which was excellent. We had Killjoys. We have Foundation, but I only made it through a season. And yes, I watch all the new Star Treks, but I want something new. I want a minimum of 10-episode seasons and I want compelling character development and sweet space action. I want an adaptation of something that hasn’t been adapted before. Is that so much to ask? (Maybe don’t answer that.) BSG doesn’t seem to be streaming anywhere, though I know some of you have neglected DVD box sets (if not, you can buy episodes on various streamers). As an alternative, if you would like another somewhat random anniversary to celebrate, Sliders premiered on March 22, 1995. Was anything ever more ’90s? (It’s presently on Prime.) Audition: Because, You Know What, We’re Sticking With the Space Theme (Except for the Gophers) There were two books published last year called Audition; one was a novel by Katie Kitamura that was shortlisted for the Booker, and the other was a small press novel by New Zealand author Pip Adam about giants in a spaceship that’s powered by their talking. I mean… it’s not about that, but that’s part of what happens. Three people are on a spaceship, and they’re unusually large, and if they stop talking, they get bigger. They try not talking, but then they start talking again. Some of what they talk about will sound familiar to the viewers of assorted romcom films. But this book is doing several things at once, and one of those things is talking overtly and un-shyly about prison and injustice. I do not really know how to explain to you exactly how this works, because I’m still trying to figure it out. But Audition seems likely to fly under the radar of many an SFF fan, which is why I’m telling you about it here. I’ll leave you with a quote from Adam, who said to Electric Literature, “I’d always thought that writing utopias was a soft thing to do, but in writing it, I realized it’s actually quite an activist thing to do.”[end-mark] The post What to Watch and Read This Weekend: The Real <i>Project Hail Mary</i> Was That Time We Threw Gophers Into a Volcano appeared first on Reactor.