The recent blockbuster Project Hail Mary offers an unusual take on the end-of-the-world genre (spoilers forthcoming if you haven’t seen it). In a variation on author Andy Weir’s “lone, astonishingly good-looking bloke stuck off-world” template, a sort of stellar virus is consuming the sun, lowering temperatures and threatening to send civilisation back, literally, to the dark ages. Scientists discover that other nearby stars are also infected, but one, Tau Ceti, isn’t, so a disgruntled ex-scientist is unwillingly dispatched 11 light-years away to find out why — only to discover that another species has done the same thing.
