#42 IIℓ
Project Hail Mary is slightly unusual in being written in the first person. More unusual is that the sections in Space are largely told in the present tense as they are unfolding.
Because direct speech can confound this, the following table separates direct speech and narration.
| Tense | Earth | Space | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Speech | Narration | Speech | Narration | |
| PAST | 9.12% | 65.47% | 6.55% | 6.65% |
| PRESENT | 34.54% | 5.06% | 38.15% | 51.27% |
Of particular note here is that, outside of direct speech: the Earth section verbs are only 5.06% PRESENT vs 65.47% PAST whereas the Space section verbs are 51.27% PRESENT vs only 6.65% PAST.
The interactive chart below breaks this down visually by section.
In the beanbag to follow we will will look at the outliers and why, in many sections, both tenses are used in narration.
You can toggle different categories on and off in the plot and hover over a point to see its section.
The points have been jittered so sections with the same values aren't directly on top of one another.
The counts rely on the part-of-speech tagging performed by the NLP library, spaCy and some manual correction is still needed.
PAST here means the VBD tag and PRESENT means the VBP and VBZ tags.
The columns don’t add to 100% (and the scatter plot points aren’t on the diagonal) because there are also
non-finite verbs tagged VB, VBG and VBN.