In His Debut Novel, Hank Green Ponders Online Fame—and Alien Robots

After becoming an internet star with his brother and ‘Fault in Our Stars’ author John Green, Hank Green tries his hand at sci-fi with ‘An Absolutely Remarkable Thing’

At one point during his rise to internet fame, Hank Green tallied up every minute that every viewer had spent watching all the videos he’d ever made with his brother, and came up with a sum roughly equal to the average human lifespan. Now, he said, that collective viewing total amounts to at least 50 lifetimes.

“It makes you think, ‘Am I doing a human lifetime’s worth of good here?’” he said.

Existential...