Project Hail Mary

After reading The Mote in God’s Eye, I realized that Garrit Franke, a fellow Fosstodon member, finished reading this book, so I decided to give it a try too.

I have to admit that at first I was a little bit hesitant about this book, because it is a written in first person, and it also starts out with ammnesia and also flashbacks. But after that I got used to the writing style pretty quickly and started to really get into the main story and the mystery behind everything happening around our protagonist.

The story follows a lone astronaut that finds himself facing impossible odds every step of the way. The way the plot is revealed and how it moves forward every chapter is great. The scientific elements are pretty accurate and that was something I found really interesting. It reminded me a lot of Jules Verne’s novels that usually felt like something that could be possible to do.

In this case of course the protagonist uses his scientific knowledge (as well as his memory slowly coming back) to figure out how handle his mission, which is pretty much to save the planet from certain demise.

I liked the setting and the characters that show up, there’s quite a bit of science tidbits I learned through this, and the moments of action and uncertainty are quite great. I could not stop reading many times because I just wanted to know what in the world would our protagonist do even just to stay alive to live another day.

I didn’t feel like the book was as long as it was, honestly. It was definitely worth it. I do think that it feels a little like a movie waiting to happen, the prose wasn’t as interesting and the plot ended up kind of predictable, and there’s a very wholesome twist at the end which is nice. Just a very fun read.

In Project Hail Mary, the sun is going out. Huge bummer. We also don't know why, and it's happening to many stars in the local area of the galaxy. But we figure out why! And we also find one system where the star ISN'T going out even though it should. So we gotta throw together a ship and crew as quickly as possible to investigate, find a solution, and get it back to Earth in time to save the sun. Enter Ryland Grace, one of the crew members of this ship. He doesn't know any of that though, because he woke up on the space ship billions of miles from home without his memory. As his memory returns, he has to work to figure out who he is, what he's doing, and how to save his home. After a shocking discovery in this alien solar system, he has new exciting opportunities to maybe make it back home too.

This was a lot of fun. Very much Andy Weir, down to the movie-like scenes and the quippy dialogue and the weird mix of isolation and hope you get from the story. I wasn't expecting this to be as hard sci-fi as it was, but I really enjoyed those parts of it. I'm not at all familiar with physics, chemistry, or biology, but I found its integration to be seamless and well-done. I found the story to be paced really well, jumping between the present, fixing things, solving problems, staying alive, running tests, and the past as memories return to our main character. We get to learn about the events leading up to this hail mary of a mission and Grace's involvement in it. I don't feel like this dragged at any point, and was a very quick read for being almost 500 pages.

There were aspects I think could have been improved upon. Personal taste, but I really don't enjoy heavy-handed quippy "marvel" dialogue, and that was pretty much every conversation in the entire book. I didn't find it funny or executed well. I'd rather have more authenticity, but I'd also rather have unique characters. Everyone important had the same personality, and everyone unimportant had some token personality quirk that never changed. I also found it hard to suspend my disbelief in some areas. Some things were just far too convenient or far too simple. I feel like, if you're going to commit to hard sci-fi book, then you need to limit the convenient coincidences that help your characters. But ultimately these things didn't detract much from my enjoyment. While it wasn't anything super groundbreaking, it was enjoyable.

If you loved The Martian, I think you'll like this a lot. Also I think if you like Blake Crouch, this would work for you, though it is a bit more lighthearted than something like Recursion or Dark Matter. Also if you like books that are paced like movies this will be perfect. If you like you science fiction to be deeply serious, like anything by Peter Watts or William Gibson, this isn't for you. It's also like.. the opposite of philosophical. Topical? So if you like commentary on the human condition, this doesn't have any of that. Just a lot of the human doing stuff. But I do guarantee you'll have a hard time putting it down!

This is my first review of a book and is a kind of reaction to the one star commentaries that I saw. For sure I have read The Martian a while back and I can see that this book is similar, but I think a lot of people enjoy it (like I did) because of those similarities. Sure, there are a lot of cliché characters but in the kind of hopefully vision of the future that is lacking right now. The stereotipe of scientists from Russia, China, America and other places that set aside differences to save the world is a much needed hope that if the world is at stake we will all come together. Sure, the book is not all fairies and rainbows, the hero is actually a coward sent against is will to save humanity and in the mean time there is almost a surety that there will be wars and the usual humans in the time of an apocalypse, but the overall tone is optimistic and upbeat and is what a lot of us need sometime. So is a fast and entertaining lecture, that you maybe forget after a while what is about, but you will remember that you felt good reading it.

I've got a problem with Andy Weir and his gripping, immaculately-scientific, personality-driven, first-person, man-against-an-impossible-problem, astronaut everyman books.

That problem is that I can't put them down. It happens every time I read The Martian, no matter how many times I read The Martian, and I know it's going to happen here too. Ryland Grace's devil-may-care retrograde-amnesia-fueled save-the-world-from-an-existential-threat story is just too enthralling.

Why is this a problem? Because I need to sleep, Weir! I don't have time for your perfectly-plotted twenty-course meal of fascinating ideas I've never seen in a sci-fi novel before! I don't have time for your surprisingly-good interpersonal chemistry! Humans are stupid when we need sleep!

So I start the book, even if I've read it before, and I know that no matter when I start it, I'm going to spend hours reading about a protagonist scienceing some intractable problem, understanding everything because he's a genius, being appropriately self-effacing when he makes a mistake, naming things laconically or with copious pop culture references, and eventually becoming a master of some incredibly specific task nobody has ever done before with no other human around to know what a savant he is. I'm going to spend that time, enjoy every minute of it, and then be exhausted the next morning!

I'm begging you, Weir. Just write a slightly more boring book. I promise I'll still read it, just maybe not all in one sitting.