Andy Weir, with just two published novels under his belt, has become a brand name. When your debut novel, The Martian, spends many, many weeks on the bestseller before it is even adapted into an multi-award nominated film directed by Ridley Scott and starring Matt Damon, brand name status is a side effect. Project Hail Mary is Weir’s third novel and is focused on Ryland Grace, a lone astronaut stranded in space trying to survive. That might sound familiar to fans of The Martian, but Weir decides to shoulder the burden of saving humanity on his protagonist’s plight.
Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission–and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish.Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.
His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, he realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Alone on this tiny ship that’s been cobbled together by every government and space agency on the planet and hurled into the depths of space, it’s up to him to conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.
And thanks to an unexpected ally, he just might have a chance.
Part scientific mystery, part dazzling interstellar journey, Project Hail Mary is a tale of discovery, speculation, and survival to rival The Martian–while taking us to places it never dreamed of going.
Ryland Grace wakes with no memory of who he is or where he is. He soon realizes he’s on a space vessel and that he’s the lone survivor of a mission sent to the Tau Ceti with the goal of saving Earth and humanity. He soon pieces together the reason why he is on this mission, with Weir taking an approach that I often find engaging. He tells two stories, the “current” story of Grace living on the Hail Mary going about saving humanity. The other story begins with Grace as a science teacher who fashions himself as “the cool teacher.” Grace published a paper on molecular biology in his college days that brings him attention in the form of Eva Stratt who has been put in charge of a UN Task Force responsible for saving humanity and Earth. The way in which Weir intersperses the past with the current is a neat trick and allows Grace to learn about his situation just as the reader learns about it.
The high concept problem here: sunlight that reaches the Earth is dimming and it is predicted that life on Earth will cease in about 30 years. What Grace helps to uncover is that life discovered on a probe to Venus is devouring sunlight before it reaches earth. This alien lifeform can survive in space, reproduces exponentially, and is dubbed Astrophage. Grace and the task force Stratt assembled discovers that the Astrophage have dimmed the light of other stars, except Tau Ceti. Thus, Project Hail Mary is born, which sends three Astronauts to Tau Ceti in the hope of finding how that solar system was not dimmed by the onset of the Astrophage.
Weir has very potent narrative skills, he crafts an extremely compelling story making it very easy to breeze through thick chunks the novel in one sitting. Grace comes across as a likeable, if flawed protagonist. There’s, of course, a great deal of science involved in the narrative and it comes across quite nicely. It sometimes seems as if Weir goes a little too much out of his way to show us just how clever Grace is with some unnecessarily contrived situations. Some of what Grace experiences in the far reaches of space outside of our own Solar System as well as the looming threat of humanity’s end; however, is constructed magnificently with all the sense of wonder the Science Fiction genre is known to possess.
Project Hail Mary is already a bestseller (this review published about a month after the book released) and it has all the feel of a slick bestseller in the Michael Crichton vein, or in the vein of Weir’s debut The Martian for that matter. That brings me to the inevitable: It is nearly impossible not to compare Project Hail Mary and The Martian because they are so similar – lone, stranded scientist in space with very few familial ties to Earth, trying to survive by only his wits and ingenuity in a bleak situation who tells the reader the story in their snarky first person voice. There’s some interesting and seemingly well-researched science in the novel as Grace gets ever closer to solving the problem of saving humanity. Heck, even the covers to the two books bear a striking resemblance, an astronaut adrift!
Those un-ignorable similarities aside, Weir increased the stakes significantly and cast a wider, more epic net for the story. Mark Watney was just one guy. Ryland Grace is just one guy, but if he doesn’t get the job done, everybody on Earth dies. I appreciated that more epic nature.
Although the break-neck plotting and pull of the narrative were extremely powerful, I never once felt Grace was in danger of failing or losing his life. Even though humanity’s existence was at stake, I didn’t truly feel as if Grace would fail. I still couldn’t put the book down and read the relatively thick tome in only a couple of days.
Project Hail Mary is an extremely compelling novel, enjoyable, and filled me with its fair share of wow moments.
Recommended.
© 2021 Rob H. Bedford
Ballantine Books | May 2021
Hardcover | 496 pages
Excerpt: https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/books/2021/05/03/project-hail-mary-excerpt-andy-weir-latest-sci-fi-novel/7404780002/
Author Web site: https://www.andyweirauthor.com/
Review copy courtesy of the publisher
