Project Hail Mary
Author: Andy Weir
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Publication Date: May 2021
“What is your name?”
He’s Ryland Grace. But we don’t know that yet. And neither does he. He’s millions of miles from home on a “hail mary” mission to save Earth from certain and imminent death. But he doesn’t remember that. All he knows is that he just woke up in a room with dead people and his memory is returning far too slowly. With time running out for our species and himself, Ryland must figure out his mission and accomplish his impossible task - finding the solution to an extinction-level threat. Alone. This is a scenario made for - and of course crafted by - the author, Andy Weir.
Ryland is an entertainer as much as a wellspring of scientific ingenuity. His sharp, often self-deprecating humor keeps him sane and takes some of the edge off of what would otherwise be an overwhelming and seemingly endless series of crises. Ryland’s sense of curiosity is as relentless as his sense of comedy. It’s Ryland’s curiosity - even in the few times that there is not a sense of desperate urgency - that makes all the science and smarts entertaining. Think fun physics experiment instead of math homework. Weir’s small set of Earth-bound characters - who live only in Ryland’s fitfully returning memory - all share a few core personality elements, similar both to each other and to Ryland. They are quick to voice opinions, decisive in their actions, and prone to sarcasm. In other words, they don’t slow plot momentum and they don’t complicate readers’ interaction with Ryland.
Weir’s literature is not finely nuanced, full of rich tangential descriptions, or weighted with deep insights. His specialty is a crisis-driven, warp-speed plot stuffed with problem-solving science and saturated with his protagonist’s relentless, laugh-out-loud sense of irony and gallows humor. But that’s more than good enough. It’s what Weir did so well in The Martian, perhaps missed a little in Artemis, and delivers again in Project Hail Mary. But this is not just a desperate-clever-guy-alone-in-space story. Without giving anything away, it is worth noting that the sociological, psychological, and xenobiological elements Weir added to Project Hail Mary make it much more than a rehash of The Martian. In the end, it’s a genuine page-turner that will leave readers a little breathless and disappointed only that the story’s over.
