Project Hail Mary

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.

weir sets up an incredibly interesting story here, our protagonist is awakened in an unknown room staffed only by robots, he remembers nothing; amnesia is typically a pretty weak excuse to throw exposition at the reader, and that doesn't change here - although it makes the mystery of who he is more engaging so i'll give it a pass.

the mystery of who he is isn't actually overly complex for even a mildly engaged reader, so the first part of the book is spent willing him on to get to the interesting part.

then we actually get to the story, the sun is going out due to some unknown bacteria-like substance and our MC is trying to find a way to fix it. he's alone in space and has to figure out ways to not only survive but save earth.

interesting setup, but then we get the curveball. he isn't the only one trying to do this. an entirely unknown entity shows up and we get the single most interesting part of the book - setting up communications with an entity that shares zero fundamentals with humanity. this part is a wonderful exploration of going from proof of intelligence and basic atmosphere composition via atomic numbers to building a shared pidgin from basic words.

from hereon out the book turns into a sort of buddy comedy with our silly human MC playing the funny man, as they try to ascertain anything that may help them. this goes on for a while and isn't too bad, with a few dives into the untranslatability of some phrases without deep context from their source

but then we hit our stumbling point - contrived tragedies. they will come thick and fast for the last half of the book. it starts with a pretty understandable one, dropping a bucket down into a planet's atmosphere causes damage to the ship which in turn causes a thruster to fail and it's SPINNE time. you'd think the remaining thrusters would have been made to compensate for this but apparently not. the alien friend seemingly sacrifices himself for our MC, and endures the deadly atomosphere to help him. oh no. whilst i did like the alien guy, i felt almost nothing at this. he hadn't been around long enough for the fake-out death to hit. he's alive again in less than a chapter so don't worry about it.

so they have their solution, but it can't survive in any other atmosphere, so they have to breed it. this part is pretty cool, it's just a long sequence of force-breeding an amoeba to survive in nitrogen. they manage it. hooray. time to go home.

now we get to the part that retroactively taints so much of the previous text - the amoeba breaks containment and gets to the fuel (made of bacteria don't think about it) - another random crisis time. fuel dead, whoops. you can tell i mentally skipped over this part because i literally do not remember how they solved it. i was just thinking "yea yea get it over with already". this wouldn't be so bad but it HAPPENS AGAIN LATER.

they jet off back to their respective homeworlds hooray. but no NOT HOORAY. alien friend's engines go off. apparently his fuel got eaten as well, and our MC nearly has his eaten again, so we need to have an exhausting sequence here where he disinfects the ship. never mind the fact that there should be solid barriers between the fuel and the cabin now.

so he has two choices - a. go back to earth, save all of humanity, be a hero, tell them where the alien world is to send a probe to them with the cure, or b. literally do none of that and go back to alien friend with no plan and the potential to have his fuel eaten again. he picks b because the power of friendship compells him. so he goes back, manages to locate a single ship in the void using some makeshift radar and brings him back aboard, sends probes back to earth and jets off to the alien world with zero plan.

epilogue is him being a science teacher to aliens and living in a literal dome on the surface

this could have been great, but every single time they were doing something i was waiting for the "OH NO" moment. it was so predictable. it became almost YA-levels of contrivance with every plan seemingly needing a point where it goes wrong, always at the exact point you'd expect (just before succeeding). this formula made the last half of the book quite tiring at points.

overall, it's an ok book. if you treat it as a light read you won't have too bad a time with it, but it can get a bit much at times

3/5, readable