Project Hail Mary

From the bestselling author of The Martian

by Andy Weir

paperback

English language

ISBN:: 9781529100624

(6 reviews)

A lone astronaut must save the earth from disaster in this incredible new science-based thriller from the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Martian.

A lone astronaut. An impossible mission. An ally he never imagined.

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, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it's up to him to puzzle out an …

A lone astronaut must save the earth from disaster in this incredible new science-based thriller from the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Martian.

A lone astronaut. An impossible mission. An ally he never imagined.

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, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it's up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery-and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.

And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he's got to do it all alone.

Or does he?

An irresistible interstellar adventure as only Andy Weir could imagine it, 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

1 edition

Athansor@bookwyrm.social reviewed Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

fun but tropey

3 stars

Content warning stuff happens

I liked the author's dedication to making the science as real as possible, and the central theme is creative. However, as is common in books such as this, characterization & character growth come in second place.

The protagonist is a failed academic-turned-middle-school-teacher who is thrown into the center of the most amazing discovery in mankind's history. In true form, this unassuming teacher becomes central to the development of mankind's response to the bacteria eating the sun (and boy are they hungry}, eventually becoming second in command for the entire project...

which of course becomes a source of instant international collaboration and cooperation, with every nation big and small pitching in to do their part (because of course, what other response could there be?)

We are treated to a big spoiler along the way regarding the protagonist's development, but as he has already progressed to overcome that psychological hurdle, there is no tension, no real character growth. He's already been there, done that.

I'm not even going to go into the interspecies communication aspect, where two individuals as completely different as could be meet, learn to talk to each other in a couple of days, and by day 3 are trading jokes and yukking it up -- because of course, modern American humor is interstellar, right?

I would have loved this book as a teen. Now, not so much. It was fast-paced, and the material problems facing the protagonist were interesting puzzles. But otherwise, there are just too many tropes to make this a significantly interesting book.

Elska Bee reviewed Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Review of 'Project Hail Mary' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

[3.5]

If I hadn't been spoiled (by my own choice) about this book it would have been a DNF. I think my biggest problems lie with believability. I constantly lost immersion and if the following things bother you maybe strongly consider whether or not you want to bother with this:
- Memory loss doesn't work like that. For a book so preoccupied with trying to make things make sense this seemed like a huge oversight. You can't have magically convenient flashbacks that are always linear in a book preoccupied with realism.
- Things were over-explained. I think it may be a me problem that I didn't need to have the science behind things explained constantly, it felt like it dragged everything to a halt when I was here more for the plot. The problem solving aspect of the science would be fine in smaller doses but it makes up 80% of a reasonably long book. I also was constantly thinking about if any of it was actually realistic or not.
- the 'things going wrong' aspect of the plot just got so repetitive. It's my biggest problem with sci-fi in general. It didn't help that a lot of the problems were very minor and either didn't need to be solved or simply had no impact on the wider plot and started to feel like filler episodes in a tv show.
- apparently the main character knows how to do bloody everything. He started to feel like a Gary Sue. He's just so special uwu! He's always there for everything important in flashbacks to earth and he knows so much science completely unrelated to his specialty of microbiology and I don't buy the high school science teacher thing, sorry

Other more minor complaints is that this book wasn't nearly as humorous as the blurbs made it out to be, that or I just didn't get the humour. The writing style also wasn't for me. It uses a lot of very simple sentence structures throughout and the explanations of how things look also felt overly simplistic. For me personally I kind of wanted more out of the writing 'cause sometimes it felt like the book was treating me like an idiot and this is adult sci-fi. Without spoilers: the linguistic aspect of this book had me rolling my eyes but I luckily could mostly accept it.

I DID LIKE SOME THINGS THOUGH. However they all fall into spoiler territory. As minimally as I can say it, I liked the dialogue and interactions in the book. I also found the ending very satisfying!

I think for such a popular and well-loved book I'm shocked by how much I didn't enjoy this at times. I also thought it was way too long. However, there were still aspects that I liked enough that it bumped up my rating a bit.

Rudi reviewed Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Meir av "The Martian"

No rating

Eng: Pretty much a sequel to The Martian - and that's not a bad thing.

Nor: Eg likte veldig godt "The Martian" då eg las ho, det er noko med problemløysing og det å tilpasse seg det ein har, som er tilfredsstillande å lese. Det er truleg det same som eg likte med MacGyver. Denne boka handlar om ein annan kar i ein annan situasjon, men opplegget er det same: ein mann med litt nerdete humor og mykje vitskapleg kompetanse må kjempe om å overleves i verdsrommet. Men her går ein steget vidare inn i science fiction, noko som fungerer bra. Samtidig så følest det av og til litt intimt å lese bøker som dette, då hovudpersonen utan tvil er ei forlenging av Weir sjølv. Ein slags dagdraum.

mortaine@bookwyrm.social reviewed Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Andy Weir delivers again

No rating

I wasn't a huge fan of Artemis, but loved The Martian. Project Hail Mary is closer to The Martian in tone and theme. I very much enjoyed it.

I listened to the audiobook, which is narrated by Ray Porter, who also narrates the Bobiverse series. The two are similar enough (big space travel stories) that there was a certain comfort in hearing Porter's voice, but I also periodically felt some dissonance between the two stories. For example, I kept expecting the narrator to offer a solution to one of the science problems based on the tech available in the Bobiverse-- which is silly because they're not even written by the same author! Still, it was a good performance by a good narrator, and I enjoyed this book immensely.

David Clubb reviewed Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Entertaining and gripping

4 stars

My usual science fiction reads don't cleave quite as strongly to 'reality' as this one - which is part of the reason I found it so interesting.

The writer has created a set of scientifically plausible scenarios and then builds the narrative around whether or not they can be resolved - while throwing in a bunch of twists along the way.

I have a very scientific/technical background, but I think that there would be wider appeal; although the general scientific concepts in here are frequent (including physics, biology, astronomy etc) they don't extend to making it feel like a text book.

I enjoyed the characters and the plot. Thumbs up for a recommendation.

Kian Ryan reviewed Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Problem - Solution

3 stars

Andy Weir writes pretty good one note hero stories that are heavy on the science and engineering and feel screen ready. This was enjoyable, but not particularly deep. Like The Martian, the protagonist suffers from a series of obstacles and overcomes them one at at time, with the application of dark humour and science and significantly less potatoes.