Review: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

 

Point #1: Does the world need another book review of Project Hail Mary? No, but you're getting one anyway (adapted slightly from the Goodreads review I posted back in April) 

Point #2: I loved the movie. Go see it. 

 

Someone on social media complained that this book is “80% math equations.” That’s an exaggeration, of course, but the protagonist does spend a lot of time math-ing. I’ve seen people complain that the book is all “science” at the expense of character and literary quality. Yes, there’s loads of science here, and yes, Andy Weir is never going to win acclaim for lyrical prose. In fact, this book is mostly structured as a series of escalating science puzzles to be solved in ingenious ways. Some people will be annoyed by that. Another type of person will eat it up. Turns out I’m the type of person who eats this up.

By now, you've probably heard the plot basics of this best seller and basis for the blockbuster movie of the same name. Something is dimming the sun and threatens all life on Earth. Middle-school science teacher Ryland Grace, once a promising research scientist in the field of xenobiology, finds himself caught up in the quest to solve this scientific mystery. And then, even more improbably, he finds himself on a space ship to another star system, where he will encounter not only the microbial life feeding off our sun's energy, but intelligent life as well. 

Weir is unabashedly in love with science, with space, with gee-wiz technology and problem-solving. Some of the science in the book is hand-wavy magic (the alien compound “xenonite,” for one) but other details track closely to real-life, and what’s sci-fi without a little hand-waving? I was delighted by the protagonist’s problem-solving abilities. I was delighted by the meeting of human and alien, and how these two buddies-in-space geek out over science together. Weir introduces audacious ideas and staggering, audacious solutions that remind me a bit of Cixin Liu’s The Three Body-Problem and its sequels--another author who, incidentally, is not particularly gifted with human emotion but compensates with awe and cool ideas. (Interestingly, Project Hail Mary and the Three-Body novels are also both stories about humanity uniting to confront an existential threat, and about the hard decisions made for survival).

Weir has a lightness and sense of humor that Cixin Liu’s novels lack, however. Is the humor often cheesy? Yes. Did I still laugh or at least smile multiple times? Also yes. Are the characters a little one-note but still hugely enjoyable? Again, yes. I adore the ruthless administrator Eva Stratt, who is apparently given all the power in the world to do whatever she sees fit to see Project Hail Mary succeed. I fell in love with Rocky, the five-handed rock-like alien engineer. (When our hero Ryland Grace tells Rocky, in a bit of banter, that Rocky looks like a “scary, deadly creature called a spider,” Rocky’s response is “Good. Proud. I am scary space monster.”)

I said earlier that Weir is not particularly gifted with human emotion. His forte—and, I believe, primary interest—is in cool science ideas and puzzle-problems. And yet in the end, human emotion caught me by surprise after all. In an engaging story of ideas and plot twists, the friendship between Ryland Grace and Rocky is slowly revealed to be the heart of this book. Maybe I even teared up a little at parts of this book. Maybe there’s a story, buried under all the gee-whiz engineering and science and breezy dialogue, about isolation and cowardice and courage and redemption. Maybe a different writer would have focused more on that, and on “literary” themes and style. But what we have here is what Andy Weir gave us: a greatly enjoyable, fun and often funny space-science adventure (with segues into evolution, panspermia, and selective breeding), that’s optimistic and warm at heart. And even, in its final chapters, moving.