Review: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

I was very pleased to learn that Andy Weir had written a new novel that sounded very similar to The Martian. A lone astronaut is out in space trying to save not just himself, but the entire human race. It sounded like a formula with a lot of promise, but it didn’t quite live up to my expectations.

 

First, the good. There are a lot of really interesting challenges that have to be solved much as was the case in The Martian. There’s also a totally unexpected first contact situation and I liked the alien character tremendously. I also think that, even though it annoyed me at times, the back and forth between the “current” problem in space and the chapter-by-chapter revelation of how our hero (Grace) got there worked pretty well, although I really wasn’t happy with this chronological restoration of his memories.

 

Now for the bad. There were lots of parts of this novel that I just had a great deal of difficulty buying into and they start right at the beginning. I have trouble believing that there is any situation in which a scientist who has left his field to teach middle school becomes the principal investigator in an effort to stop an extinction level event. I realize that Weir made Grace a teacher to set up the very last scene in the book, but to my mind it undercut the whole story. Similarly, I just don’t believe that any potential cataclysm would be so great that the United States would turn the keys to their nuclear arsenal over to an unelected civilian without any safeguards. It just isn’t going to happen. I also have some difficulty with the idea that there would only be one Hail Mary and that Grace could ever have been chosen to be on that ship especially when he was totally opposed to going on a suicide mission to save the planet.

 

Add to all of that that the novel was very slow moving for the first two-thirds or so and you can see that it just didn’t quite work for me. It’s better than Artemis but just nowhere near The Martian.