Oct 2025 BOTM: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

[Steve]

October 2025 Book of the Month (BOTM): We had a tie on the favorite authors theme, so went with both of them, as I usually do.

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (2021)


One of my favorite authors, best book of the 2020s, and in my opinion, the best techno-thriller book of all-time. A movie adaptation is coming out in March of 2026. The trailer misses the tone among other things, but I imagine it will still be good, and suddenly, the masses will get that this is a great book. Going to reread to confirm whether it really is the best.

Publisher's Summary
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 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?

[Steve]

Is Project Hail Mary the best techno-thriller of all time?

If not, then what book is the best?

Post your thoughts here, … and I encourage you to also weigh in on our various techno-thriller book ranking lists here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

[Steve]

I say it’s the best.


I might further qualify that by saying it’s the best singular book. There aren’t many explicit series in the techno-thriller genre, but I’d say the Aggressor series, as a whole, is the arguably the best series reading. You can buy it as a series, getting all fives books at once. They were clearly marketed as a series, with a unifying common look to the covers, and released in quick succession. They’ll be the same size and look nice arrayed on the bookshelf … though I’m a audiobook guy. Today, there is still no paperback “box set” per se.


Tom Clancy’s various Jack Ryan and John Clark books are more of an implicit series. They weren’t released in chronological order and all have different cover art styles and sizes. If they were published today, the publisher (he had more than one) would have exerted more influence (for better or worse) and released them as a box set. Perhaps they will create such a set some day. If I had to compare the first several Clancy books to the Aggressor series … that’s a tough call. I might go with the first several books by Clancy, but unfortunately, Jack Ryan isn’t in all the John Clark books, and Red Storm Rising (my favorite Clancy book) is a totally different and incompatible hypothetical timeline. So, it doesn’t form one united pristine chronological series. If you just take Jack Ryan, and don’t include Without Remorse, or Red Storm Rising, or Rainbow Six, … then that series isn’t as strong. Maybe I go with Aggressor.


So then, if you start cherry picking or taking random bundles of books by an author, the question becomes who is the best techno-thriller author? Now, Crichton comes back into play, since most of his books were unrelated standalone books. How do compare an author with a couple great books to an author with many books but not so many great books. Well, … we’ve got a list for favorite authors too.

In any case, there is a lot of good reading to be had here. Read them all, feel free to change your mind as you go, and as you age, and as the quality of books progress, and have fun all along the way!

[Steve]

Started. 25% in. Such a good audiobook performance. Still tracking as my favorite techno-thriller.

I think it won an Audie award. Yes—just checked—it won an Audie award for the best audiobooks of 2022.

[Jed]

2022! can't believe it was that long ago. Andy Weir needs to crank out another one.

[Steve]

OK, finished again. Yes, still my favorite technothriller of the 2020s, 21st century, and all time. This time, I felt the weight of excessive science deliberation more so. Sure, lots of success does come after a series of failed alternatives you tried first. A genius trekking forth in the unknown does not have apriori or congenital knowledge of all things and does not make all decisions correctly at light speed as stupid books and stupid movies and stupid shows often portray, completely missing the mark time and again trying to portray intelligence. Just like solving an IT issue, it is often just a quick succession of trying several approaches that gets the problem solved, instead of encyclopedic knowledge of things you’ve never seen before. So, having the character try and fail is important to show, but it gets old. Can’t do it all the time. Still a 5 star book, and still probably the best technothriller, but not as high of a 5 star as I initially thought.