Today’s review is on one of my favorite author’s newest book. Get your space suits on obscurists because we’re talking about Andy Weir’s “
Project Hail Mary.”
***The Non-Spoiler part of this review***
What I love about this book:
This book does exactly what I love about “The Martian,” but more so, and you can tell how Weir has evolved for the better as a writer. What I mean by this, it takes a hard science fiction plot, sticks with it throughout the novel—with only minor flights of fancy such as astrophage itself—and wraps it around a character-driven story.
I was happy that Weir’s humor is also preserved in this novel. The density of this book’s technical details would be dry if it weren’t for the numerous chuckles throughout this book. The protagonist’s battle with the robotic arms of the Hail Mary at the beginning of the novel was especially funny to me.
Storywise, for all its similarities to “The Martian,” “Project Hail Mary” is a darker story than that novel. That book was all about the incredible survival of one man, but this book is about the survival of Earth itself—so, to put this as delicately as possible, death is never far in this story. I know I often get accused of enjoying bleak fiction, but it isn’t all that grim of a story—trust me.
The protagonist of this novel isn’t Mark Watney, and that’s a good thing. Don’t misunderstand, I love Mark Watney, but he’s such a strong character that it would be easy for a writer to fall back and create lesser versions of him. This protagonist shares certain qualities with Watney, to be sure, but still, I feel that his individual character is distinct from his predecessor’s—for one, he’s not nearly as technically handy. Also, I can’t bring it up here due to spoilers, but there are revelations about him in the latter half of the book that really demonstrates his not Watney-like qualities.
As a great lover of audiobooks, I was practically giddy—ok, there wasn’t anything “practically” about it—I was absolutely giddy when I heard that my favorite narrator Ray Porter read this book. Porter’s performance was terrific—as always—and I genuinely feel this novel is an entirely different experience without him, and the musical sound effect touches added to the audiobook edition.
What I don’t love about this book:
So this book features a case of amnesia, and it’s why I’m referring to the main character as the protagonist, even though the publisher’s summary just comes out and says his name. But anyway, amnesia is a bit of an overused cliched plot device, and that warrants mentioning. It’s used to set up the novel’s B plot, which tells the story of how the protagonist got involved with project hail mary and how the ship was created. Having read the whole novel at this point, I can’t imagine it any other way, so this literary device does its job, which means I don’t hate it. I might not love it, but I can’t say it isn’t well done. There is undoubtedly an emotional gut-punch toward the end of the novel because of it. That story beat wouldn’t be so effective without the amnesia.
This also happened in “The Martian” for me, but I never grew as invested in the other crew members of the mission as literally every other character in the book. That was a bit disappointing to me that the Hermes and the Hail Mary crews outside of the protagonists themselves weren’t as well developed as, say, the NASA engineers on Earth in “The Martian” or the project administrators in “Project Hail Mary.” The protagonist certainly thinks about his crewmates a bunch, and I assumed his memories would be supported in the B plot to make their fates more tragic, but no, not really.
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***The Spoiler part of this review***
***Ye be warned to turn back now***
The quick and dirty synopsis:
The story begins with our protagonist waking up with all kinds of tubes and medical instruments connected to him. In his weakened state, not only can’t he remember why he’s there, but he can’t even remember who he is or even his name. This is a problem since the computer that is taking care of him with two robotic arms that come out of the ceiling keeps asking him what his name is. Eventually, he regains his strength enough to get up and survey his surroundings, there are two other beds in his room with him, but both occupants are long dead.
