Recommend: No
As both an engineer and avid science fiction reader I firmly believe that Andy Weir’s much-lauded previous novel, The Martian, was one of the worst books I have ever read. It perfectly captured why people hate dealing with know-it-all technical people whose profession is their defining character trait and wrapped it up in an ambling story with no suspense or plot. With this as my main context, I tentatively approached Project Hail Mary.
A note of caution, I will have mild spoilers for Project Hail Mary in this review. It’s in movie form now and if you were going to read it, you probably already would have and going vaguely into a few things allows me to give proper depth to the review.
I have made my disdain for Andy Weir well known. It is a good litmus test for filtering out book recommendations from people. However, enough people had said that this one was “actually good” (some of them I even respected!) that I was starting to get suspicious. When Caitlin found a copy in a public library and it was floated as the next book-club entry I gave it a shot.
First, the good. The massive improvement over the Martian is that there is some semblance of a broader plot. Earth is as risk from a sun-absorbing alien bacteria in the atmosphere and Grace (first name Ryland, second name Ryan Gosling) needs to science the hell out of space to find the solution. The plot moves along briskly and there is a constant back and forth between flashbacks to Earth and Grace now in orbit around Tau Ceti V.
Now, the not-so-good. Andy Weir still can’t write dialogue. The Martian resolved this by just having one character completely isolated for the whole book. Project Hail Mary resolves this issue by having one character completely isolated with a whacky buddy who basically doesn’t speak English for the whole book. Thankfully when Grace wakes up at the start of the book, both of their fellow astronauts are discovered deed from the cryosleep. God knows what Andy Weir would have done if they had survived.
The main interesting aspect of Project Hail Mary (spoilers in this paragraph) is the alien, “Rocky”, that Grace meets at Tau Ceti V. Rocky is a Silicon based lifeform with a bunch of quirky differences from humans. He hears, instead of sees. Has solved materials science, but doesn’t understand any physics past the 1940s. Is made out of rock, lives in magma and is a bit silly. Rocky is a fun addition and you can tell Andy Weir is trying to do something more interesting with them. It gets close, but doesn’t quite get there for me. It feels more akin to a Tolkien-Dwarf than a Peter Watts truly alien entity.
The main point of the book is to show how smart Grace is. This is a constant theme in Andy Weir’s books. I don’t know how Andy Weir formed his idea of science, but it’s basically a form of competency porn. Everyone is wholesome, well-intended and excessively good at what they do. Not a paragraph goes by without some startling insight by the main character.
She looked at the diagram, then back to me. “You did all that math in your head?”
The whole book is like this. It sorts of like an engineer had a really bad week at work and then had a dream that everyone said they were the smartest, bestest engineer in the whole world.
Finally, I kid you not, we landed on a honest-to-god aircraft carrier.
That quote also reveals the ceaseless internal monologue. The internal discussion is deafening.
Those numbers are different! They both went down by one. Oh wow. Hang on. I pull my stopwatch from my toga (the best Ancient Greek philosophers always carried stopwatches in their togas).
Project Hail Mary wasn’t great, but it was a lot better than the Martian. I didn’t get the sense of awe, scale and insight that really good science fiction brings. There were a few interesting ideas, but they weren’t explored in any real depth. The focus was on a superficial technical level, instead of considering what the ideas could actually entail. It was an easy, enjoyable read and I’m glad I could be part of the zeitgeist. If I can convince Cait to come to IMAX and watch it I think that will be fun.
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