Thursday, November 4, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

 




Project Hail Mary is the third novel by Astounding Award Winning author Andy Weir, best known for The Martian.  Believe it or not, I've never read Weir's work before, and my sole experience with him comes from the film adaptation of The Martian (which I loved).  So I wasn't really sure what to expect from Project Hail Mary, and hadn't even been planning on reading it at first - but a real life friend was planning on reading it, and so I figured for once I'd see how my opinion compared to theirs.  

Unfortunately, I was not impressed really with Project Hail Mary, which both managed to be the type of idea focused (as opposed to character focused) Sci-Fi that I don't love in general and felt like a not particularly great execution of it even accounting for that.  Again, I've never read The Martian, but Project Hail Mary feels like an attempt to recreate the magic of the story I saw on screen, except its protagonist isn't nearly as entertaining, the scenes on Earth (all flashbacks) aren't really interesting at all, and the hard science fun is a bit more abstract and less interesting to me at least as a result.  Add in some occasional non science scenes that are just bad (there's a really really bad Courtroom scene) and well, this is a hard miss.  

---------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------
Ryland Grace wakes up barely able to move, being nursed by a strange mechanical voice and device, and with no memory of how he got there.  A few awakenings later, he discovers two things: 1. he's not alone - he's accompanied by two dead bodies - and 2.  he's not on Earth anymore - in fact, somehow, he's not even in the same solar system, on a ship seemingly christened the Hail Mary. 

Slowly, Grace begins to regain his own memories, which reveal the direness of his circumstances are worse than he could have imagined: his ship was sent to a distant star because the Earth is facing an extinction level threat, and only a scientific investigation of this other solar system could potentially provide the key to saving the human race.  And this mission was clearly a one-way trip, with Grace expected to die light years away from any other humans.  

Of course if Grace doesn't succeed in discovering an answer to the problem, all of humanity, not just Grace, will perish.  But perhaps he doesn't have to do this all alone?
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Project Hail Mary uses its amnesiac hero to tell its story in essentially two timelines:  a present-day timeline taking place in deep space with Grace, and a flashback storyline to what happened on Earth to result in the present-day storyline, which is presented mostly as a series of remembered memories as Grace sleeps and goes about his business on the Hail Mary.  The story setup will remind you very much of the Martian, as it features people on Earth trying to come together - or well being forced together by a certain prominent side character - to scientifically solve a major problem and then a person on their own in space trying to figure out his own scientific problem with seemingly limited resources.  

Unfortunately, Project Hail Mary isn't nearly as interesting as The Martian, in either plotline.  Starting with the more important one, Grace in the Hail Mary, the story has to carry itself for the first 40% (and really after that point as well) of the book with just Grace's inner monologue, as he attempts to figure out the science behind his current predicament both on the ship and out in space.  The problem is that while Grace is an enjoyable lead protagonist, he's not nearly as interesting or amusing in his internal monologue as The Martian's protagonist, which results in a lot of the science feeling far too dry for my taste.  It doesn't help that the science is in large part far more abstract than in the Martian, dealing not with growing plants and staying alive, but in studying strange (pretty unrealistic) particles.  The book does become more enjoyable in the back 60%, once (very minor spoiler) Grace has to actually work with someone, but so much of that working comes ridiculously easily and unrealistically for his background (as someone who has been trying to learn a language this past year with a lot of struggling, a portion that involves language exchange and learning just does not ring realistic at all).  The plot relies near entirely upon its scientific ideas, based upon real research, to work, and not only is that less interesting to me than character interactions (of which there are very few to have in the present day), but the ones here just really aren't that interesting honestly.  

And then there are the flashback scenes.  At the beginning, the flashback scenes serve a purpose, in that the reader experiences them whenever Grace is finally remembering something, so they serve as an explanation to the crisis Grace is meant to solve, as well as the tools that Grace is supposed to work with.  But the flashbacks continue throughout the book even beyond that, and honestly they never proof to have a reason for existing.  The characters other than Grace in the flashbacks aren't very interesting, the international politics (and oh god, the completely unnecessary and legally incorrect courtroom scene) just rings completely wrong, and even a late act twist has absolutely no impact on the plot or characters.  Like these scenes feel like they're meant to be this book's version of the NASA scenes in The Martian, except those scenes contributed to the present day plot and worked alongside them, whereas these scenes all happened in the past and thus have no relevance to what's happening here.  It'd be one thing if we got occasional scenes showing Earth in the present day to show the dire situation back home, but nope, we get none of that.   

So yeah, Project Hail Mary feels like a book that was trying to recreate the magic of The Martian, and a book that failed pretty badly at doing so.  Not that interesting characters, a whole huge segment of the book that is very uninteresting and goes nowhere, and science and ideas that aren't nearly as fun as the book thinks they are.  I suspect, based upon Weir's name and the fact this was a bestseller (again based on his name) that someone is trying to adapt this for film, but I suspect this is one that won't ever be adapted without ginormous changes - there just isn't enough there to actually entertain.  Alas.  

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