Projekt Hail Mary

After reading The Mote in God’s Eye, I realized that Garrit Franke, a fellow Fosstodon member, finished reading this book, so I decided to give it a try too.

I have to admit that at first I was a little bit hesitant about this book, because it is a written in first person, and it also starts out with ammnesia and also flashbacks. But after that I got used to the writing style pretty quickly and started to really get into the main story and the mystery behind everything happening around our protagonist.

The story follows a lone astronaut that finds himself facing impossible odds every step of the way. The way the plot is revealed and how it moves forward every chapter is great. The scientific elements are pretty accurate and that was something I found really interesting. It reminded me a lot of Jules Verne’s novels that usually felt like something that could be possible to do.

In this case of course the protagonist uses his scientific knowledge (as well as his memory slowly coming back) to figure out how handle his mission, which is pretty much to save the planet from certain demise.

I liked the setting and the characters that show up, there’s quite a bit of science tidbits I learned through this, and the moments of action and uncertainty are quite great. I could not stop reading many times because I just wanted to know what in the world would our protagonist do even just to stay alive to live another day.

I didn’t feel like the book was as long as it was, honestly. It was definitely worth it. I do think that it feels a little like a movie waiting to happen, the prose wasn’t as interesting and the plot ended up kind of predictable, and there’s a very wholesome twist at the end which is nice. Just a very fun read.

I'm not a math nerd, but if I were, this would have been more like 4 stars. I am, however, other kinds of nerd and I found the non-math parts of the book to be absolutely bonkers, but not in the joyful way. Weir has given us a protagonist with zero backstory. And I don't mean his amnesia. He ends up remembering how he got on the ship, but apparently those few months were all there was to his life. There's no family, no friends, no flings, no hobbies, no likes or dislikes--and mind you, the book is almost 500 pages in length. When he does finally make a friend, he doesn't even notice that it's the first friend he's ever had. There's no emotional interiority to this guy at all. He's just there to solve puzzles. This is truly science fantasy, not science fiction. There's nothing believable about the majority of science in this, the character isn't believable, and yet I read to the end. Rocky truly saves this book from being impossible, but despite him, I can't recommend this one.