Nicole's Reviews > Project Hail Mary

In case you don’t know the premise, some alien microorganisms (astrophage) are eating the sun’s energy simply put which will make Earth colder and lead to another ice age. The 8th-grade teacher is a scientist who finds himself involved in researching this phenomenon and later he wakes up on a suicide mission to find a way to kill those astrophage and basically save Earth.

Well, credits where it’s due, this book required tons of research and it showed that Weir did his homework and then some more. He tried to explain everything using our laws of physics which was nice and interesting to read about.

I found this book -other than the science- smooth and easy to follow, sure it started slow but I liked being in Ryland Grace’s head and wasn’t bored by it. The book is told following two timelines, Ryland in space and the other whole Astrophage discovery and planning to save Earth preparing for project Hail Mary.

Okay, so why not 4 stars? Well, I had a "few" issues with this book.
✲ It was too similar to the Martian in the concept of “man alone in space doing some crazy shit” although I didn’t mind this while reading, I also can’t not mention it
✲ Grace’s voice was also too similar to Watney’s (I loved that guy) so I’m not sure how to feel about that. While it made the book easier to read, I certainly had some question marks about it. Like why not come up with a new characterization?

✲The science. Ok look, it was cool and I was very interested in it at first. Then it got technical. So much more technical. Needlessly so. I don’t know about footnotes in novels but maybe the overdone details could’ve been added as footnotes or something for those who’d like to read more about it? An external link for those interested?

✲ To borrow Hamad’s word, the characters were comical. They sometimes had a trait and their characterization was focused on that trait, especially Russians. They are always portrayed as stern by American authors, how cliché. Let’s make them the life of the party with their vodka!!!

✲ I hope this will be edited in the final version but oh, we had so many exclamation marks. Even I know enough to realize that the fewer exclamation marks used the better and this book had soo many while they simply could’ve been a period.

✲ For such a book that is based on logic, some things certainly didn’t reflect that. When Grace wakes up he has lost his memory, not technical knowledge just personal identity. So he’s trying to figure out where he’s from. He thinks of every way to figure that out and ohh he doesn’t think metric (also he’s such a cool American scientist!!! Thinks in metric too!). Can’t he speak and he’ll figure it out from his accent? British and American accents are pretty different for example. I’m no native English speaker and I still can distinguish lots of different accents.. his solution to where he's from is pretty simple but no we had to show how smart we are. Also, why would a Canadian know the distance between NY and LA? Why would anyone non-American know?
Another stupid thing was that he’s touching an alien object, he doesn’t wear gloves no. He ends up burning his hands but I found it pretty stupid to touch an alien object without gloves and without making sure that its surface is not poisonous or harmful to human skin…

✲ Stratt who is basically leading the whole project of saving Earth hasn’t studied ANYTHING to do with science and has people to tell her if this is the right choice or not scientifically.. she was dismissing the very helpful idea of someone if that person didn’t repeatedly demand her attention.

✲ The thing that I found hard to believe is how someone with a doctoral degree is teaching science to 8 grade. I would’ve been fine (but not really) if Grace had been a high school teacher. But middle grade with such a vast knowledge? Oh please. He also apparently has more knowledge than no other 37 years old has. He just knows a lot about everything scientific even if he didn’t do any research in years, even if he hasn’t majored in more than one scientific field, well, biology? Physics? Computer science? You name it. our guy knows about it.

I preferred honestly the present, past perspectives rarely interest me and this book was no exception. Sure I want to know how he got there.. but not in such detail. I just wanted to see how he’ll solve things. I understand however that this was needed in a way to make the book less Ryland heavy. I also liked the ending part.

Overall this book was fun even it got carried away with the scientific details. However, that’s about it, enjoyable. It lacked depth and fleshed-out characters. I would recommend it to Weir’s fans but if you haven’t read any of his books yet, then you should definitely start with the Martian, which I loved even if sci-fi is not my thing. I think it's gonna be liked by many people however and it'll be more successful for sure than Artemis because it's such an entertaining book! Also, it's certainly winning GR's best sci-fi for 2021.


Thanks to publishers and Netgalley for sending me an e-arc of this book