Mario the lone bookwolf's Reviews > Project Hail Mary

AI, Aliens, MacGyvering, global cooling, and corpses combined to another astonishing Robinsonade soon escalating to more complexity and depth than Weirs´ already great, first work The Martian.

Good old flashback amnesia who where what why wtf.
Combine this with the right, cynical, auto self sarcasting worldview POV and one gets tons of humor and edutainment, mixed with a suspenseful saving the earth plot, and the pages can´t be turned over fast enough, at least if there is still enough light because of the

Dimming, dimming little star…
What a great metaphor for exaggerated climate change reversal (more on that later) and what an ingenious double use for both the main plot and delivering a message by icing the badass factor to ultra cool absolute zero.

(view spoiler)[ Alien friends (hide spoiler)]are the best
I can´t remember many similar, perfect matches from somewhere else in sci-fi, maybe because not many authors ever considered risking balancing the plot on such an (view spoiler)[ interspecies (hide spoiler)]relationship. Weirs´gags unfold thanks to good, old cultural differences, innuendos, social criticism, and contrasts, letting the reader permanently question what cool idea might come next and how Weir continues the sci-fi tradition of ironizing the heck out of the dysfunctional human society.

Should one freeze or should one sweat, science isn´t clear on that.
Global cooling or warming, glaciers or tropical greenhouse fun, it´s tricky to choose between the devil and the deep blue sea. Another of Weirs´ingenuities is to draw a completely different picture of our current climate crisis, by just reversing it to something some might hope for, at least for the time until all the damage we´ve done to earth´ weather, soil, ecological, etc systems can be fixed thanks to better tech. For instance with Dysonswarms of billions of small, automated, collective super AI automated, coordinated drones that block sunlight in the space around earth or do some work in the atmosphere like adding or removing the right chemicals from air and water, greening deserts, building superstructures, etc. Until then and tech saves us, each book awakening more public awareness regarding the mixture of the sixth extinction, Venus style super global heating catastrophes, not ever to mention all the wars and humanitarian crises this will cause, is important.

The irony is that we already have many of the technologies that could reduce the speed of self cannibalization, but prefer to put billions and trillions of fiat money in economic systems destroying and worsening the situation, although a simple shift of all the subsidies and central bank made fantasy money, not even physical anymore, just numbers, to use it to green everything in a sustainable way, could be made overnight. Economics is a fringe voodoo scam, one can do everything good or bad with it by just changing the dogmas and boring, badly written holy texts of macro economical yada yada yada. But that all goes too far, back to the show.

People happier with the Martian and Project Hail Mary than Artemis
Duh, Project Hail Mary, and The Martian are different styles, one could say different subgenres, full of humor and totally character and tech survival focused, while Artemis is more of a normal sci-fi novel with its conventions. People shouldn´t expect the always same writing style of evolving, new authors and consider that it might just subjectively not be their kind of subgenre of a genre new to them, but still a good book. It´s true, Martian and Mary are better, but that doesn´t make Artemis a bad book, it´s just not as accessible for not sci-fi heads.

Less is more
Like in many great works, Weir just uses humor, science, some tropes, characterization, social criticism, and innuendos to compress such immense space freighter loads of philosophy, ideas, creative thought experiments, and charm in this short work that one would like to know how long it originally (not just the kind of space opera ( would it have been a megahit or kind of flopped like Artemis instead? We´ll never know) he stopped writing and used elements of it in this one) was before he began finetuning and cutting it to perfection. Or did he first plot everything and didn´t creatively free write too much, I don´t even know what kind of writer he is, what a shame, I should be infected with Astrophages, proto molecules, T Virus, melding plague, etc. at the same time as an appropriate punishment.

Switching between nerdgasm, tragicomedy, and DIY tutorials
Thereby, Weir can be educational, funny, hopeless, and change tone and impact in perfect balance, to always keep all kinds of readers interested. In other cases, social sci-fi gets too sentimental without technobabble, which is itself too static and cold while nobody laughs, but here, all kinds of audiences get some individualized world saving plot possibilities served as stylish as possible.

Astrophaging
Did anyone notice that viruses aren´t just bad in real life, but great for all kinds of sci-fi, video games, and series? Especially if a unique, new combination of theoretical physics, science fantasy, real biochemistry, clarketech, and some billions of years of evolution are thrown into the mix, close to everything can come out and be used as unique, new, never before seen, or thought of plot device. What an incredible microorganism, even able to teach some hard STEM science just by its existence.

Friendship and relationships
Especially in contrast to the hard science focus, it´s astonishing that Weir shines where many sci-fi writers struggle. Creating living, credible characters with everyday problems while making the science accessible, funny, and more infotainment than soporific. Readers prone to both sides of the empathy scale can get so much out of this, because it offers the different perspectives of both cold, hard knowledge and emotional, soft vertebrate behavior.

Combine this with the accessibility to make it easy to love for everyone new to the genre and space science and what comes out is one of the possibly best and masterfully executed new ideas in modern sci-fi.

Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...