Book Review: Project Hail Mary
Full of spoilers and spiders.
I just finished “Project Hail Mary” by Andy Weir, who also authored “The Martian”. The latter was left on a bench in my house by my sister, who wanted me to take it, along with a bag of clothes, to the thrift store to donate. Instead, I picked it up and read it – the first book I’d read after a harrowing experience of second-child induced extreme sleep deprivation that lasted almost three years.
I enjoyed that book – fast-paced, interesting, and despite not knowing a whole lot about space science, it seemed relatively plausible. It was the perfect re-introduction to reading for my mashed potatoes brain, and I definitely daydreamed about also being stranded on Mars, nothing to do but eat pre-packaged food and SLEEP OH THE SLEEP I WOULD GET ON MARS. DELICIOUS MARS NAPS.
Project Hail Mary (PHM) follows essentially the same formula as The Martian: white dude sciences his way through adversity. Dr Ryland Grace wakes up from a coma in a small room with two dead crewmates and some ceiling robot arms. He can’t remember his name and notices that the gravity feels a bit off, and so begins his Extreme Clever Science Journey(TM) as we join him in figuring out where he is and why he’s there.
And try as I could, I just couldn’t get over the giant, gaping plot holes that kept popping up. The second I put one behind me in order to continue to keep reading and enjoying the tale, another would appear and take me right out of the story again.
Grace regains consciousness in what we later learn is a spacecraft built with an unlimited budget and designed by the most brilliant team of scientists, doctors, and engineers on Earth in order to journey 13 light years to a distant star. It is humanity’s last-ditch-effort to figure out how to stop space bugs from dimming the Sun. The Hail Mary is manned with three carefully selected crew who were put into a travel coma in order to avoid the psychological trauma of being in cramped quarters for years while on a one-way suicide mission. A known side effect of long-term coma is amnesia, and yet… when Grace comes to, there are *zero* instructions available to help him figure out WTF he’s supposed to be doing. I realize this is a plot device so he could science his way through the first few chapters, but COME ON. The human race’s only shot at survival and they don’t plop a MISSION DIRECTIVE binder next to his bed? Instead he just flops around doing random pendulum experiments and nearly killing himself falling off ladders while Robot Arms keeps asking if he knows his name.
Eventually he recovers more of his memory, and with it access to the control room of the ship, and realizes that he is literally Earth’s last chance of survival against the mysterious Sun-slurping Astrophage. He alone holds the fate of the entirety of humankind in his hands… and without much caution or consideration at all, trusts an alien who pulls up alongside his ride. It turns out to be fine, Rocky the five-legged space spider is basically the Joe Six-Pack of the cosmos, and before too long they’re knocking back PBRs and solving the Astrophage issue together.
Learning about Rocky’s body and language and planet were some of the more enjoyable parts of the book, and Weir obviously put a lot of thought into it. But the way Grace was just *too excited* about this alien to stop and consider the million ways making contact could go wrong, even inadvertently, and doom his entire species to a terrible death, made it obvious that Dr Ryland Grace is actually a 12-year-old boy trapped in an adult’s body.
Once I realized that PHM is essentially Space Big, the book started to make a lot more sense. Grace stumbled upon a Zoltar machine, woke up with stubble and bamboozled his way into an intergalactic adventure.
A few more holes of note:
– The ship didn’t have any sort of probe or a one-person ship to do some smaller side-missions if necessary. There is a sample collecting device, but it is permanently attached to the hull of the ship. The ship included a well-stocked lab that was considered so critical there was a complicated method to produce gravity in order to perform precise experiments… but experiments on what? How were the crew meant to gather anything apart from what they could scrape off the hull? This problem became evident when Grace and Rocky spent two weeks assembling a 10km chain attached to a Rocky-engineered probe to scoop up some Taumoeba from planet Adrian. Both nearly die as a result of that effort.
– Speaking of samples, the “beetles”, four little devices designed to travel back to Earth with the Astrophage Answer, were only equipped with hard drives and no room for specimens. Grace ended up having to jerry-rig a sample jar and counterweight to these *extremely important* gadgets in order to transport Taumoeba back to Earth. Why did every Smart Person on Earth neglect to consider that there might be a biological answer to a biological problem?
– And speaking of biological problems, before construction even began on the Hail Mary, Grace discovered you could kill an Astrophage by… poking it with a stick. If there was a part in the book where they first tried to kill the Astrophage in the solar system with lots of sticks (or nukes), I missed it. Fix a $5 problem with a $500 trillion space mission, that’s humans for ya!
All of these “things seemingly brilliant people shouldn’t have overlooked” didn’t allow me to become fully engrossed in the story. I was willing to suspend all belief when it came to science/physics and aliens, but wish Weir could have come up with some more plausible setbacks for Grace to solve with dazzling ingenuity.
There were quite a few other things that irritated me, like Stratt telling Grace he is and always has been a risk-averse coward before concluding that he’s fundamentally a good man and will do just dandy as backup scientist #3 on this existentially important death mission. Scientist #1 and backup scientist #2 blew up while performing a dangerous experiment together just days before launch, of course. Maybe the whole cast of characters are Zoltared pre-teens.
Project Hail Mary is definitely much better suited for the Young Adult section. Teen me would certainly have been thrilled with the awe-inspiring concepts of space travel and aliens and completely missed the plot holes, implausible (human) characters, and juvenile writing that grumpy current me couldn’t get past. The simple language, no adult themes (minus a very brief and spectacularly awkward sex conversation between two scientists), and Grace’s “hey golly gee wiz”, endlessly cheery, Emmet-from-Lego-Movie personality puts PHM on my list to let my kids read when they hit their teens. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone older than that.
2/5 stars.