Project Hail Mary

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir Rating ★★★★★ Spoiler warning, although knowing what happens won’t ruin your enjoyment. I knew there’d be an alien, I knew he’d save the world, and I still enjoyed the book.

I read The Martian back when it was popular, after watching the movie. These books are about as mainstream as it gets. I figured I deserved one after Quantitative Trading and A Room of One’s Own.

What makes a 5/5 book? This one was easy to read, enjoyable, interesting, and without artificial suspense points. I finished it in about a day, which is pretty rare for me nowadays. The humor was good. It’s most intense in the early pages, to reel readers in and make Ryland likeable. It worked. I liked him since he tried “Two times e to the two-i-pi” as the cube root of eight.

Example:

So I’m a single man in my thirties, who lives alone in a small apartment, I don’t have any kids, but I like kids a lot. I don’t like where this is going…

The pacing was nice. He, like the reader, starts out knowing nothing. The flashbacks gradually add context, and the reader quickly realizes he’s a Science Guy.

I’m a cynic at heart. The solution to the Fermi paradox is obvious to me. Great Filter ahead. Nukes. Boom.

But the book is so optimistic. Weir makes an effort to include as many countries as possible. USA, China, and Russia as the big three. A Canadian makes the beetles. A Dutch woman leads the project. Africa has the astrophage breeding panels. France has drugs and New Zealand has prisons. Yay, cooperation!!

You can tell he wanted to write a book about the everyman meeting an alien and Saving The World. All the fine details came after. Why is he a science teacher? Because he needs to be good at science, and teachers are good at teaching. Why the coma gene thing? Because Andy needed a reason to kill off the two other crewmates plus select the everyman. Why is Ryland single and childless? He’s a disposable life and it makes the bittersweet ending happier. Why do the countries get along so well? Because if the world was to be saved, that’s the most likely precedent.

The Taumoeba breeding part reminded me of animal behavior modification. Namely, trying to train my “aggressive and unreliable” companion. You get the behavior your reinforce, not the behavior you want. Ryland wanted a Taumoeba strain that would survive in higher nitrogen percentages. Surviving in the artificial environment, the xenonite box with the increasingly higher nitrogen, was reinforced. The distinction is very relevant in this book.

Another unintentionally interesting bit was the simplicity of the ship AI. AI has come so far since 2021. The setting seems to be “near future” rather than “alternate present,” but the ones of today are already far past the point of understanding simple commands. Does life imitate art?

There were some plot holes:

1. Why a 1-in-7000 coma gene? Okay, people get ANGY and try to kill each other. But surely that’s not everyone. Why not select for a 1-in-1000 temperament? It’s probably also loosely correlated to astronaut skill. But okay, Andy wanted Ryland, I get it.
2. Why were DuBois and Shapiro (the scientist and replacement-crew scientist) ever allowed to be together? Not just together-together, but also just together in the same building? Is it a popular fantheory that Stratt intentionally had them killed? I just looked it up, and no it isn’t.

Rocky was likeable, if not all that cute. The evolution is interesting to ponder. In such an environment as Threeplanet, if intelligent life ever took hold, why wouldn’t it look like Rocky’s species? And the things they have in common: similar hearing frequencies, graspy hands, social instinct, they all make sense.

The in-universe explanation for how they were at similar technology levels: a higher-tech civilization wouldn’t have needed to leave their system at all, and a lower-tech civilization would have just died.

I’m glad we got to see the epilogue of Ryland living on their planet.

Will this review have a similarly thoughtful epilogue?

Nope.