Project Hail Mary

Ok, be honest: how many of you pictured Matt Damon playing Our Hero? How many of you heard the same narrative voice from The Martian? The “aw shucks” charm. The slightly narcissistic, “gee ain't I clever?” persona. The “wait'll you see how I solved THIS” schlock.

Yeah, ok, this isn't literary fiction. It's pop fiction, a beach read for nerds. Diversion. So that makes it ok, right? Well, no. I don't think so. I don't think that, just because it's for a pop audience, that a writer can't ask more of the readers than “just sit back, relax and turn the pages.” This is what I find plagues Weir's novels. Sure he put a lot of time and effort and research into them, but he's the one doing all the work. The reader is not put upon in the least - he even goes so far as to use clunky expository dialogue to define and explain scientific concepts like relativity, atomic structure and basic chemistry concepts. It's like he doesn't trust anyone to know anything.

So, as the story goes, Doomsday looms. Why? The sun is dimming. Why? Ah, that's the central problem that trillions of dollars, an international effort led by a cardboard cutout named “Stratt”, and various scientists and astronauts are determined to solve. And Our Hero, a former exobiologist turned middle school teacher named Ryland Grace (a name charged with significance as we find out), finds himself at the centre of the whole thing due to having once published a controversial paper that made him the laughing stock of the science community. What? That he rises to be the second in command of the project despite Stratt having assembled the top minds of their respective fields, then finds himself on the mission itself taxes the reader's willing suspension of disbelief.

Like all good hard science fiction, this book is full of Smart People (who, regrettably, come straight out of TV Tropes: the hard-drinking Russian, the tough, inscrutable Chinese, the clumsily kind Canadian. Like I said, it's an international effort) and their quest to launch the titular Hail Mary Project (given that it's an international effort, the white, Christian name is fun (lampshaded by Our Hero when he muses on what other names recognizing non-Christian deities might have been used)), a space mission to a distant star to find a solution to the Doomsday threat. Lots of Unobtainium; lots of Handwavium. New technologies and galaxy-spanning settings. We're continuously reminded that the mission is up against a tight deadline, that billions will die, that misery and privation and drought and and and . . . well, it'll be awful, so the mission can't fail and all stops are pulled and no expense is spared.

The fun of this novel is, of course, the tone. If you've read an Andy Weir book you know what I'm talking about. It's all major chords. If it were a song it would be stuck in your head. Weir's charming and easy style keeps you hooked and you can't help but like Ryland Grace. His story unfolds across two timelines, past and present, interwoven such that questions arising in the present are answered via flashback, while conversations and aha moments in the past inform the present. It keeps you reading.

There are also some big plot twists that are heavily foreshadowed: how Grace ends up on the mission, how the mission almost ends before it starts, how it goes off the rails (then gets back on track) and how it ends are all supposed to be big surprises but you just know they're coming. The themes of the book are what you'd expect from the plot, Teamwork, Sacrifice, Loyalty, Friendship and Redemption, and scene after scene of never-say-die, can-do, gitterdun, good ole Amurican know-how ensure the bestseller status. What there is not is growth or change. Our Hero is Our Hero from the moment we meet him until the final droll scene, and if the outcome is never in doubt, well, that's only because it's a first-person narrative.

So yeah. Fun story, competently if not capably told. I'm sure it'll be a Netflix series before too long.