Review of Project Hail Mary (2021)
Andy Weir (writer).
Read in 2026.
A man wakes up with no memory of who or where he is. That’s bad, because he’s the last hope of humankind, on a suicide mission to reverse an interstellar climate disaster. In fact, the situation is worse than that. The man’s a crank biologist. When the apocalypse began, he was teaching junior high.
It’s the same basic premise as “No Morning After” (1954). That is, the sun’s a bit broken and aliens want to cooperate about it. This runs on the same basic structure as Weir’s The Martian (2015). That is, it’s focused on the interior monologue of a quirky science enthusiast generating drama by working too hard and overlooking the flaws of his own optimistic plans for survival. The science is softer, the scale is far greater, and the bestselling tricks are a little more annoying.
The protagonist’s hangup is in exotic astrobiology: The idea that life might arise on any chemical basis, without preference for water. Weir does a pretty good job showing how this crank scientist is typically narcissistic, unsystematic in their thinking, and a coward avoiding testing of their own theory by leaving academia. At the same time, one of the novel’s bestselling tricks is a cute and funny buddy who is not water-based, and who therefore validates the crank.
The worldbuilding is entertaining but this is an adventure novel more than anything else. The astrobiology is not the centrepiece. The two main characters get along so consistently and so well that the alien “Rocky”’s actual dialogue falls in with Weir’s humorous tone, learning the English word “sarcasm”. There is a little bit of alien mentality in Rocky: He’s private about defecating and eating, ultimately because he has no immune system. That biological detail contradicts the liberal non-water-centric premise of his biology. Rocky’s planet has microbes, but these microbes somehow cannot stand the internal temperature of the macroscopic life, so disease is unknown, which means that Rocky’s not really vulnerable when eating. Judging by their lifespan of 600 years, despite their high internal temperature and chemically promiscuous heavy-metal content, degenerative diseases aren’t common. It makes about as much sense as the 400-year lifespan of a wookie, which is a shame.
Central to the buddy-comedy aspect of the adventure is the high level of trust in the relationship. It is stated that the protagonist gives Rocky a complete offline copy of Wikipedia, and implied that a lot more militarily sensitive data on humankind is included and will be distributed to Rocky’s fellow Eridians. This high level of trust is based on meeting one nice individual under extreme circumstances. The exchange happens after the protagonist finds out that even he himself did not volunteer for his mission, but was “murdered” (sent to his death) by force on Earth. There is some ethical nuance to that Project Hail Mary, but the scene of project leader Stratt in court is narcissistic, mixing the fantasy of dictatorial power with the fantasy of successful global cooperation and self-sacrifice excepting only some villainous intellectual-property lawyers. That narcissism trumps all realistic concern for future interstellar relations.
The same Stratt says of the protagonist that “there’s more to him” than meets the eye. That’s more narcissism, but some of Weir’s bestselling tricks are brilliant, and the choice of making the protagonist a high-school science teacher with amnesia is one of them. He can explain as much of the science to the audience as necessary for the plot, and skip the boring stuff. With the amnesia, every building block of the thriller plot can be perfectly placed, and there is an intradiegetic justification for it too, though not a very good one. The ultimate result is clever, funny, moving, and commercial.