Book: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
Genre: Science fiction novel
Publisher: Random House
Publication date: 2021

Source: E-book borrowed from the library

Summary: Earthlings finally encounter an alien life form. Unfortunately, it is a microscopic creature that, with billions of its buddies, is draining our sun of its energy — endangering every life form on earth. Our planet’s people unite in unprecedented ways to solve the problem.

The narrator of the story is Ryland Grace who thinks of himself as a middle school science teacher, even after he’s tapped for his expertise on alien life. He wrote a somewhat ill-advised Ph.D. dissertation that lambasted his colleagues to the point that science teacher was the only career available to him.

Now, Ryland Grace is in a spaceship. He awoke from a coma to find himself without his memories and the sole survivor of a crew of three. He gradually realizes that it’s now his job to save Earth, all by himself.

Thoughts: I probably wouldn’t have read Project Hail Mary if it weren’t a book club selection for a group that I wanted to join. I enjoyed the movie version of The Martian, but I don’t read much science fiction, so that didn’t become a reason to read more of Andy Weir’s work. But it turned out that this was a page-turner for me — I resented my time away from reading when I was absorbed in this book.

I read Project Hail Mary at the same time as Romantic Comedy and was delighted by both in much the same way, even though they are very different stories. What they had in common was a single strong narrative voice that was wryly amused and amusing about the human condition. The humor was mostly self-effacing because if we’re going to remark on the human condition, the human that each of us knows the best is oneself. The experience of reading these together helped me realize the kind of narrative voice that I want to write in my novel.

Appeal: Project Hail Mary is obviously going to appeal to science fiction readers. I liked it for the narrative voice enough that it worked for me (although I admit to skimming through a few paragraphs when the science was more detailed than I was willing to work to understand). Another attraction, for me, was that Project Hail Mary was about how Earth got together to solve a problem — under current circumstances, that’s a perfect proposition for escapist fiction.

Have you read this book? What did you think?