project hail mary
February 9, 2026
i read andy weir’s webcomic back in the day. it’s called casey and andy and (among other things) it features weir’s self interest dating sexy female satan and a pretty good joke about literary agents. and now his books get adapted into blockbusters! starring matt damon and ryan gosling! the internet has led to some very interesting career trajectories.
so: project hail mary. i never actually read the martian, only watched the movie, so this is my first time encountering weir’s prose. the setup is pretty good — an amnesiac wakes up in a strange room under the care of a bunch of robot arms, and he’s got to figure out where he is and why. in another life this could easily have been a problem sleuth-like. i found myself comparing the situation to a video game. and then our protagonist made the same comparison, which was very courteous of him. throughout the novel he remembers more and more of his past. he makes progress towards his goal, overcomes setbacks, and so on. it’s a pretty fun time. my brother called it a “science mystery”, and i think that’s a pretty good description. if you’re willing to accept the sci-fi stuff, the rest is real or real-ish science, making it “fair play” in the sense of a fair play mystery.
i had been told to go in blind, so i could discover what the deal is alongside the protagonist. i can imagine this being a fun way to read the book, following the breadcrumb trail of memories to determine what’s up. but also they’re making a movie, and the trailer tells you what the deal is. and i saw the trailer. and the book was still a pretty fun time! in general, i find the outer wilds thing of insisting the premise is a spoiler to be less than compelling. if all you have is a setup, what’s the point? is there really nothing more to discover? in this case there is more to discover, but i’m putting the premise behind a spoiler block anyway.
the amnesia corner (click to reveal)
so our protagonist, dr. ryland grace, is the sole survivor of a mission to find a way to stop the astrophage, a single-celled organism that is rapidly consuming more and more of the sun’s output. he encounters an alien, the sole survivor of a similar exploration from their home planet. (he names them rocky, ‘cause they’ve got a rocky carapace.) the two of them make contact and start figuring out how to communicate so they can save their respective planets.
this is my favorite part of the book by far. it’s an effective payoff to the recurring motif of language barriers, and there’s something very charming about watching two intelligent creatures try to build up a vocabulary. (and it’s cute how ryland’s second career as a teacher ties into this. the book’s got themes!) ryland and rocky’s friendship is the heart of the book, i think. i ended up caring about them by the end, at least, which is not nothing. (i also appreciate just how weird rocky’s biology is. their species also doesn’t know about relativity or radiation, even though they have much better materials. there’s some fun Space Alien Shit in this book!)
the politics do end up fairly Reddit Liberal. there’s a brief scene where the copyright alliance sues the hail mary project for illegally copying all software, informational texts, media, etc. as part of their effort to save humanity. this is laughed off. every government has given eva strauss, the project’s leader, absolute legal authority. that idea is itself suspect, of course, but the explicit invocation of the us military in that scene pushed it over the limit. the united states military apparatus, working for the good of humanity against capital holders!
like i said. reddit liberal. (though weir’s chinese and russian characters aren’t strawman villains, so he’s better than the average reddit liberal in that respect.)
the prose is very blunt. i keep comparing it to older sci-fi i’ve read. jurassic park is similarly high-concept, similarly concerned with the science of it all. but crichton’s prose was so much better! there’s a bit early on where someone’s face to face with dinosaurs for the first time, we get some dramatic narration, and it says “somewhere his advertiser’s mind is still writing copy.” that bit is so good! it’s such a good little character moment. there’s some character stuff here, too, and i even find some of it compelling, but none of it is as effectively drawn.
i think weir may be an author that works better in adaptation or, less charitably, one who is focusing less on the book and more on said adaptation. the pacing felt off here. things would be going well, so it’d skip over quiet progress. this is natural — you don’t want to waste time on stuff that probably isn’t very interesting — but it was still jarring to start a new chapter and find out it’s a week or month or whatever later. that could be rendered effectively in a montage. similarly, i think a good screenwriter could give the dialog some much needed love. (it’d need a good amount of refinement in order to sound right on screen.)
still, it’s a good time. “airport novel” has a negative connotation, but i can think of worse traveling companions than this one.