Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (2021) (read in 2022)

Standard disclaimer[1]

Andy Weir manages to comes up with consistently interesting science-fiction ideas and entertaining yarns (even if it’s rather obvious in some places where he’s almost writing a screenplay). I really wish he would find a co-author to help him smooth out some of the more YA aspects of his writing. Still, this was a fun book to read—after the first third.

As with The Martian, it took me about that long to either get used to the writing style or for Weir to settle in and write more reasonably. I do feel that the overuse of inner monologue when Grace first woke up at the beginning of the book was something I didn’t imagine. It was quite jarring and seemed a very forced way of introducing the character and background for the rest of the story. It got the job done, but I nearly gave up[2], which would have been a shame—because there are some intriguing concepts and ideas in the rest of the book.

This is not the hardest of hardcore science-fiction. There’s a lot of science in it, and a lot of engineering as well (Weir mentions all of the people he consulted), but he also elides a bunch of stuff in the “squishy sciences” to get to where he wants to go. That’s OK! Focus on what you’re interested in and make a rollicking tale! Still, it doesn’t matter. It’s a story. Lay back and enjoy the ride. I don’t think it’s in the same class as The Expanse, but neither does it get over-wordy like that series. It moves relatively quickly.

So, on to the plot. Ryland Grace wakes up in a hospital bed. He spends a bunch of time not remembering that he’s been shot into space on a suicide mission to find out why something that’s killing our sun isn’t killing Tau Ceti, a sun 13 light-years (LY) away. He’s to figure that out, send back information on little drones—another 13LY journey—and then die of starvation—or whatever—knowing that he’d helped possibly save mankind.

There are two interwoven threads of narration. Instead of just switching back and forth, though, the conceit is that Grace is slowly regaining his memories after having been in a medically-induced coma for nearly four years on the flight out to Tau Ceti. One thread is him, alone in a spaceship, in the Tau Ceti system. The other is the thread in the past that details how he came to be there and why.

It all starts when the sun dims, at an alarming rate. Ryland Grace is a somewhat-disgraced exobiologist who’s moved on from a promising career that he torpedoed. He now teaches junior-high science to a roomful of adoring children (of course they’re adoring). He’s corralled into a top-secret project by a woman named Stratt, who has near-God-like powers granted by an unanimous vote of the U.N. As I wrote in my notes below: this is the most laughably unbelievable part of the book.

Grace investigates the contents of a probe that had been sent into the anomaly near Venus (the “Petrova Line”, named after the Russian scientist who’d discovered it)—all on his own—and discovers that the dimming is caused by microscopic alien creatures that can absorb a tremendous amount of radiation. They are, in effect, eating the output of the sun. Grace names them “Astrophage”.

The collect and store power and then ambulate by emitting photons. Because they have such a tremendous ability to store power and can emit it in a harvestable form, they are automatically the most powerful batteries mankind has ever known. Grace and Stratt’s crew go about learning how to get them to replicate. They store completely inertly, luckily enough.

Mankind discovers that there are many other systems in the immediate vicinity that are suffering from the same dimming. Except for Tau Ceti. Something else is going on there. We have to find out what if we have any chance of saving Earth. That’s the Project Hail Mary mission: send three super-capable astronauts in comas at a significant fraction of the speed of light to Tau Ceti to figure it out, send back the results, and die as heroes.

The world bends its efforts to making this happen. Astrophage can also be harnessed as rocket engines. Now Earth just needs enough energy to breed them. They pave the Sahara to get the energy they need. Meanwhile, the planet is cooling too quickly, so climate scientists need to do a 180º turnaround and start dropping Antarctica into the ocean to heat the planet back up. They’re releasing methane, so hopefully the effects can be reversed in a decade after the planet is saved.

At the last moment before launch, both the primary and secondary scientist for the mission are blown to smithereens and Grace is the next best choice. He remembers demurring, being kidnapped, and then … waking up at Tau Ceti. He’s not a hero. He’s a coward who was afraid to go.

OK. Tau Ceti system. Grace discovers that he’s along because Yáo and Ilyukhina (Илюхина) both died en route. They didn’t survive their comas. Grace gets acquainted with the automated support system on his ship and with his surroundings as he slowly regains strength and figure out where he is and what he’s doing there.

Before Grace can really look around, he discovers a large spaceship right next to his, just a couple of hundred meters away. It’s piloted by Rocky. They become fast friends and quickly learn to communicate. Rocky’s been there for much longer. He is the only surviving crew member of 23. The others all died of radiation poisoning. They didn’t know about cosmic rays. Neither do they know about relativity. They are from 40 Eridani, another nearby star. They were there for the same reason as Grace: to find out what’s killing their star.

The Eridanians are different: they are about the size of a dog, with five legs, like a spider. They are highly efficient. No eyes, only ears. They communicate in tones. They are incredible engineers, but have no computers. Their atmosphere is nearly pure ammonia at 29x the pressure of Earth. They make nearly everything out of Xenonite.

Rocky moves in to the Project Hail Mary and Rocky and Grace travel to the planet to which the Petrova Line in this system connects, a CO2-rich planet they call “Adrian” (because Rocky named it after his partner, back at Eridani 40). They scoop up a piece of the atmosphere and discover “Taumoeba”, which eats Astrophage, keeping it under control in this system.

The Taumoeba escapes into Project Hail Mary, eating all of its astrophage and crippling it. They figure out how to get back to Rocky’s ship. Rocky tells Grace that he has more than enough fuel to give him to make the return journey instead of continuing his suicide mission. (The Eridians didn’t know about relativity, remember, so they planned for a much longer journey.)

Once they have Taumoeba and isolate it, they begin to breed it so that it can survive in the target atmospheres of the planets in their respective systems (e.g. Venus in the Solar System). This is all very science-y and pleasing and moves along at a bit more of an appropriate pace than the first half of the book.

They tearfully part ways and begin their respective hero’s journeys. Grace discovers that the Taumoeba has escaped again: this time, it not only evolutionally developed a resistance to Nitrogen, but also learned how to squeeze out through Xenonite. He solves the problem with plastic, but then realizes that Rocky must be dead in the water, as well. Grace gives up returning to Earth himself, sending his four drones with data and samples instead. He uses a sweep and search to find Rocky and rescues him.

Rocky moves back in and they navigate the Hail Mary back to Eridani 40, where they save the day and are welcomed as heroes. Grace lives on the high-gravity planet until the end of his days. He learns at one point that the Sun has resumed its original luminosity so that the drones he’d sent must have worked. At this point, as an older man made even more frail by the high gravity, he declines to make a mission back to Earth.

Citations

Jesus. That is just … bad.

From where? The Earth’s surface? Or private time on James Webb?

Funny that this is the most outlandish part of the whole book.

Just a taste of the joke-y spell-it-all-out flavor of the book. This is one of the better “jokes”. It feels like reading a Jack Reacher book.

Another example. I am.not making this up. YA-level writing.

Two-thousandth? Did you just give up on writing that? “Ah, they’ll know what I mean.”

This gimmick for interleaving flashbacks, as well as the penetrating internal dialogue.

It’s called Storage on the diagram. I have a hard time believing this computer would get past that synonym hassle-free. It failed to do so in many other cases. (It would later be noted that it wasn’t an AI in the traditional sense, but more of an expert system.)

Really? Why the hell does he write like this? Are we shooting for a particular reading level here?

Hates comma but loves loggorhea. We don’t need this level of detail for opening a hatch. That’s how you get to a 400-page book, but it’s unnecessary and distracting. E.g. “The hatch opens, revealing a crawlspace filled wall-to-wall with soft-sided white cubes.

Eye roll. This really works as character-description, I guess. But…c’mon. This feels much more like the description of a character in a screenplay. All this for a character who would only feature in one or two minor flashbacks 250 pages later.

C’MON! You’re really killing me here, Andy.

This is the end of about two pages of this bullshit about unpacking a box. This is obvious filler. He’d already unpacked two other uniforms and described them in exactly the same way. The three paragraphs differed only in the logo and the name tag.

Ah there it is. The libertarian Randian bullshit about the lone genius/hero/all-rounder gittin’ ‘er done.

I wasn’t going to question that. What is wrong with him? What is the point of mentioning this? I’m reminded of my reading of Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol”, which I gave up on.

This is pretty ignorant. Many Chinese of the latest adult generation speak at least some English. A good number are perfectly fluent. It’s hard to believe that they wouldn’t have been put on this boat filled with foreigners.

That is not even conceivably realistic for a gathering of scientists. They all understand English perfectly.

Not gonna lie. This part I liked. It felt more natural than the “tell, don’t show” style he’d used before.

Also not terrible. I remember this from The Martian: the first third of that was painful too.

This kind of feels like the plotting of a puzzle-based video game. It makes sense, but you can almost see the video-game levels writing themselves.

But wasn’t that literally what he’d been doing, just days before? He had one meeting so far. Also he hasn’t mentioned his students at all.

Had been. C’mon.

This kind of stuff is so pedestrian. You really don’t need to go into this level of detail.

He’s not only an exobiologist, but also a power-systems engineer. He’s also a teacher. This is Tony Stark/John Gault syndrome.

Obviously! Weir is so obsessed with the one-man-show genius that he’s unsure whether to even have his character talk to what is clearly an advanced race.

On the other hand, Weir gives little thought to how long it would take to communicate complex concepts. They got lucky that they’re even remotely compatible.

This ain’t Charles Yu, that’s for sure. If it’s not basic physics, then Weir doesn’t cover it in detail. That’s fine! Of course! But the contract to the level of detail Weir spends on the process with which Grace takes out a tool out of a drawer is jarring.

Why not? No spectrometer?

He’s literally making the other side do all of the work of building the tunnel.

Yes they do. You sent back a sample. In the box. You didn’t decompress it, did you? Well, then the alien has a sample of your atmosphere.

Maybe. Or maybe you’re missing hypersonics.

What, no meth in the future?

People get such boners for military coups. They love em. They’re enamored with the idea of an infallible god flanked by incorrigible soldiers cutting through the bullshit of democracy. It’s puerile, adolescent at best. It’s Atlas Shrugged.

How does Rocky measure anything at astronomical distances if he doesn’t know about radiation? How do long-range instruments work when you don’t know what wavelengths are? How does Rocky’s sensorium work? How can he hear anything Ryland is doing when their two environments are separate?

I watched Don’t Look Up while I was reading this book. That scenario seemed much more plausible than the one outlined above, unfortunately.

Skipping lots of encoding steps there. Like, a ton of them, on both the encoding and linguistic level.

Elegant.