Because he has amnesia at the beginning of the book, you get to puzzle out what’s happening along with him, which is a lot of fun. Ryland is a fundamentally decent and likable main character who you can’t help but root for. Like Weir’s other books, Project Hail Mary is clever about the dilemmas the hero gets put into. (Rocky is from the 40 Eridani system, which is “only” 16 lightyears away from our sun.) Still, it’s exciting to think about what other life might be out there. The odds that there is another sentient species relatively nearby seem low. Lane helps you understand the extraordinary number of things that had to line up perfectly to create complex life on Earth. The two end up bonding over being lonely travelers who are light years from home, and they develop a beautiful friendship despite being so different from one another.Īs I was reading about Rocky, I couldn’t help but think about Nick Lane’s excellent book The Vital Question. Ryland has to create a smart bit of software before they can communicate.
He breathes ammonia, uses echolocation to “see,” and speaks using musical notes. Unlike the humanoid extraterrestrials you see in a lot of science fiction, Rocky is completely alien in every sense of the word. Weir offers a somewhat plausible notion of what it would be like to make first contact. The rest of the book is about Ryland and his new alien friend-whom he not-so-cleverly names Rocky-working together to save their home planets. He crosses paths with an alien that looks like a Labrador-sized spider made out of rock. It turns out that Ryland isn’t the only one looking for a way to stop the Astrophage. I won’t ruin the ending or anything like that, but I’m going to give away a bit more than the summary on the book jacket. So if you want to go into it blind, you should probably stop reading this now.
The twist comes about a quarter of the way into the book. If Ryland doesn’t succeed, the Earth will enter a new ice age that kills billions of people. He quickly figures out that he’s been sent on a mission to save our solar system from a microorganism called the Astrophage, which is essentially eating our sun. It tells the story of Ryland Grace, a high school science teacher who wakes up alone on a spaceship in a different star system with no memory of how he got there. Here’s what I can say without ruining anything for you: Project Hail Mary is the latest novel by Andy Weir, who is best known for writing The Martian. But as soon as I started talking about it to some colleagues, I realized there was a problem: there was no way to explain why I liked the book so much without spoiling one of its big surprises. Have you ever read a book that's hard to tell people about without giving away some of the plot? I recently finished Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir and couldn’t wait to recommend it.
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