Book Club March 2024- Project Hail Mary

By: Andy Weir
Published Year: 2021
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Pages: 476

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Summary (Provided by Goodreads): Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish.

Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.

All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.

His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it’s up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery—and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.

And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he’s got to do it all alone.

Or does he?

What I thought

I don’t normally consider myself a science-fiction person, but Weir makes me question that every time.

The world is in danger of coming to an end, when a microbe threatens to essentially eat the sun. Project Hail Mary is created as the last chance to save Earth, but it begins with Ryland Grace waking up in space with no memory of who he is or how he go there. His two crewmates are dead and he has to remember his mission, and then remember how to save the world.

I really enjoyed this story. I liked the mystery of remembering what happened on Earth with flashbacks rather than having the story told chronologically and then ending up on the Project Hail Mary. Grace is a very likable character too, which I guess he needs to be considering you’re stuck with only him as a reader.

There were two things that got on my nerves a little bit with this story. The first was how conveniently smart Grace is. Yes, he’s a scientist and obviously was chosen for the mission because of his intelligence, but he seems to have such a wide range it’s a little unbelievable. For example, he’s a microbiologist and a science teacher, yet when he needs language translating software he creates his writes his own computer program. It didn’t ruin the book for me, but every once in a while I wanted to see him come across a problem he couldn’t find a solution to.

The other minor issue I had was that Weir is a scientist and sometimes I think he gets a little too excited about that. I think he loves to explain processes and science and so occasionally, he gets carried away with the explanations. A lot of the time I liked the explanation because it did make it feel more real and believable, but occasionally it was a little too in depth and over my head so I would just skim past it.

For an end of the world sci-fi novel, the ending also was very good. I was worried about how the story would end, but was pleasantly surprised. I don’t know if it’s how I would’ve chosen to end the story, but I was very content with it.

I know my review is kind of vague, but I think a lot of what made this book enjoyable was not knowing much about it and learning the information along with Grace as the story went on. Even if you don’t find yourself to usually be a science fiction reader, I would say to give this one a chance. It was very interesting and I’m curious to see how this becomes a movie!

What Book Club Thought

Unfortunately, due to some library hold issues, I was the only one to finish the book in time for discussion. However, one of the other book club members finished it recently, so I was able to chat with her about it. We both loved it! She cried at the ending and enjoyed the adventure. She has a few more issues with some of the light speed/time travel stuff whereas I had more issues with Grace being all knowing, but both of us agree that neither of these issues were hugely impactful on our enjoyment of the story. I also found out that Ryan Gosling is slated to play Ryland Grace which I think will be a perfect fit! I definitely recommend reading this book along with someone because I do feel like there is a lot to talk about. Luckily, my dad had also previously read this book so I was able to talk to him about it as I read which I loved.