The nominations for this year’s Hugo Awards will be announced next month, and one book that’s showing up on a lot of Best Of lists is Andy Weir’s latest novel, Project Hail Mary. I’ve somehow missed out on Weir’s previous books (and the movie based on The Martian; I know, no excuses for that), so it’s high time I give this one a try.
The book starts with Dr. Ryland Grace waking up aboard a spaceship. He doesn’t know it’s a spaceship; he doesn’t know his own name. He’s been in a coma for a very long time and it’s done something to his memory. Any hopes of getting a simple explanation from someone else aboard the ship are dashed when it turns out his situation is even worse than he first thought.
“Time to get a good look at my fellow patients. I don’t know who I am or why I’m here, but at least I’m not alone – aaaand they’re dead.”
Having the main character of the story wake up Tabula Rasa is a pretty common trope, but it’s also one hell of a way to gradually play out your exposition over the course of several chapters. As he recovers his strength after his coma, Grace’s patchwork memory gradually fills in the blanks. This lets the story bounce back and forth between his struggles aboard the spaceship, to his history back on Earth and what led up to this trip.
Andy Weir’s style of dialog (monologue?) can take a little getting used to. Grace’s inner voice is extremely chatty, by necessity, since the entire book is first-person narrative from his point of view. The reader can only understand what’s going on if Grace is constantly talking to himself, working through problems, giving himself pep talks, or substituting things like “Gosh darn” for profanity (junior high-school teacher, so not-swearing is a very hard habit to break). It can occasionally come across a tad cartoonish, especially since the entire book is in present tense. Relentlessly present tense, with all the “Whoops!” and “Whoa!” and everything else to show whenever Grace is reacting to something.
But it works, because it adds to the panicky, almost claustrophobic situation, where the main character has to learn his way around his environment, recover his memories, and then start figuring out a solution after spending most of a day trying to remember what the problem is.
And man, what a problem. This story feels like a locked-room scientific murder mystery, except that the murder hasn’t happened yet and the victim is all life on Earth.
“They say the sun is 0.01 percent less bright than it should be.”
Obviously the imminent death of the Sun is a complex problem with a wide variety of factors that stem from a previously unknown organism. So, a lot of science. And as readers of Andy Weir’s previous books will already know, the author brings all the science. Some things fall firmly into the science fiction category (star-killing organisms, noble gasses becoming solids, etc.) but all of it is based in actual science, and Weir goes into minute detail about every bit of it. Atomic physics. Orbital maneuvers. Painstaking chemistry experiments (with a full explanation for why most of them have to take place in gravity). Relativity. (Pretty much everyone has heard of the time dilation effect, but did you know there’s such a thing as length dilation? Me neither, and the science for that is quite over my head.)
And you can’t skip over any of it, because every piece is essential to the story, from the details about how the spaceship transforms itself to create gravity, to the difference between a nanogram and a microgram and why getting it right really matters. The science doesn’t sidetrack the action, the science is the action. You may have to wait for the scientists to explain why the math they’ve gotten so excited about is exciting, but once you get it you’ll have that “ohh, now I understand” moment and you’ll want to cheer. Or shiver. Or any of the other reactions you can have to things that will go wrong when dealing with variables that – as far as humanity was concerned – hadn’t even existed a few years earlier. (I’ve got several instances where my notes just say. “Yikes.” or “Oh jeez…” or “AAAAAAAAAA”.)
And humanity doesn’t just have to solve the existing problem, they have to come up with a way to, well, not stop the devastation on Earth in the meantime, but to make it slightly less horrible.
He scowled at her. “Okay. Nineteen years.”
“Nineteen years?”
“You wanted a number,” he said. “There’s a number. Nineteen years.”
“Okay, what’s nineteen years?”
“That’s my estimate for when half the people currently alive will be dead. Nineteen years from now.”
The effects that a dimming sun has on the climate are just some of the questions that have to be asked at every stage of the process. How do you coordinate the resources of an entire world into one project? (The answer here is mostly “Eva Stratt”. You’ll see a lot of her.) What are the ethics of choosing the best candidates for an expedition versus picking the best group of candidates that can work together in a tiny space over several years without killing each other? Everyone knows a trip to a star light years away is probably only going to be one-way. So. How do you plan for the actual moment of the astronauts’ deaths ahead of time? And most importantly, you have a former academic-turned-junior-high-school-science-teacher being selected as the best hope for mankind on a suicide mission to save the solar system. How exactly does THAT happen?
What makes the book really really tricky to review is that so many elements to the story were amazing, but I can’t even mention here because it’s the finding out that’s the whole point to the story. There are quite a few teary-eyed moments, and ones of sheer unexpected triumph. There are delightfully funny scenes like a scientist getting nitpicky about how actually the first person to kill a Predator was in Predator 2. You’ve got the horror of being light years away from home in an environment that is trying to kill you all the time, (keeping in mind that your death would also mean the death of billions of other humans), then doing an EVA under the effects of the gravity of the planet you’re currently in orbit around, while attempting to fish using a ten-kilometer chain.
It’s all really cinematic, which (along with the style of dialog) makes me think that Weir wrote this with a movie adaptation in mind. If that’s the case then it worked out well, since there’s currently a movie in development starring (checks notes) Ryan Gosling? Playing the empathic, resourceful, and uniquely broken lead character? Sold, sign me up for some of that!