Review: Project Hail Mary

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

After enjoying The Martian and being deeply disappointed with Artemis, I hesitated for a while about starting this one (I had a pre-release review copy via Netgalley). I'm happy to report that it's a return to the elements that made The Martian work for me.

Weir's two greatest faults - the science infodumps and the "?!" - are on full display still, but at least he's not trying (and notably failing) to write a female protagonist or a heist. He's returned to what made The Martian successful: man alone, far from Earth, using science against the universe. He seems most comfortable (and capable) when his character is like himself: a white, American, STEM-educated man. In other words, there's a thing he can do, and he does it well, and he should probably stick to it rather than try to do something else for which he's ill-equipped.

His main characters all sound a bit alike, in fact - though not to the level of Scalzi, who's incapable of writing a character who doesn't have his exact voice. Ryland Grace is distinct from Mark Watney mainly in that (at least early on; the schtick gets dropped after a while) he swears euphemistically instead of full-out.

This isn't just a rehash of The Martian, though; we have an escalation of the premise. Mark Watney's stakes were his own survival; Ryland Grace's stakes are the survival of billions. We have, in fact, a motivated protagonist in a dynamic situation, which is a great place to start a novel.

And here we come to what makes these books work for me, and I suspect for many other people. It's not the science infodumps; the books work despite those rather than because of them. It's the emotional beats: the terrifying lows, the dizzying highs, the creamy middles. In this, Weir is doing something that a lot of "hard" science fiction fails to do: giving us characters with agency who protagonize wholeheartedly, rather than just observing events too big for them; and drawing us into their emotional world, making us care about the things they care about and root for their success. While a lot of the emotional beats boil down to "sudden problem arises (usually at the end of a chapter, when the character is congratulating himself on how well things are going); science ensues; problem solved," it's not just the same thing over and over without variation, and there's the larger story problem holding the whole thing together.

The other difference from "hard" science fiction is that, despite all of the actual science spewed onto the page, a lot of what goes on is not that plausible. In fact, for someone who thinks of himself as the "realistic science fiction" guy, Weir certainly spends a lot of time building his plot out of impossibilium, powering it with unobtainium, and facilitating it with unlikely coincidence. I don't have enough background in chemistry or physics to critique those aspects in depth, though there are elements that seem pretty dubious to me, but I do know enough to tell you that his biology is hokey and full of big holes. And there were a number of questions I had which I'll put under a spoiler tag:

(view spoiler)[Why do the Eridians bother to build a space elevator and go to orbit if they have no reason to go further into space? How does their hull robot work if they don't have transistors?

And while I'm talking about the Eridians, I found the character of Rocky, the Eridian engineer, a bit too much like a convenient genie in a bottle. He did also have the important role of giving the protagonist another being to interact with, but he was very much a sidekick; the lone American man ended up saving two entire intelligent races with his help, more than in collaboration with him. That trope of American exceptionalism is a bit of an irritation for me.

I did feel like the ending was the right one: a return to where the character began, emotionally but not physically. Sure, it glides over exactly what the fate of the Earth was (in detail, rather than in the big picture), and leaves us to imagine disaster or triumph to our own taste, and that's a bit of a cheat; but to do otherwise might easily have distracted from the resolution of the story.
(hide spoiler)]

With the unlikely elements, the infodumps, the exclaimed questions, and the limited range the author's showing, this doesn't make it to my Best of the Year list. But I was entertained enough to give it four stars anyway.

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