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, he realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Alone on this tiny ship that's been cobbled together by every government and space agency on the planet and hurled into the depths of space, it's up to him to conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.
And thanks to an unexpected ally, he just might have a chance.
Part scientific mystery, …
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, he realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Alone on this tiny ship that's been cobbled together by every government and space agency on the planet and hurled into the depths of space, it's up to him to conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.
And thanks to an unexpected ally, he just might have a chance.
Part scientific mystery, part dazzling interstellar journey, Project Hail Mary is a tale of discovery, speculation, and survival to rival The Martian--while taking us to places it never dreamed of going.
A story about a high school science teacher who gets sucked (willingly) into humanity's attempt to save itself from "astrophage", a microbe that has the capability of living on the surface of the sun because it lives on energy. The problem is that astrophage will dim the sun by 10% and that will kill everyone.
The story begins with Ryland Grace waking up on a space ship with no memories. The device allows Weir to go into the history of astrophage through flashbacks, and also allow some things to not be told to the reader because Grace doesn't remember them... yet. Anyway, Grace realizes he's at Tau Ceti because it's the only nearby star system that isn't infected with astrophage and he's there to figure out why.
Project Hail Mary has a very 80s feel to it. Very gee whiz exploring the universe is very cool. A lot of plausible sounding science, if you accept the premise that a microbe can absorb the sun's energy, store it, and then propel itself at nearly the speed of light through releasing that energy.
Most of the characters appear in flashbacks explaining how we got here, and those characters are fun caricatures. Unfortunately only one of them, Eva Stratt gets any real repeat scenes. She's the administrator who is put in charge of Project Hail Mary. A wondrously amoral character that can command the militaries of any of the world's powers, including detonating nukes in Antarctica and force-drafting scientists to the project who really don't want to be part of it.
The primary story happens on the Hail Mary in the Tau Ceti system with Grace alone trying to figure out what to do. The plot is a series of scenes of problems appearing, Grace thinking and sciencing his way through them, followed by a short respite or flashback before the next problem appears. Grace solves all of them, but this isn't competence porn. He's incredibly sloppy in a way that really does remind me of my high school science teachers.
This is clearly written to be a major motion picture or a streaming series, so I expect there will be ample opportunity to consume this story that way soon.
What a lovely read this was... I tend to read some pretty heavy sprawling-plot sci-fi, and came at this knowing virtually nothing about it other than having seen The Martian in the cinema. As such, I found the small, contained nature of the story (despite the huge consequences in the background) to be thoroughly refreshing. I was smiling throughout and constantly wanting to read on to find out what happened next. I was up 'til 1am last night because I got close to the end and just had to keep going. Excellent.
I think this will be the book I recommend the most this year. It is entertaining from beginning to end. If you like sci-fi or space stories, read it. If you don't, read it anyway because you will laugh. It is very rare that I tear through a book in the span of a day, but, and I apologise for the cliché, I could not put this book down.
