Fans of Andy Weir's 'The Martian' Will Love 'Project Hail Mary'
Just a heads up for anyone who enjoyed The Martian.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Project Hail Mary, the third book by Andy Weir, finds the author going back to what made him famous in the first place. Weir rose to fame with The Martian, a book (and eventually a movie) about a man stranded on Mars who uses complicated, compelling science to get himself home. While Weir’s second book, Artemis, deviated from that formula, his latest harkens back to The Martian’s formula, just with bigger stakes and one major addition.
If you love reading about someone using science to solve problems in space, you’ll probably love Project Hail Mary. It’s the story of a man named Ryland Grace who wakes up with temporary amnesia—he doesn’t know where he is, when it is, or even who he is. Eventually, he figures out he’s on a deep space mission to save Earth from a dangerous, molecular-sized alien that’s cooling off the sun. If something isn’t done soon, Earth will freeze and everyone there will die and his mission is our planet’s last chance. Truly a hail mary. Upping the stakes is the fact that even though Ryland is one of three people on the journey, when he wakes up, the other two people are dead, leaving the full responsibility of humanity’s survival on his shoulders.
So you’ve got one man, on a spaceship, who has to save an entire planet—in terms of stakes, they don’t get much bigger than that. And as you’d expect, Weir puts Ryland in increasingly difficult situations as things on the mission go wrong, need to be fixed, adapted, and more, all with the ticking clock of mass extinction in our minds. That alone would make for an intriguing story, albeit one that’s almost too similar to The Martian—which is why Weir puts in a twist. One that’s not a huge spoiler (it’s revealed about 170 pages into a 470-page novel) but a big enough reveal that if you’re interested in reading the book, you should leave here. Long story short, Project Hail Mary is nerdy as hell and a wild page-turner if you love weird science stuff.
That's all I read because of the spoiler alert, and it's all I'm going to post. I'm ordering the book today and I want the story to be as much of a surprise as possible.
Looks like it's already being made into a movie:
Ryan Gosling to Star in Andy Weir Adaptation ‘Project Hail Mary’
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I can't wait to read this.
My husband would have loved this book.
Sounds like it will be an interesting read.
Anybody read and enjoy Artemis? I love The Martian, but couldn’t get into Artemis. Now, it was audio, so maybe that had something to do with it, I don’t know. It was killing me, though. Had to quit it.
UPDATE
Having read it now, I wanted to come back and report that this book is AWESOME!
Nonstop fun, no boring parts. I really, really enjoyed it. It was hard to put down. It instantly became one of my favorite books.
As with The Martian, Weir's use of real-world science is top notch.
Everyone needs to read it so we can talk about it.
Wish I could, but maybe I'll survive long enough to see the movie - good to see that the star is a Canadian (although that has zip to do with it).
Why can't you? I think it was only released a month or two ago, but it should be available everywhere by now.
Doesn't Amazon do international orders? Maybe just download the ebook?
But yeah, I can't wait to see how they turn it into a movie. I'm worried that they're going to leave some good stuff out because of time constraints. Hope they can figure out a way to do it well, without damaging the story very much.
I don't post financial info on the internet, and because I survive on govenment pension spend money only on necessities anyway. Besides, I don't know what wouild pass the customs inspectors here anyway. The movie I'm most anxious to see, and might even go to a theatre to see it, is Villeneuve's movie Dune.