Project Hail Mary

A man wakes up in a bed he does not recognize, in a room that turns out to be a spacecraft, in a solar system that turns out not to be ours. He cannot remember his own name. Two other people share the room and they are both long dead. This is the first ten minutes of Project Hail Mary and Andy Weir spends the next four hundred pages earning every twist of it.

What it's about

The amnesia is a gift to the reader as much as a problem for the hero. As the memories trickle back we learn that our man is Ryland Grace, a junior-high science teacher pulled into a global emergency: a microbe called Astrophage is feeding on the sun, dimming it year by year and Earth is quietly starving toward an ice age. Grace is aboard the Hail Mary, a desperate one-way mission to a distant star that seems immune, sent to figure out why and beam the answer home.

Then the mission stops being lonely. Grace discovers he is not the only traveler who came looking for the same answer and the book opens up into something warmer and stranger than a solo survival story. To say more would spoil the best surprise in recent science fiction. What can be said is that the friendship at the heart of this novel is funny, hard-won and genuinely moving, built one shared problem at a time.

Why everyone's talking about it

Weir does the thing almost nobody can: he makes competence thrilling. This is a novel where the tension comes from a whiteboard and a spectrometer, where the hero saves the day with high-school chemistry and stubborn optimism and where you somehow cannot put it down. It is The Martian formula scaled up to interstellar stakes, with more heart and a bigger imagination.

If you loved The Martian, this is Weir at the top of his game and then some. Readers who want lyrical prose or morally murky characters should look elsewhere: Grace narrates like the enthusiastic teacher he is, the science is explained in loving detail and the tone stays sunny even when the stakes are extinction. That relentless problem-solving optimism is either the whole appeal or not your thing. For most people it is the whole appeal.

The verdict, for now

Read it, ideally in as few sittings as your life allows. Come for the dying-sun mystery, stay for a friendship you will not see coming and will not forget. It is proof that a story about saving the world can also be an enormous amount of fun.