Will I Like Project Hail Mary?
- May 22
- 9 min read
If you’re wondering if the book or movie, Project Hail Mary is for you, I’ll break down some reasons for both.
Are you a hard sci-fi fan?
Project Hail Mary is listed # 1 in Hard Science Fiction right now on Amazon. Hard sci-fi is a subgenre of sci-fi where the author gives a high priority to scientific realism. That science becomes part of the story and the character’s struggles are often tied to the facts as we know them in the real world.
The Martian, also written by Andy Weir, is a great example.
I will come back to this, but if you use the phrase "nerd alert" a lot when people talk about physics, chemistry, quantum theory, time dilation, etc, you may find this book a little dense. The film is less so.
Did you enjoy The Martian?
Project Hail Mary has a lot of the same edgy humor of The Martian. The main protagonist in PHM (forgive me the abbreviation), Ryland Grace, has a lot of snark in his personality and it’s fun to see it come out when he’s…well, always. Whether he’s pissed off or overjoyed, it seems like his character can’t help making jokes, and they are often at another character’s expense or directed at a walk of life that he doesn’t have much respect for—at least in the moment.
Grace isn’t mean spirited but he speaks his mind, and since the book is written in first person present tense, you get a heaping dose of his character’s plain-speaking, often vulnerable personality.
Do You Like First Person Present Novels?
They’re all the rage right now, and have been for quite some time, so you can hardly avoid them, but if this kind of thing drives you up the wall…
I double-check my tether to make darn sure I’m attached, then I step out into space. I’m good at this. I must have practiced it a lot. Maybe in a neutral-buoyancy tank or something. But it comes second nature to me.
That kind of experiential writing and almost stream-of-consciousness prose makes up the bulk of the book.
If you can’t deal with first person present but you still want to experience Project Hail Mary, then watching the movie instead of the book is your best bet.
Are You Okay With Books That Switch Tenses?
I don’t know what it is, but I’ve encountered a lot of books lately that do this, and it is starting to annoy me. If you also don’t like it, prepare to be annoyed as well, but you may still want to chance that you’ll like Project Hail Mary in spite of the tense changes. Weir uses first person past tense for flashbacks as Ryland Grace, an amnesiac astronaut, is regaining memories.
Sometimes these come at chapter breaks, but sometimes they are softer breaks than that. Still, I was never confused by them. It’s just a stylistic shift that you might want to prepare for. Again, if that kind of thing bothers you, the film has the flashbacks, but it doesn’t shift from color to black and white or anything crazy.
Expand To Reveal Section With Spoilers!
Do You Like Adorable Buddy Comedies?
Ryland Grace ends up being the straight man in most of the story. Even the stern, intimidating, and often imperious Eva Stratt ends up ribbing Grace about always wanting things just so and for being overly humble and timid.
But the largest buddy comedy component doesn’t come in until about a third of the way into the book. That’s odd and probably warrants more exploration. I recently re-read Craig Alanson’s Columbus Day (Expeditionary Force) and it’s much the same way. It almost feels like two books.
There’s another character you meet, a non-humanoid but incredibly human alien that Grace calls Rocky.
Before this encounter, the book is mostly about the mystery of how Grace gets into space and into another stellar system without memory of the trip or anything else—not even his name. That’s quite the novel premise right there.
But then, about 160 pages in, the novel throws this curveball at you—intelligent alien life—and the book gets so much better.
Honestly, without Rocky, I don’t know how much I would like Project Hail Mary. Rocky also gets to poke fun at Grace for being a ‘dumb human’ but the two end up forming a bond worth dying for as they work together to save their two very different worlds. It’s beautiful, funny, and touching.
So yeah, if you kind of want a Turner and Hooch or Lilo and Stitch baked into a hard sci-fi, spacefaring novel, then you’ll probably enjoy Project Hail Mary.
Do You Like Alien Movies?
Sometimes you feel like a nut, and sometimes you feel like a humbug of a human who is sick of alien movies—or in my case, I’m fine with aliens but I’m tired of action movies bringing in gods from myth or other planets (I’m looking at you, Marvel).
If you’re just over stuff with aliens in it or just have never really been into stories with aliens, a third of the book in, without this spoiler, you may have said to yourself, “Well, crap. I just read 159 pages too many of an alien book. You could have warned me, Weir!” Of course, unless you avoid spoilers like I do, you probably saw the alien reveal in the Project Hail Mary movie trailers. Lame!
For those of us with no aversion to alien life in our fiction, that curveball felt more like a push-pull reading moment where we, instead of saying to ourselves, “Well, crap, Weir!” were saying, “Well Mr. Weir, you sly dog. I didn’t see this coming after The Martian!”
Would You Prefer Purely Immersive, Soft Sci-fi?
Immersive sci-fi isn’t really a thing as far as I’ve researched, and you could certainly make the argument that all the details in hard science fiction have a more immersive effective because they attempt to ground the story in realism. But having recently watched the Project Hail Mary movie twice and then re-read the book, I’ve concluded that, while I love this book and thoroughly enjoyed seeing the film adaptation, I don’t want to write books like Andy Weir.
He is a thorough guy with a lovable geek vibe when you watch interviews with him, which is mostly irrelevant except that, he really digs into the details of his story, both to ensure that his science fiction is as scientifically-sound as possible, and to help him see what is likely to happen next in his story.
Expand section to reveal spoiler.
In The Martian, this helped you get into the mind of an astronaut’s struggle to survive. In Project Hail Mary, it detailed the threats to humanity’s struggle to survive and how Ryland Grace approached first contact interactions with intelligent alien life.
I don’t think there’s a single detail in Weir’s writing that he hasn’t broken down into a multi-sheeted spreadsheet document. (see below YouTube interview for proof)
I don’t want to write that way. Maybe I will find it helpful to edit that way eventually, but I also don’t plan on putting this much scientific background into my books.
In the only piece of fiction that I’ve published so far, a novella called K.I.A., I am very skimpy on the technical, scientific, and spiritual details. To me, those are liabilities that are likely to lead the reader to bring baggage into the story from other books they’ve read or real world science they know. I don’t want to explain to my readers who a faster-than-light ship’s engines work. I just want to have the character push the Go Fast button on their ship’s console, they get somewhere super fast, and then the plot keeps going and the characters continue to do interesting things, changing as they go. That appeals more to me.
Weir info dumps. He does it well, but holy exposition, Batman! He dumps early, often, and right up until the end of Project Hail Mary. If you’re not a fan of hard sci-fi, you’ll probably have to work at getting through parts of Project Hail Mary. But again, Peter Weir (or his editor) does a pretty good job of knowing when enough is enough. He gets away with more than he probably should because
Expand to reveal spoiler
It turns out that Ryland Grace is a high school science teacher.
So he almost can’t help himself and it comes out a little more naturally.
I’ve been reading The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, and I just put it on my Did Not Finish shelf because I was tired of looking up the fancy words the characters use in that book. I mention that because I tried to justify this in the same way. “If the British government were to form a Ministry of Time, they’d staff it with highly educated people that might speak with a more sophisticated vocabulary, so yeah, it's annoying, but maybe I shouldn’t let it take me out of the story…” I thought and fought for the book because I really wanted to stick it out. I mean it’s soft sci-fi, which I’m thinking is my jam. Literary fiction, but still…maybe I’ll get back to it.
Anyway, back to PHM. At page 459, so close to the resolution, I might have been tempted to rewrite this passage:
I put my finger on the screen where I saw the blip. I check the Petrovascope bearing, do some math on the screen, and work out the angle. It’s 214 degrees’ yah in my current plane, which is 55 degrees off the Tau Ceti-Adrian orbital ecliptic.
“Gotcha!”
To instead read something like:
I put my finger on the screen where I saw the blip. I check the Petrovascope bearing, do some math.
“Gotcha!
I don’t want to feel like I did the math. I just want that “Gotcha!” success moment, you know?
Hard sci-fi infodumps take me out of the story big time. Instead, I’d prefer the minimum amount of detail to keep the story going and the characters moving. I want the character to swing a light saber—not tell me in detail about how their grandfather crafted it and where the crystal inside it was sourced. At the very least, spread all that out over the course of a couple of chapters and only if it’s absolutely necessary.
There’s also a fair bit…I want to say a lot…of what some might call ecological propaganda in the book and that comes out in large, often dialogue based infodumps that really took me out of the story, and I don’t even necessarily have a problem with what the characters are saying.
Can You Deal With A Little Eco-Shaming and Climate Change Preaching That May Trigger Your Solastalgia?
The theme of this book is, “If we work together, we can stop human-generated climate change and even reverse its effects.”
Expand to reveal section containing spoilers.
In Project Hail Mary, alien life first jeopardizes humanity’s survival by threatening global cooling, then saves our planet by restoring balance. All along the way though, the human scientists and politicians in the story can’t help but drop nuggets about how humans have been causing climate change for decades and how we haven’t been able to work together to solve it up until now, so it’s going to take a miracle (a hail mary—hey, the joke’s in the book—it’s not my pun) to save the day in light of these sun-munching critters from outer space. In order to survive in the meantime, the characters nuke Antarctica to try to reverse of the effects of the solar plague that is reducing sunlight, purposely leveraging the greenhouse effect to increase the temperature of Earth.
I get the science; I don’t disagree with the science; and I still could have done without the undertone of political vitriol. That took me out of the story most of all, and I would have felt the same way if the views shared by the characters were those of climate deniers. I’m just done with the argument. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’m Torn When It Comes To Hard Sci-Fi
Circling back to this point, my mission statement or whatever you call it—my About The Author manifesto—on this website is to feed the desire to look around the corner in stories and to give details that satisfy the itch to be immersed in a story. People probably love hard science fiction because the details about the world do that for them. I may end up having to revise my position on that or reframe how I read and think about hard sci-fi and exposition.
The mentorship program I am currently participating in teaches to write with the minimum viable amount of exposition and that just feels right. My current work in progress (not Live and Impersonated but something new and super-secret 🤫) is coming out lithe and fast-paced. When I go back and read things after letting them marinate for a bit, I get this sense of surprise, almost forgetting that I wrote the piece. When I go back and read this new thing, I think it'll really feel that way because I'm writing in a different style. Fingers-crossed it's because I've leveled up as a writer.
Anyways, thanks for reading, and please buy someone a copy of Project Hail Mary from a link on this website and support the maintenance of this blog. 🍻