Very spoilery review of Project Hail Mary. I don’t recommend reading this if you ever plan to read PHM (go in as fresh as possible), but it provides enough context for people who haven’t read it. I liked the book, and this review is largely about my ideas for how it could have been even better.
Ryland Grace, a scientist who wakes up with amnesia on a spaceship with corpses in the other two coma pods, slowly pieces together that
- he used to be a schoolteacher
- who also became one of the world experts on a planetary catastrophe
- he was on a 3 person mission to another star system to find the solution to said planetary catastrophe (star-eating microbe whose life cycle involves zipping back and forth between Venus and Sol)
- the mission was a suicide mission
- he did not want to go, and had to be physically coerced into getting on the spaceship when the original scientist crew member died in an accident.
Ryland Grace is basically interchangeable with the protagonist of The Martian – more a vehicle for explaining the solutions to a bunch of physics problem set questions in a layperson-friendly way than a person.
This is a pity, because unlike The Martian, Project Hail Mary has a very specific shape that would fit a very specific person that Ryland Grace almost is. But before that, let’s get to the spoilery part, which is that Grace
- picks up the energy readings of another spaceship in the same star system
- makes contact with the sole inhabitant, a five-limbed spider-lookin’ engineer (nicknamed Rocky) from an ammonia planet with a much higher temperature and gravity, who has traveled to the Tau Ceti system for the same reason as Grace
- quickly learns the Rocky’s language (within weeks) and starts working together with him to find a solution
- finds a local predator (nicknamed taumoeba) of the star-eating microbe, and selectively breeds it to survive the atmospheres of Venus and (the alien’s equivalent of Venus)
- parts ways with Rocky
At this point I have to make the obligatory complaint about how unseriously Andy Weir treats the challenge of establishing a mutual language with an alien species! After showing how Grace and Rocky establish what their terms are for “velocity” or “nitrogen”, we fast forward to the state of affairs where Rocky is approximately a fluent English speaker who uses words like “sad” or “amaze” (no explanation of how those were conveyed!).
Andy Weir cares 99% about engineering problems, and the remaining 1% of caring is thinly buttered over all the other topics. I can’t find it in me to be too annoyed about this – it’s endearing, honestly – but when 80% of the emotional interactions in a novel are with an alien (largely because Weir so ardently wants to avoid writing about humans talking to humans…), it’s disappointing that the alien is basically Some Guy but with mercury for blood.
…back to the plot. On his way home, Grace realizes there was a problem with the containment system that will lead to the taumoeba escaping and eating all of the fuel in Rocky’s spaceship. He solves the problem on his own ship, and changes course to intercept Rocky. Rocky is indeed out of fuel, and Grace chooses to use his ship to take Rocky to his home, Erid. There isn’t enough fuel for both of them to return to their respective planets.
(Taumoeba samples, and explanations on how to deploy them, are sent back to Earth on four tiny backup rockets.)
Over a decade later, Grace receives news from his alien hosts that Sol’s energy output is restored and Earth’s crisis has been averted. He rejoices and hobbles over on a cane (Erid’s gravity is hell on his joints) to a different part of his habitat whose window opens up to a classroom, where it is revealed that he has resumed his vocation as a schoolteacher – to Eridian children who are extremely psyched to receive instruction from an alien.
So. This is a bittersweet ending! It’s a hell of a thing to be the only human being on an alien planet, even if you like your hosts – living alone in a habitat that none of your hosts can survive in, eating burgers grown from your own stem cells, and knowing that you’re going to die without ever being touched by a conspecific again. This would be a depressing ass fate for the vast majority of people. It only kind of works because the Eridians are depicted as so psychologically similar to humans.
And Grace’s reaction is kind of, “Ah, well, it was hard to get this going. I have some health problems. Life goes on though.”
But you know what would make this reaction sensical? If Grace had been significantly more socially maladjusted! Here’s more about Grace:
- Left academia after he published a paper on alien life (that sounded pretty mainstream to me, but apparently in this universe it got him laughed out of the door)
- Doesn’t have any romantic partners because he’s not suited to coordinating with other people at close contact (this comes up ONCE when his new boss is psychoanalyzing him and never again)
- Is a schoolteacher and loves it – seems much more comfortable teaching children than interacting with peers
- Refused to join the crew of his because he was not down with going on a suicide mission, even though he cares about Earth’s survival and recognizes he’s far more suitable than the second best candidate
He’s a very bland protagonist – aside from having to be forced to get into the robot spaceship, he has no conflict with other human character. Nor does he expresses judgment or discomfort or alienation about other people, aside from a brief incident where someone overshares about his sex life. But if you leaned into how his discomfort with other human beings, his exile in Erid retroactively becomes a relief and a freedom that, personally, I find more narratively satisfying than “dissonant bittersweet”.
It wouldn’t even take that much adjusting!
- Play up how averse he is to dating or having close friendships
- Play up how much he likes teaching children because the social rules are so explicit and he has clear value to them as a source of entertainment and information
- Switch his motivation for working on the mission from “want to save humanity” to “I honestly am not capable of caring about humanity itself due to my alienation from it, but find this research problem super intellectually interesting and it would HURT to not get to work on this” (which would make the scene where he’s forced to become a backup crew member more compelling – in the text as it is, he sounds incongruously cowardly and irrational)
- Sprinkle in more minor conflicts with other researchers due to obliviousness/anxiety/contempt/discomfort
I’d also make the aliens more alien, so that there’s less camaraderie between himself and Rocky – which would actually sets him at ease, because the Grace Prime I’m designing is much more comfortable with intellectual problems than interpersonal negotiation, and the more Rocky presents as the former than the latter, the happier Grace Prime is. I think they should be friends, as in canon, but friends who struggle to communicate anything that isn’t technical. Grace Prime takes comfort in Rocky’s presence the same way he would in the presence of a dog, and doesn’t even attempt to talk about his feelings to Rocky. It comes to Grace Prime as a relief, in fact, that doing so would be so linguistically difficult that he doesn’t have to debate whether it’s socially appropriate!
Grace Prime, in his exile on Erid with enough alien technology to chew on for the rest of his life, is cut off permanently from potential growth as a social animal but doesn’t regard it as a tragedy (although the reader may).
This characterization and ending is particularly suited for a book written by an author who so clearly prefers to write about a guy solving problems, safely separated a million miles away from any other human being – it would just need to come out of a writer who finds this fact about himself interesting. And Andy Weir doesn’t.