Project Hail Mary Review

Project Hail Mary was an excellent book! After three people in a row recommending it to me, and it being nominated for a Hugo award, I figured I'd give it a read. In the future I want to do a compare and contrast with "A Memory Called Empire" and "A Desolation Called Peace", since the latter stole the Hugo away from Project Hail Mary. Before I get into the review, here is my standard disclaimer: Obviously the book was good. It's award winning, they're selling it at Kmart down the street, and the movie adaptation featuring Ryan Gosling has been announced - obviously it was a great book. In saying that, here is my critical review.

Project Hail Mary is a simple sci-fi novel with some unique world-building and lighthearted humor. A relatively easy read compared to others in the same category.

Engineer-core

I'm also proclaiming this book as "engineer-core" in that it falls into a category of books clearly written by engineers. (Andy Weir is a former software engineer.) Another example of this is "The Three Body Problem" series written by Liu Cixin (ex-Computer Engineer). Distilled, the core features of any engineer-core novel are:

• Logical problem solving.
• Lots of problem -> thinking -> solution cycles.
• Little to no detail on interpersonal relations or the social aspect of human lives.

As an engineer myself, this is satisfying. All I do at work is solve problems, and watching Ryland and Rocky speedrun solving them feels nice. However, the "hit rate" of their inventions is unrealistically high:

• I just coded up a program to FFT the sound waves and look the chords up in a table! All in 8 hours with little to no software experience! Easy!
• Rocky just built a chain winch! And it works first time! Easy!
• Breeding nitrogen-resistant Taophage works first time! Easy!

But I can overlook this because a book where: Ryland meets Rocky, spends the next 10 days programming some shitty software, only to attempt a handful of experiments (they all fail) and then they crash into the sun, would be quite a boring novel.

Psychological Impacts

Speaking of engineer-core neglecting the social aspect of stories, there is little to no social side to this story. It's just science, story, and excellent worldbuilding. It is mentioned early in the book that the astronauts will be placed into a coma before their flight to mitigate the chance they'll go crazy. After Ryland wakes up, he's just fine. This cold, emotionless, inhuman astronaut never considers:

• Never talking to family again.
• Never talking to friends again.
• Never communicating with another human again.
• Never feeling lonely.
• Never considers if Rocky feels lonely.
• Never asks about Eridian society.

And despite this, Ryland is portrayed as "very human". He's funny. He's likable. It doesn't feel right.

Spaceship Diagrams are Spoilers

In the epub version of the book that I read, the first couple pages show labelled diagrams of the spaceship in both centrifuge and non-centrifuge mode.

Then Chapter 1 immediately goes into painstaking detail about how Ryland slowly experiments his way into the revelation that he's on a spaceship. Which is not a surprise to the reader AT ALL, because:

• The cover of the book has an astronaut on it.
• I was just shown detailed schematics of a spacecraft.

Likewise in Chapter 8, the spacecraft's "Centrifuge Mode" is carefully explained. Any revelation here is stolen from the reader by the schematic of the spacecraft in centrifuge configuration at the start of the novel.

My recommendation: just move those diagrams to the end of chapters 1 and 8 respectively, so we can see the schematics after having the "Ah-ha" moment.

How the F does Taophage "hide" in Xenonite?

I felt like there were two main intensity peaks in this story:

1. Almost breaking the spaceship, and having to jettison fuel, and then having that fuel get eaten by Taomoeba.
2. Taomoeba escaping and getting back into the fuel whilst on the return journey.

The latter here doesn't make any sense. If xenonite can hold a vacuum (which it can, e.g: Rocky's ship + the Taophage enclosures), then hydrogen atoms can't get through it. If hydrogen atoms can't get through it, then a single cell organism most certainly can't get through it.

I know Andy gives a hand-wavy explanation in the book, (throwing tennis balls into a forest, etc) but it doesn't really make sense. I'd love it if there was a more plausible explanation for this.

Other small comments:

• I was hoping Rocky would be like "I wanna watch you poop" but I suppose he would already have "seen" it at some point anyway given he sees everything with vibrations. It could have been very funny if they talked about it.
• Ryland learnt Rocky's alien language very fast 🤔.
• They never cover how reading / writing / information sharing works for Eridians, which is a shame because Andy's thoroughly well-thought-out alien worldbuilding is one of the best parts of this book. I'd read a 100 page story purely about a fictional Eridian dissection to learn more about how they work.

Movie Casting

I placed Ryland Grace as more of a nerdy Californian Ted Lasso, and not Ryan Gosling. More of wholesome, unapologetically nerdy, generic male school teacher - not a classically attractive bad-boy who also does science. But let's see how it works.

Conclusion

I loved the book, and felt it was worth reading. There was unique worldbuilding, a satisfying storyline, and a feel-good ending! It isn't quite as deep, 'artistically' written, or as vibrant as the other Hugo nominated books I've read though, so I feel its place in "Top 5 Sci-fi books of the year" - but not the winner - is a fair assessment.

Bonus Content

Mark Weir has successfully defended himself against AI generated images of Rocky by creating an entirely unique alien. AI image generation is exceptional at adapting things it's seen in loads of images, but creating something unique from text still seems out of reach for it.

Due to my low inate artistic ability, I attempted to generate an image of Rocky. Firstly, this is hard, because it's tough to collect all the descriptions of him from the book. Here is my condensed description in case anyone else wants to give it a try:

Rocky has 5 arms. Each ends with a hand.  The skin looks like a brown-ish blackish rock. Like someone had carved it out of granite but hadn't smoothed it yet.

He's sort of a labrador-sized space-spider. He has five legs radiating out from a central roughly-pentagonal shaped carapace. The carapace, is 18 inches across and half as thick. It has no eyes or face. It is not humanoid shaped at all. Just pentagonal. Each leg has a joint in the middle. Each leg ends in a hand. So he’s got five hands. Each hand has 3 articulared triangular fingers. All 5 hands are the same. He appears to be pentagonally symmetrical. He wears clothing. The legs are bare, showing the rocklike skin, but there’s cloth on the carapace. Sort of like a thick sack with five armholes. It’s a dull greenish-brown. The top of the shirt has a large open hole. That hole is smaller than the carapace.

But there’s no neck or head to go through that hole on top. Just a hard-looking rocky pentagon that sticks up a little bit from the crusty skin.