Project Hail Mary

 A friend of mine wanted to do a sort of book club together with some books including Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. We just happened to start reading it right before the movie is due to come out, so that was a happy coincidence. :)

In Project Hail Mary, astronaut Mark Watney Ryland Grace wakes up from a coma in another solar system. He's really disoriented and doesn't really remember what was happening at first, but he slowly pieces together, with help of his slowly returning memories, that he and two other astronauts were sent aboard the Hail Mary to Tau Ceti in a desperate attempt to save the Earth. A bacteria, Astrophage, has been discovered traveling back and forth between our sun and Venus, and it seems to be feeding off of our sun's light; in just a few short years, without a solution, over half of the world's population will die as crops fail due to the cooling of the air. So the world's governments got together to send a team to Tau Ceti, a nearby star, that seemed to be unaffected by Astrophage (the other neighbouring stars all seemed to have similar dimming problems).

But Ryland wakes up alone; his fellow astronauts passed away in transit. So now he has to solve the problem on his own.

Or at least, that's what he originally thinks until he encounters an alien star-ship. It seems that an alien species from another solar system (40 Eridani) are having similar problems due to Astrophage, and are also at Tau Ceti to try to find a solution. When the aliens saw the Hail Mary arrive, they made contact in the hopes that the two species can find a solution and save both their worlds together.

I loved Project Hail Mary. I wasn't expecting an alien species to make contact with Ryland, and, being a language nerd, I loved how they built up communication together. I also loved Rocky (what Ryland calls his new alien friend), and thought the two of them made a great team. 

The book goes back and forth between Ryland's present at Tau Ceti and his past, where he was part of the team that built the Hail Mary, as flashbacks as he regains his memories. The past serves to help him remember things about the ship and how it works, which in turns helps him use his scientific knowledge (he is a microbiologist) to try to find a solution to the Astrophage. I did start getting annoyed with going back to the past at times once the book got going because I was much more interested in what was going on at Tau Ceti than with what happened while they were building the ship. Though there was some interesting intrigue going on as well, once it became clear that everything wasn't quite as clear-cut as I originally assumed regarding Ryland's presence.

I also felt like Ryland wasn't really his own character, but just a further adventure of Mark Watney from The Martian. While it's admittedly been over a decade since I read The Martian, I felt like they were just too similar. Both were science nerd with a lot of random knowledge that was helpful. They also talked and thought in what felt like a similar manner (though again, it might not be; I haven't reread The Martian recently). 

The book also feels similar to The Martian in that everything that can go wrong (but Ryland and company survive) does. I remember feeling like the book must be wrapping up soon, but looking at how many pages are left to go still and thinking "well, at least one or two things are still going to go wrong from here."  So that was a little bit disappointing.

But honestly, I flew through the book in just a few days, barely wanting to put it down. I really enjoyed it, and I'm looking forward to the movie (though it'll be interesting to see how Ryan Gosling interprets Ryland Grace - a lot of how he talks in the book reminds me of Ryan Reynolds).