Project Hail Mary (Andy Weir)

Project Hail Mary
Andy Weir
Ballantine Books
Fiction, SciFi
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Dr. Ryland Grace wakes on a spaceship with no memory of how he got there, let alone why he's there at all. Two corpses are all that remains of the rest of the crew. When he discovers that the nearest star isn't the sun he's known all his life, things get even stranger... but as fragmentary memories surface, he realizes just how dire his situation is.
It all started when the sun began dimming inexplicably. When the culprit was discovered to be a form of microscopic life entirely unlike anything seen on Earth, a top team of experts recruited Ryland - once a prominent scientist who wrote a controversial thesis on hypothetical extraterrestrial life possibilities, now a middle school teacher who shuns academia - to study the "Astrophage" and, hopefully, find a cure before reduced sunlight triggers a mass extinction event. But he was never supposed to be out here alone, especially not with fragmented memories.
Then he sees the flare of another engine, and he learns that he's not as alone as he thought he was... nor is Earth the only world in danger.

REVIEW: The movie based on this book, starring Ryan Gosling, has been dominating the box office and gets little but positive buzz everywhere I look, but I hear many people who read the book first grumble at what was trimmed. I have not seen the movie yet, but I just finished the book... and I have to say that there's quite a bit that could be cut that might've improved the reading experience, page-eating tangents that made the first half drag so bad I nearly gave up.
From the start, there's a certain "Gary Stu" vibe to Dr. Ryland Grace that, along with Weir's love of long scientific tangents into minutiae that seems to exist largely to show off how much thought he put into the intricacies of his ideas, overshadows the overall story and what should have been a gripping premise. The man can "science" anything better than anyone else, yet nobly prefers teaching children to pursuing academic accolades. When the world needs saving, though, he's plucked from obscurity as one of the earliest members of what will become Project Hail Mary, the desperate plan to save humanity (and a fair chunk of Earth's essential biome) from the effects of a dimming sun. Even here, among the best of the best, he shines as a top star despite insisting he's just an "everyman" scientist... and that was before he found himself literally as Earth's last, best hope.
Between working out his current situation on the spaceship and flashbacks to the origins of his predicament, a metric spitload of theories and experiments and science and tangents await... and when Ryland encounters the intelligent alien "Rocky" (not really a spoiler, given the movie trailers everywhere, and it's not the main twist anyway), he wastes yet more time and page count ensuring that the reader understands just how much consideration Weir put into designing a truly alien alien, not a green-skinned humanoid with a few bumps on their head. Thankfully, Ryland considers Rocky to be essentially another guy (the alien species doesn't actually have male or female sexes), dodging an old pulp cliché, though there's a bit of a "guy's club" undertone to the book that I couldn't quite guarantee was there yet couldn't quite not see, if that makes any sense.
As all this crawls across the page, past the halfway point, I found myself just picking at the book, not devouring it like I recall devouring Weir's The Martian - which also featured a fair bit of science but stayed focused on astronaut Mark Watney's survival predicament more than Project Hail Mary stays focused on that irrelevant little subplot of saving the planet. It's like there was half a story that was padded out with tangents.
Later on, the story (almost despite itself) builds up a decent momentum. Ryland actually makes a few humanizing mistakes. The scientific tangents focus a little more on the problem at hand, for all that I found myself skimming a few paragraphs now and again to get back to the plot itself. It comes down to a fairly solid wrap-up that leaves the door cracked for future developments.
The overall ideas should've earned Project Hail Mary four stars at least. Weir presents some interesting ideas and hypotheticals, and clearly put a decent amount of thought into things beyond "it looks cool" (not that there's anything wrong with that sort of story). One also has to admire a book that celebrates the possibilities of science, especially in an era where too many people (particularly those in power, despite how much of that power only exists because of science and the advancements in civilization that it creates) are actively rallying against it. But the book just could not overcome the slog of the first half when it came time for me to rate it.

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