Project Hail Mary

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir is yet another book I've been seeing everywhere over the last six months or so. Clearly, from the reviews, very popular. And at the beginning of this year I decided that one of my personal challenges would be to try to read at least one science fiction or fantasy book per month. I did well with that in January but hadn't read anything in that vein come mid-February so I went to my library pile and grabbed Project Hail Mary.

The story opens with someone emerging from a coma and a voice asking what is two plus two. It takes the patient a long time to work this out and once he's done that the voice wants to know his name. If he can't remember, which he can't, he has to stay in the room he's currently in, which is rather traumatic because there are two other beds there, both containing dead bodies.

Slowly but surely, Robert Grace remembers his name and realises where he must be. Not that it helps to know that he's on a spaceship and the two dead people are the rest of his crew, because he can't remember what the mission is. But here he is approaching the sun. Well, no. He's not. He soon realises that this is not his sun or even his solar system, it's someone else's. It's Tau Ceti, a close neighbour of ours, and it's taken Grace three years to get here and he's on his own with a problem to solve but he can't remember what the problem is. 

Enter stage left another spacecraft. It couldn't be more different to the one Grace is in but he is contacted and the two crafts join via a tunnel and he becomes the first human to ever meet a real live member of an alien species, 'Rocky', as Grace names him. As it turns out the two have struck lucky. Grace is a scientist and Rocky is an engineer who can fix or make anything. But he can't go into the human environment and Grace can't go into his. Which is problematical as they both realise they are here for the same reason, to save their planets from certain destruction from the same source.

There used to be an American TV show years ago, called McGyver, wherein an actor called Richard Dean Anderson played a chap who got into all kinds of scrapes and always had the ingenuity to fix anything with an elastic band and a piece of chewing gum. This is what this book reminded me of. It's chock-full of science and engineering explanations of how they manage to fix some pretty challenging problems, many of them going over my head rather but I got the gist and anyway it really didn't matter because the stars of the show are Grace and Rocky and their relationship. I love how they taught themselves their respective languages via a laptop. I loved that it was explained to me exactly how different Rocky is to humans and how our atmosphere was so toxic to him. These 'differences' are why I love science fiction so much, it makes me think in an entirely different way about Life, the Universe and Everything.

This is a dual timeline story. Not only are we with Grace and Rocky trying to save their respective planets, we also go back to see how Grace got where he is. What is causing the sun's light to diminish, what the scientists decided to do about it, who they put in charge - a real kick-ass woman - and how the crew of the Earth spacecraft got chosen. I generally am not mad about dual timelines because I always prefer one over the other but that wasn't so much the case here. I did prefer being with Rocky and Grace but only marginally. 

I gave Project Hail Mary 5 stars on Goodreads. It was a terrific yarn, full of edge of your seat moments, intriguing science and best of all two fantastic main characters whose relationship was a 'joy'. I think I'll be looking for more books by Andy Weir.