Project Hail Mary Book Review
Project Hail Mary Book Review by Andy Weir
Let me set the scene.
A man wakes up alone in a room he doesn't recognize. He has no memory of who he is, where he is, or how he got there. Two dead bodies are strapped into beds nearby. He's malnourished. He has no idea what's happening.
Oh, and he's in space.
This is how Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary opens, and I'll give credit where it's due, that's a hook. That's a genuinely excellent hook. You're immediately in problem-solving mode alongside our hero, Dr. Ryland Grace, a middle school science teacher turned accidental savior of the entire human race, as he slowly pieces together that he's on a solo mission to a star called Tau Ceti to figure out why the sun is dying and save all of humanity. Casual Tuesday. No big deal.
The premise is absurd in the best possible way. A microscopic organism called Astrophage, don't worry, Ryland will explain it to you fourteen times, has been feeding on solar energy across the entire solar system, dimming every star it touches, and Earth has approximately a generation before we all freeze to death.
International governments have pooled their resources, sacrificed everything, and shot one scientist into deep space on the Hail Mary with a cryogenic prayer that he figures something out. The fate of mankind rests on a single schoolteacher who, frankly, does not inspire a ton of confidence.
That's the good news and the bad news, simultaneously.
Let me be very clear about something before we go any further: Ryland Grace has the internal monologue of a fourteen-year-old boy.
I say this not as a casual observation but as a professional assessment. I teach high school. I know the voice of a freshman boy who just learned something cool in class and cannot wait to explain it to you in exhaustive, slightly unhinged detail. That is Ryland Grace. That is this entire book. The man is handed the weight of human civilization and his primary emotional register is gee whiz, isn't that neat.
When he makes a scientific breakthrough, he doesn't sit with it. He doesn't feel the existential enormity of what it means. He goes "Huh. Cool." and then figures out the next thing. When he's confronted with the fact that he may die billions of miles from home, alone, having never seen his planet again, his response is essentially a shrug and a pivot to the next equation. The emotional depth of a golden retriever who just found a tennis ball.
Now, I have to be intellectually honest: I think this might be intentional. Andy Weir clearly wrote The Martian the same way, and people loved Mark Watney's relentless sunniness in the face of probable death.
The point is the optimism. The point is the science. The point is to make astrophysics feel fun and accessible rather than terrifying and cold. I understand the assignment. I recognize that this is probably a feature, not a bug.
And yet.
I wanted more. I wanted Ryland to crack, even once. I wanted him to sit in the dark of that ship and feel the full horror of what he'd lost— his memory, his life, his planet— before bouncing back. The math is staggering. The science is legitimately fascinating.
But it's all being processed by a man who sounds like he's narrating a YouTube video for gifted middle schoolers, and it creates a persistent disconnect between the magnitude of the mission and the voice carrying it. For all its astrophysics, this is, literarily speaking, a book for smart teenagers. Which is fine! But I wanted to read the adult version.
The characters are where I have the most complicated feelings, because they are genuinely good. I just wanted more of them.
Dr. Ryland Grace and Rocky, the spider-like alien from a binary star system who Ryland meets mid-mission in a great first-contact sequence, are a duo for the ages. Their friendship is the beating heart of this novel, built on math and science and mutual desperation, and it is unexpectedly moving.
The scenes where they learn to communicate, where they start to trust each other, where they begin to actually like each other despite being completely incompatible life forms—those scenes are wonderful. Weir is at his best when he lets these two just exist together.
But I wanted more of it. I wanted the quiet moments, the friendship deepening beyond survival logistics, the genuine growth that comes from two beings fundamentally changing each other. We get glimpses. We get enough to love what's there. We don't get enough to feel the full weight of it.
Stratt is the other standout, a ruthless, brilliant, morally iron-spined woman who essentially conscripts Ryland into this mission by refusing to take no for an answer. She's fascinating. She makes choices that are deeply uncomfortable and completely correct, and she barely flinches doing it.
In the movie, we get significantly more of her, and it is controversial for it. Her presence grounds the Earth-side story in a way the book never quite manages to replicate through flashbacks alone. I wanted her on the page the way she is on the screen. She deserved it.
The supporting cast of the international scientists, the various figures who populate the flashback sequences are serviceable. They exist to move plot and establish stakes. They are not particularly memorable. But honestly, with Rocky and Stratt in the mix, I'm not sure the book needed them to be.
So. Let's talk numbers, because I believe in transparency and in not rounding up out of politeness.
Literarily? Project Hail Mary is a six out of ten. From both the perspective of an English teacher and an English major, the writing is functional rather than beautiful, the protagonist is emotionally stunted by design, and the character work, while charming, stops short of what it could have been. As a piece of literature, it doesn't particularly distinguish itself.
But I'm giving it an eight out of ten and let me tell you why.
Here's the thing about books: sometimes they're just fun. Sometimes the premise is so good, the central relationship is so charming, and the experience of reading it is so genuinely enjoyable that the literary deficiencies almost don't matter.
Project Hail Mary gave me real wonder. It made me think about the universe and the sun and the impossible loneliness of space in ways that were exciting rather than existentially crushing. It made me root for an alien who communicates through music and breathes toxic ammonia gas. It is hopeful in a way that very few books manage without feeling saccharine.
And then I watched the movie (which I also enjoyed by the way) and got to experience the whole thing again from a different angle. That doesn't happen often. Being part of a cultural moment, reading a book that everyone is talking about, watching an adaptation that honors the source material—there's a specific joy in that, and Project Hail Mary delivered all of it.
Recommendation: Is it the most sophisticated novel I've ever read? Absolutely not. Will Ryland Grace's cheerful obliviousness in the face of apocalypse occasionally make me want to throw the book across the room? Yes, he will, and he did. But do I regret a single page of it?
Not even a little.
Sometimes books don't need to be literary masterpieces. Sometimes they just need to have a really, really good time. On that metric, Project Hail Mary passes with flying colors.
Even if Ryland Grace would have phrased that much, much nerdier (and cringier) than me.
Score: 8/10