Project Hail Mary is every bit as entertaining, inspiring, and satisfying as The Martian. For a sense of wonder, we can wait for the movie, which may even touch on the unspoken dread - implicit in the myth of the competent man - that Watney once expressed in a rare moment of doubt: 'No more getting my hopes up, no more self-delusion and no more problem-solving.' Read Full Review > At its best, the genre is a delightful game indeed, and many literary virtues can be sacrificed to its potential pleasures, which include awe, strangeness and other effects that Weir never really achieves. demands to be judged by the standards of hard science fiction, and it honors the laws of physics to an extent that makes comparable novels seem like playing tennis without a net. Weir’s default voice allows for the painless delivery of facts, but it limits the emotions available to our hero, whose usual reaction to astounding events is to nerd out briefly at their awesomeness. While Mark Watney confronted a succession of escalating obstacles, Grace tends to resolve each setback almost immediately, and his relentless quips read like the output of an algorithm that was fed nothing but Joss Whedon scripts. For readers who can forgive its shortcomings, the result is an engaging space odyssey. The main character’s isolation, which was so crucial in The Martian, is a similarly convenient excuse for Weir to downplay messy human issues in favor of a cleverly organized series of challenges that Grace himself compares to 'a video game'.
In fiction, an unambiguous technological crisis can be oddly comforting, and the novel works best as we piece together the situation alongside Grace, whose memory loss is less an essential plot point - apart from a passing revelation toward the end, this isn’t a story that treats amnesia as a source of surprises - than a device for parceling out information.
a sensible course correction that supersizes the strategies of his most successful book.
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