Project Hail Mary

Andy Weir, 2021

Thoughts

Andy Weir can do plot. You can tell Weir was a developer in a past life; the eddies and whorls of dramatic tension and resolution are crafted into tight feedback loops, the peaks and valleys of success and failure for our protagonist an EKG across nearly 500 pages. Flow state, a heightened mental acuity you get from threading work between not too easy and not too hard tasks, is built on these tight feedback loops, and is a built into the fabric of Weir’s fiction. To past readers of Weir and specifically The Martian, this book will fit like a sports metaphor to a corporate powerpoint. It is immensely readable, and there is plenty of genuine surprise at the many turns of the plot, mostly centered around a particular problem solved by a particular piece of science, science a junior high school teacher might know. Which is fortunate, since the protagonist assures us multiple times that he, Ryland Grace, is a junior high school teacher.

Peer behind the curtain of plot, however, and there isn’t much beyond the dazzling veneer. What I’ve always liked about the best science fiction is that plot was always in service of asking bigger ontological questions, questions about what it means to be human, our place in the universe. Asimov’s robots or Dick’s androids force us to reckon with our own existence and autonomy. Butler’s stories were about racism, sexism, and culture as much as they were about aliens or religious cults. Instead, here we have the masculinist story of lone man facing an unconquered wilderness: Hillary and Everest, McCandless and Alaska, Shackleton and Antarctica.

Weir is keen to play the enthusiastic instructor, outlining two stories, one in the amnesiatic present, and one in the recent past that explains how we came to be in the present. It works as a plot device, as the ping-ponging back and forth building frothed tension. But the two halves aren’t balanced, and like most other things, seem solely in service of plot. The cowardice of the final act doesn’t feel authentic, undermined by the previous 400 pages of characterization. The linguistic precocity of the protagonist is frankly unbelievable. There isn’t a tidiness of structure, no hint of complexity in construction. Not that I expect the labyrinthine creations of Umberto Eco or Borges, but I suppose I like my stories told like puzzles to solve in their assembly. What you end up with is a alluring two dimensional Walter White doing science in space.