Project Hail Mary

Ryland Grace, an American middle school teacher with an annoying name, wakes up from a coma in deep space. His mission, remembered only at intervals due to coma-related amnesia, is to uncover the mystery behind an interstellar bacterium which has infected the sun and is causing it to slowly go out. Shortly he meets an alien from another star system on the same mission. Together they get into a bunch of The Martian-esque science hijinx and sort out the mystery.

That’s the book.

It doesn’t feel like a story so much as a series of problems that Grace and his extraterrestrial buddy, Rocky, have to solve. Which I guess some people quite like; but as for me I never felt like anything was in danger of happening. Most of the book is: something has upset the status quo on the spaceship; Grace & Rocky fix it; the status quo is restored; something else has upset the status quo on the spaceship.

Usually the solution involves gratuitous descriptions of pressing buttons or cycling through screens or attaching things together. This doesn’t feel like narrative to me. It is to narrative as descriptions of what someone is wearing is to character. Yes, Grace is doing things — but nothing is happening. I don’t need three pages of explanation of how some xenonite chain is designed and constructed; just tell me that you did it.

I will say that Rocky is a terrific character. He’s physically expressive, a bit of a himbo, helpless and simultaneously capable. I do wonder how much of Rocky’s lovability is because he’s like a dog that can communicate. Do we like Rocky because he's basically Grace’s daemon?

There are a couple of story beats right at the end of the book that do feel like something is happening — but they come a little bit too late:

The first explains why Grace is on the mission, despite being a middle school teacher and not an astronaut. I wouldn’t call it a twist, but it sort of reorients your perspective of characters in a way that makes zero material difference. I think it was included to give Grace a character arc, but it’s not an effective arc because the shift in character happens off-screen, while he’s out with his coma+amnesia; he goes to sleep at one end of the arc and wakes up at the other.

The second did surprise me, so I’m not going to write about it here — but the book runs out of pages to explore the consequences of what was effectively only the third or fourth actual thing to happen in the whole book.

Still I thought it was fun.