This is a transcript of my latest podcast episode.
Hello and welcome to Resurrected Reviews Revisited, part of the Will You Still Love It Tomorrow podcast. I’m Annie and, in each Reviews episode, I pick something I’ve reviewed sometime since 2005, reread or rewatch it, and then compare my reactions. Fair warning: there will be spoilers.
This month, my pick is Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, which was originally published in 2021.
Set in the near future, it centers on school-teacher-turned-astronaut Ryland Grace, who wakes up from a coma afflicted with amnesia. He gradually remembers that he was sent to the Tau Ceti solar system, 12 light-years from Earth, to find a means of reversing a solar dimming event that could cause the extinction of humanity.
Before revisiting it, my recollections of my original experience of encountering this book are as follows:
I loved The Martian and have read it at least three times, both in text and audio versions. So, I remember looking forward to Project Hail Mary – and I also remember enjoying it, but not much more than that. I think there’s a guy who’s alone on a spaceship and he makes contact with an alien, who is also alone on a spaceship – and that’s about it.
Here’s what I thought on revisiting it this year.
It’s very much Andy Weir’s conversational, informal tone – much like Mark Watney’s narrative in the The Martian. The opening is all about the protagonist not knowing where he is or what’s going on – but I can’t imagine many people coming to read this book without already knowing he’s on a spaceship, which rather undermines the intrigue. There’s also quite a lot about gravity, science, and the protagonist trying to work things out from first principles – I remember finding all the science stuff really interesting in The Martian, but the guy trying to figure stuff out at the opening of this book – not so much. Without any context or any details about the character (even his name), it makes it difficult to be invested in what’s happening to him or what any of it means. It’s more like a fairly dry, academic exercise of determining a situation given very little information – but that doesn’t make for a compelling opening to a story, in my view.
There’s quite a lot of personality injected into the narrative voice – but I’m generally finding him a bit annoying rather than anything else, which isn’t good…
I like him a bit more in the flashback to him doing a quickfire quiz with his high school students. But it was a very short scene and then it goes back to overwhelming science detail and him bumbling about the spaceship, trying to remember stuff.
It’s quite amusing, after he’s been assigned to be the first and only person to look at the astrophage samples for a while, and he then discovers he was picked to be the guinea pig to find out if they’ll kill humans.
It doesn’t make sense, though, that he would wake up in the spaceship and not have access to any records or a database or be able to ask the computer questions and get sensible answers. I guess it wouldn’t be expected that he’d wake up without his memories, but you’d think there’d be some information available to the crew for cross-referencing or checking stuff. Mission briefings, manuals for all the technology on the ship, that kind of thing.
I’m just not connecting with it for some reason – and I’m finding the intonation of the audiobook narrator quite annoying, as well as failing to understand most of the science stuff. There’s an incredible depth of minutiae, with the protagonist’s every tiny action being itemised and described and discussed at length, which makes the ‘present day’ storyline of him on the spaceship feel very laboured and slow. And once we have the basics of what led up to him being there, the flashbacks to the preparation for the mission start to feel redundant.
I remembered the story picking up quite a bit with the introduction of the alien, Rocky – but it’s just more tediously detailed science experiments and it takes quite a long time before Rocky really establishes himself with a personality and a presence beyond basic gestures.
It’s about halfway through when Rocky and Grace (his name is used so infrequently that I find it very hard to remember) start having proper conversations and the shared language usage they develop is very cute. They start touching on emotional subjects as well, which also helps a lot in making their interactions more compelling.
It’s at the same point that the flashbacks start talking about attempts to speed up global warming as a way to slow the cooling effects of the astrophage, which is the first part of the background storyline that is really interesting to me and that I actually understand. It also then moves on to crew selection, which is also more interesting than all the impenetrable science.
So I’m suddenly much more engaged, which is nice – though I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have made it this far if I hadn’t been reading it for family book club as well as the podcast.
It gets very exciting and emotionally fraught when they’re collecting the atmosphere sample and suffer the hull breach – the relationship that’s developed between human and alien is very touching when they both risk their own lives to save the other and are injured.
And then Grace remembers that he was forced onto the mission against his will, which is quite a reveal and not something I remembered. But it’s fairly inconsequential compared to saving two planets with intelligent civilisations, so it gets glossed over quite quickly.
And then we’re back to endless science experiments that don’t interest me much. Though the discussion of the make-up of Earth’s atmosphere did have me paying attention to my breathing in a non-meditative way for a while!
The buildup up to Rocky and Grace separating to each head home is really good, and their farewell definitely got me in the feels. And then I’d completely forgotten that Grace then gives up on getting back to Earth to save Rocky and his mission. I guess the point is that it’s a redemption from him having to be forced onto the mission from Earth in the first place – with the option to go home, he willingly sacrifices his own chance to survive to help Rocky and save Rocky’s planet.
But it means we don’t get to find out what’s happened on Earth, which is a bit of a shame.
I’d also forgotten that Grace ends up living on Rocky’s planet, but it did come back to me as I listened to the end of the book and it’s quite sweet.
Overall, though, I didn’t get on particularly well with this book on the revisit, though I did get invested in the friendship between Rocky and Grace, but it wasn’t enough to mitigate the endless science minutiae. I think the difference is definitely me – well, of course it is, because the book hasn’t changed…
Looking back to my original review, it turns out it was in August 2021, so a bit more recent than I remembered.
Here’s what I thought the first time around:
“I absolutely loved The Martian (against all expectations) but wasn’t so keen on Artemis, so I went into the audiobook version of the new Andy Weir book – Project Hail Mary – with some uncertainty.
And my response to it was mixed.
Weir has obviously gone back to what he knows well and what has done well in the past – a man alone in space, not expecting to survive but doing whatever he can to make that happen. In this story, Ryland Grace has the added pressure of having to save humanity as well as himself.
The structure works well – Grace has amnesia so uses what he has on his spaceship to try to figure out what’s going on, while chunks of his memory start to come back to him in flashbacks to the last few years on Earth. But, at least for the first third or so of the book, it’s very, very slow going.
I was engaged enough by the character (aided by very good audiobook narration) and intrigued enough by the situation to keep listening, though it was touch and go for a while. There’s a lot of ‘working things out using scientific first principles’, which isn’t something that generally interests me. All the science stuff in The Martian actually did fascinate me, but here it didn’t so much.
Then, another character is introduced to the present-tense space narrative, which leads to another section of very slow progress, which was a bit of a slog. However, once that aspect of the plot really gets going, things pick up massively, and the second half was much more entertaining and emotive.
And the ending was really cute and very satisfying – so, overall, I would say I enjoyed this book, even though I nearly gave up on it before it got really good. And, anyone who is more interested in space and science than I am will likely not have the same problems with it.”
So, in actual fact, almost exactly the same as this time around! Apart from liking the audiobook narrator the first time and not so much this time. Which yet again proves the unreliability of my memory, because I thought I’d enjoyed this book a lot more than I apparently did! Ah well…
Shortly after I finished reading the book, I attended my family book club, where Dave had chosen Project Hail Mary as the next book to discuss. It’s always interesting to hear other people’s views of the books we read, and this occasion was no different.
Three of the five members loved the book, though one other wasn’t as keen, though I think liked it overall more than I did. The teachers in the group particularly liked the scenes with Grace in the classroom, and everyone loved Rocky as a character.
Dave had a few opinions about the way things worked in the book that hadn’t occurred to me. He always understands more of the science in books than I do and often thinks more critically about certain aspects of world-building and setting. Here, he pointed out that the time it takes Grace and Rocky to reach a point of basically being able to talk to each other without much trouble is ridiculously short.
Several other members of the group highlighted the humour in the book, which I did enjoy to a certain extent, but it wasn’t something that stood out to me as much as it did to them.
Someone also wondered if the set-up of two people being stuck in a small space together over a long period of time was an indication that Andy Weir had written the book in lockdown. But I found an interview with him online where he was asked this question, and he said he’d already completed the book before the pandemic hit.
It was a fun discussion and, as always, it made me consider the book in ways I wouldn’t have otherwise, and I think I came away from the session thinking more positively about it overall than I had beforehand.
And that’s it for this episode of Reviews Revisited.
Next month, I’m going to be revisiting A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, which I currently consider to be one of my favourite books of all time – so I hope I won’t be proved wrong on that score, either by misremembering how much I liked it the first time, or by not enjoying it as much this time for some reason…
Many thanks to Cambo for our theme music. And thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it wherever you get your podcasts.
And if you have any comments, or if you want to tell me about a time you revisited some media, and whether or not you still loved it afterwards, you can email me at willyoustillloveit@gmail.com. I’d love to hear from you.
Lastly, please join us for the next main episode of Will You Still Love It Tomorrow in two weeks to hear what happens when our friend Richard gets us to watch The Adventure Game, which Dave already knows about but that I’ve never seen. Will I like it at all? And will Dave and Richard still love it after our discussion? I’m looking forward to finding out!
Bye for now!