Like The Martian, this book features a highly competent astronaut, far from home, trying to stay alive long enough to get a job done. Unlike that book, our protagonist wakes up not knowing where or even who he is and has to figure many things out from first principles, while his memory slowly comes back.
The book takes two parallel tracks, firstly in the present, our protagonist (who eventually remembers that he’s called Ryland Grace) figures out that he’s on a spaceship, but not in our solar system, while the other story fills in the blanks about how he ended up in that situation. What was dire enough to send him in a coma so far into space? Unlike The Martian’s Mark Watney, at least Grace doesn’t have to do it all alone – technically this is a (fairly minor) spoiler, but it’s important for the plot, so Grace meets an alien, who, it turns out, is on a similar mission to himself.
While Weir is top notch on the physics in the book, the linguistics around this was an area where I felt he hand-waved a bit. It just seemed too easy for the two to learn to communicate. It takes a few pages, starting with basic counting and ending with them being able to communicate complex abstract concepts like ‘hope’. It’s not a big thing, but it bothered me.
The book is a lot of fun to read, it’s got that same close first person narration as The Martian and Grace is almost (almost!) as personable as Watney and is great to spend time with. When you eventually find out his background, though, I’m not as convinced that he should be as competent as he is. I also never really felt that he, or his alien companion, was in any actual danger at any point. It felt like they were going to be able to “science the sh*t” out of whatever situation they found themselves in. The only remotely shocking revelation came in the second-last flashback, which made you sit up and re-evaluate Grace entirely, not to mention Ms Stratt, the administrator the world put in charge of Project Hail Mary.
Speaking of Stratt, that’s another thing that doesn’t entirely ring true. Maybe I’m just cynical in my old age, but I honestly don’t think the various nations of the world would have agreed to work as closely as they did to get the Hail Mary launched, giving Stratt effectively unlimited authority. We’ve just been through (hell, are still in) a global pandemic, and we saw countries close themselves off, rich countries pay to ensure that they got the vaccines before poorer ones, and a hell of a lot of secrecy around treatment and vaccine development. Now granted, Covid-19 wasn’t an existential threat to the whole of humanity the way that Astrophage is, but it’s a glimpse into how we’d react. And we were found wanting.
Still, that just makes it a comforting read, to think that politicians might actually work for the best when the chips are fully down.
A riveting book, very easy to read, with an intriguing mystery, a sympathetic protagonist and a lot of science!
