I’m woefully behind on posting because life has been busy to an extent that I find hard to capture in words. I’m sitting here on New Year’s Eve, at a coffee shop, delightfully unencumbered by…anything, and finally taking my many notes and thoughts about books I’ve read this year and writing them up.
For August, our Book Club read the terribly popular Project Hail Mary. This book is, at heart, a celebration of the belief that science—applied rigorously, creatively, and with a sense of humor—can solve almost any problem. It is also a quintessential example of Andy Weir’s particular brand of hard science fiction: meticulous technical speculation, nerdy joy in discovery, and a tone that invites the reader to marvel alongside the protagonist. For those of us who grew up as space-admiring/aspiring nerds in the 1980s (myself very much included), the novel is a deeply lovable romp through physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering—even if its emotional and psychological dimensions sometimes feel underdeveloped. As with The Martian and Artemis, Weir’s emphasis on scientific accuracy and problem-solving captures hearts and minds, even when the characters themselves can feel more functional than fully realized.
The story takes place in a near future—close enough that all of the science feels contemporary—where junior high school science teacher Dr. Ryland Grace wakes up alone on the interstellar spacecraft Hail Mary with total amnesia. He soon learns that he is the sole survivor of a three-person crew sent twelve light-years from Earth to the Tau Ceti system on a one-way mission to save humanity. Earth’s sun has been infected with Astrophage, a microbial life form that feeds on stellar energy and migrates between stars via infrared emissions known as the Petrova Line. As Astrophage dims the Sun, humanity has only a few decades before agricultural collapse, mass famine, and eventual extinction.
Grace’s task is brutally simple in concept and terrifying in execution: determine why Tau Ceti is unaffected by Astrophage and send that information back to Earth via unmanned probes. The Hail Mary itself is a sacrifice ship—there is not enough fuel for a return journey—and the novel alternates between Grace’s present-day struggle to survive and his gradually returning memories of how he became involved in the mission at all.
Those memories introduce Eva Stratt, arguably one of the most interesting characters in the book. As the UN-appointed director of Project Hail Mary, Stratt is granted total authority and legal immunity, and she uses it without hesitation. Her moral calculus is chilling but compelling: conscription of unwilling experts, international coercion, and even the nuclear bombing of Antarctic ice shelves are all justified if they buy humanity more time. Stratt is not portrayed as cruel, but as ruthlessly pragmatic—someone who accepts the moral cost of survival without flinching. In contrast, Grace’s role in these flashbacks highlights one of his central flaws: his passivity. He enables Stratt’s choices through cooperation and intellectual brilliance, while systematically turning a blind eye to his personal responsibility for their ethical consequences.
At Tau Ceti, the novel truly comes alive when Grace encounters an alien spacecraft—the Blip-A—and its sole surviving pilot, a spider-like Eridian engineer Grace names Rocky. Rocky is easily the most interesting character in the book. Sightless, reliant on sonar, encased in mineral armor, and breathing an ammonia-rich atmosphere, Rocky is both profoundly alien and instantly relatable. His intelligence, perfect memory, extraordinary engineering skill, and deeply ingrained sense of cooperation make him a natural counterpart to Grace. Where Grace improvises and theorizes, Rocky builds. Where Grace jokes to deflect anxiety, Rocky responds with earnest curiosity. Their growing friendship—built through painstaking communication, shared scientific puzzles, and genuine affection—is the emotional core of the novel.
Rocky is on a parallel mission: Astrophage threatens his home system, 40 Eridani, just as it threatens Earth. Together, Grace and Rocky investigate Tau Ceti’s Petrova Line and the planet Adrian, narrowly surviving catastrophic accidents and even exposing themselves to each other’s lethal atmospheres in acts of mutual sacrifice. These scenes underscore one of the book’s strongest themes: cooperation across difference as a survival strategy, not just for individuals, but for entire species.
Grace’s recovered memories reveal the final, damning truth about his own character. After the original crew members—Martin DuBois and Annie Shapiro—are killed in an accident, Stratt forces Grace onto the mission against his will. When he refuses to volunteer, she drugs him with an amnesia-inducing agent and has him loaded onto the ship unconscious. Grace’s shame over this cowardice haunts him in the present timeline, particularly as his actions in space repeatedly demonstrate extraordinary courage, ingenuity, and self-sacrifice.
The ultimate scientific breakthrough—the discovery of Astrophage’s natural predator, Taumoeba, and the engineering of a nitrogen-resistant strain capable of saving both human and Eridian stars—perfectly encapsulates Weir’s thesis: complex, existential problems can be solved through persistence, experimentation, and collaboration. Yet the emotional resolution is more ambiguous. When Grace realizes that his solution may have stranded Rocky, he chooses to abandon his own chance at survival to save his friend. It is the bravest decision he makes in the entire novel—and one that finally feels unambiguous, indicating he has grown through the harrowing experience and friendship he built.
The novel ends with Grace living on Erid, teaching science to young Eridians—a full-circle return to the role that once gave him joy. Earth, we learn, has been saved; the Sun has recovered. But the state of humanity itself remains unresolved. The mission took nearly the entire window before agricultural collapse, and Grace’s choice not to return conveniently spares him from confronting both his earlier cowardice and his complicity in Stratt’s morally catastrophic decisions. In that sense, the ending feels emotionally evasive, even as it is narratively satisfying.
Ultimately, I loved Project Hail Mary. As hard science fiction, it is enormously fun, generous to its readers, and infused with genuine wonder. But I also wished for more: more confrontation, more internal reckoning, and a deeper evolution of Grace as a character. He begins and ends the story in essentially the same emotional place—defined by teaching, avoidance, and intellectual problem-solving—while the most compelling moral and emotional arcs belong to Rocky and Stratt. It’s an incredibly fun book, but one that hints at richer counter-narratives it never fully explores.