CBR14 Book 8: "Project Hail Mary" by Andy Weir

Page count: 482 pages

Audio book length: 16 hrs 10 mins

Rating: 4 stars

 

Official book description:

Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission - and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish.

Except that right now, he doesn't know that. He can't even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.

All he knows is that he's been asleep for a very, very long time. And he's just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.

His crew-mates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, he realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Alone on this tiny ship that's been cobbled together by every government and space agency on the planet and hurled into the depths of space, it's up to him to conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.

And thanks to an unexpected ally, he just might have a chance. 

 

First of all, I want to apologise to any and all Cannonball reviewers if I'm in any way repeating things they have already said in their own reviews. I have very deliberately avoided reading them, so my review wouldn't be influenced by them. I would also like to apologise to all of my readers, because I probably don't remember all that much about this book, having finished it in February (a month after it was a book club selection for my fantasy/sci-fi book club - I even skipped the meeting so as not to get spoiled for the ending). 

It's been way too long for me (seven years, in fact) to be able to make accurate comparisons between this book and Andy Weir's first runaway success, The Martian. I would not be surprised to discover that the adaptation rights for this book were sold before the book was even published, as it's also about a wise-cracking astronaut stuck in space, so Ryland Grace and Mark Wattney probably share a lot of similar traits. The situations the two are in are generally pretty different, though, although so as not to spoil too much of the plot of the novel - why is Grace the sole survivor in a small spacecraft? Why is his mission so crucial for the survival of Earth and humanity? Why does he seem to suffer from complete amnesia when he wakes up? All of these questions are a lot more interesting if you discover them as you read.

I listened to the book in audio, and Ray Porter was a really engaging and well-balanced narrator. While Grace is stuck alone on the spaceship, there are a LOT of flashback sequences to before he ended up in space, and in these we encounter a lot of characters of both genders with a number of different accents. I think Porter managed to differentiate between them in a really good way. Later in the book, Porter is also given some rather interesting narration challenges, and I thoroughly enjoyed the book throughout, probably more so than if I'd read it on paper.

My main gripe, which I'm sure others have also mentioned by now, is that the major threat to Earth and humanity requires teamwork on an international and global scale, which sadly the pandemic of recent years has shown is entirely and utterly unrealistic. Were humanity ever faced with the sort of challenges they meet in this book, we would all be doomed, there would be no global coming together to solve a problem. Possibly the rest of the world with the USA opting out, but absolutely nothing like we see in this book. Now, this is a work of fiction, and I can see why Weir didn't want his version of humanity to suck as much as it turns out our real one actually does. But it was sadly rather grating.

Judging a book by its cover: While I'm not sure this cover really conveys most of the feel of this book, it does give the impression that it's a pretty action-packed sci-fi story, which is really all you need. The dramatic image of an astronaut seemingly plummeting through space in free-fall is certainly eye-catching, if possibly a bit misleading.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR7 Book 71: "The Martian" by Andy Weir

Page count: 369 pages
Rating: 5 stars

Six days into the first manned mission on Mars, there is a huge dust storm, forcing most of the crew to evacuate, earlier than anticipated. Mark Watney, the crew's botanist and mechanical engineer is impaled on an antenna and believed to have died. He wakes up alone, stranded on Mars with no way of signalling Earth that he is still alive. The next manned mission to Mars is scheduled in four years' time, and even if he were able to send a signal to announce his miraculous survival, he doesn't have enough supplies to last him long enough for a rescue mission to reach him. Even if he could use his botany skills to grow food enough to last him, none of the equipment he has with him is designed to last for years in the unforgiving environment of the red planet. Mark Watney, one of the first men to ever walk on Mars, is very likely to be the first man ever to die there too. He's not going down without a fight, though? With his boundless optimism, his education and his creativity, he's determined to survive until the next crew of space explorers arrive, when he will hopefully be able to go home at last.

I was given this book as a Cannonball gift exchange present from the lovely Beth Ellen, but first heard about it in August last year, when my friend Erica, who usually can't stand science fiction books, read it in less than 48 hours and then rated it five stars. Since then, so many people all over the interwebs have read and reviewed it and absolutely loved it, to the point where I started getting scared of reading it at all, convinced I was going to be the first person I knew, in real life or online, who was going to think the book was just ok. So I kept putting it off, and finding excuses for why I couldn't read it yet, until the trailers for the upcoming film starring Matt Damon started being released, and I realised that unless I wanted to get spoiled, I was going to have to just read the book already.

I discovered very quickly that I wasn't going to hate the book, and as I tore through the pages (annoyed that I actually had to do work, even with the summer holidays quickly approaching), it was really obvious why so many different people in my friend sphere had rated the book so very highly. I've seen it described as Robinson Crusoe meets MacGyver several times, and as a super-brief summary, that makes a lot of sense. Mark Watney is a great protagonist. He's funny, charming, self-deprecating, resourceful and smart. He keeps his head cool in a crisis (and being stranded on Mars is a hell of one) and his education, training and background make it believable that he'd be able to actually do the things he ends up doing to survive. I will admit I skimmed quite a few of the explanations of the mechanics and physics of what he did, because science is so far from what I cared about, but it all seemed realistic.

The chapters are short, the tension is high and Mark is a character you really root for. You want him to make it, you are invested in his survival and while I assumed he was going to be ok in the end, this was not a guarantee and actually told my husband (who, is coincidentally also called Mark) off for asking me questions while I was reading the final parts of the book. I needed for it to be only me and the book. So yes, you can add me to the long list of people who loved this book and have added Mark Watney to my list of favourite fictional characters. Now I'm one of the many who hope Ridley Scott doesn't screw up the film.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.