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.

#CBR9 Books 119-120: "The Unwritten, vol 10: War Stories" and "The Unwritten, vol 11: Apocalypse" by Mike Carey and Peter Gross

Total page count: 304
Rating: 4 stars

Tom Taylor is trying to find his way back to his friends, moving through a number of children's stories. Even when he's reunited with his storyteller father, Wilson Taylor, who by writing a popular fantasy series where the main character shared Tom's name, pretty much gave him the abilities to move through all manner of works of fiction, and his friends, the world is in chaos, as the Leviathan, the source of all the stories in the world, is gravely wounded. The boundaries between stories are thin and unreliable and it's difficult to tell what is real and what is fiction anymore.

Tom and his little band of supporters need to find a way to heal the Leviathan, but it seems as if all the wicked forces in the world are working to stop them, controlled by Pullman, the eternal adversary. To complicate matters further, there's the mysterious puppet-mistress, Madame Rausch, who seems to have her own agenda, separate from both Pullman and the Wilsons. In the end, it all comes down to one final quest and if Tom succeeds, he can save both our own reality and restore the balance to the worlds of fiction. If he's thwarted, thing could go very bad indeed.

War Stories and Apocalypse collects issues 1-12 of the miniseries The Unwritten:Apocalypse, which is both the final installments of the entire run of the comic, yet somehow also seems made to stand on its own. Throughout the graphic novel series, author Mike Carey and artist Peter Gross has collaborated closely, exploring the importance of storytelling and the nature of stories. What is reality? What is fiction? Is our world just a story told by someone else? What is it about humanity that we keep coming back to the same themes and motifs in storytelling through the ages? Are there ancient archetypes built into our DNA?

It's been about ten days since I finished vol 11: Apocalypse and I wish I could give you a clear and concise opinion, but I'm honestly not sure I got all the things that Carey and Gross were trying to tell me. I'm not sure I'm literate and clever enough to parse all the various levels of the storytelling that was coming across. I have studied literature at university level (but unlike my husband, who is naturally analytical and pretty much picks apart anything he watches, reads or listens to just for fun, I generally prefer to just consume my entertainment on more of a surface level). It's clear that in these 12 issues, Carey and Gross are saying goodbye to their characters, tying up loose ends and providing an ending. There's a lot of clever stuff in here, but again, I'm not sure I understood it all. Even after having recently seen Mike Carey talk about the ending at a sci-fi/fantasy convention, which made things somewhat more clear, I'm not entirely certain if I get all the nuances here.

Maybe, in time, if I go back and read the whole series closer together, this will make more sense to me. I am tempted to just make my husband finally read the final issues and make him tell me what he thinks. I frequently do better when I can bounce ideas off someone else.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.