The modern world has rotted my brain. I find focusing on anything that isn't designed to hijack my dopamine stream very difficult. Earlier this year I decided to try and set myself the ambitious goal of reading a book. Yes, you read that right. One book.

I haven't actually finished a book cover to cover in... I don't even know. Years, at least. Probably a decade or more. That's insane.

So, I bought a Kobo Clara Color, spent a month setting up an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine to wirelessly sync any epub I could get my hands on wirelessly via an OPDS stream and then finally gave in and started reading.

This review contains massive spoilers!

Project Hail Mary

The book begins completely grounded in reality. Science we all know and are familiar with. Despite the Sun dimming bacteria Astrophage being fiction, the author fitted them so plausibly into the real universe that I was able to suspend disbelief masterfully.

Andy Weir, author of Project Hail Mary and The Martian, created a star killing bacteria so powerful that it united humanity as one. The world killing dilemma as a reader was quite compelling too. The idea that if politics were no longer a factor, and if science had a blank cheque, we could build an interstellar space ship to save our species? A refreshing thought in these tumultuous times, even if we must charitably permit the small matter of a hitherto unfeasibly energy dense fuel to enable it.

The narrative flowed easily. The first half of the book was enjoyable but not gripping. Then we met Rocky.

Rocky was playful, empathetic, skillful, and an alien. After Rocky showed up I knew I was going to finish this book. I just had to!

Rocky explaining without language, via molecule models, his atmospheric conditions? Genius. Making me understand just enough to be dangerous about evolution and molecular biology (Astrophage evolving Xenonite resistance like a tennis ball finding a way through a forest being a prime example).

Generally speaking the book was what I imagine to be an almost perfect example of great sci-fi writing. Lots of concepts explained just enough to further the story without being overwhelmingly dense. Although I will admit to a couple of moments of bamboozlement to some of the more complicated topics. In general though, I think this is Andy Weir's biggest strength. I am not a scientist, but this book left me feeling like I could have been if I'd had a teacher like Andy at some point in my life.

By far the most gripping section of the book is after the Adrian biomatter collection. I felt real loss, or at least I thought I was about to, for Rocky. The whole moment where Rocky broke out of his atmospheric containment to save our human hero Ryland Grace was emotionally charged and that night I stayed up late frantically turning page after page to find out what happened. Great storytelling.

Toward the end of the book, once our hero Ryland had made his final decision whether to return home or not, I felt like Andy Weir was kinda done with the story and the ending felt rushed. A version of the ending where we found out how Earth reacted to "The Beetles" return (surely they would build a second Hail Mary to come and meet the Eridanians?!) would have been most welcome. By this point in the story I wasn't too bothered by how Earth resolved their Astrophage problems, but humanity becoming a space faring species, knowing that there's actually life out there? C'mon, the ending robbed us of that.

The Movie

I waited to watch the movie until after I'd read the book. I suppose the last time I did that was probably The Hobbit, mostly because the movie took another 20 years to materialise.

The movie got some things really right, like Rocky and the overall sense of humour. Ryan Gosling was great. But how the fuck can you do a movie about a sci-fi book and remove practically all the science? I'm fairly sure the word celcius was not in the script anywhere.

I think I would have enjoyed the movie without having read the book, but because I read the book, I didn't. Visually they got a lot right, which is always very subjective. But the alien spaceship was quite wrong, as was Rylands Eridanian biome at the end.

The movie did agree with me on point though, that we should know at least a little bit about how Earth reacted to the return of The Beetles.