Everyone expected me to like The Martian a lot more than I did. It’s held up to me as an example of modern, hard science fiction that isn’t gritty, dystopic, depressing, or pessimistic, all of which is true enough, and my continued insistence that I didn’t particularly enjoy it is considered proof that I am simply a curmudgeon stuck on some inane notion of science fiction’s bygone golden age. It’s not that The Martian is bad, or even that I failed to enjoy it in certain respects. Weir does his research, keeps his stories realistic to an impressive extent, and crafts compelling stories of human survival in science fiction settings. To harken back to the notions of core types of story conflict, Weir writes the science fiction version of man vs nature novels. The Martian is Hatchet, but with a more competent, less whiney protagonist stranded on Mars instead of in Canada.
Perhaps because of this, I actually enjoyed the movie version of The Martian more than the book. It’s simply a different kind of science fiction, less focused on wild scientific ideas than the science fiction stories I tend to laud. I also wasn’t hugely fond of the protagonist. All of which is to say that, despite the number of people recommending it to me, despite the amount of attention it’s received, I’ve been reluctant to pick up Project Hail Mary. When it popped up on a promotional deal linked to the forthcoming movie adaptation, I gave in and decided to see if the book merited all the fuss surrounding it.
I almost quit after the first page. Project Hail Mary is written in first person present tense, which makes sense artistically, plot-wise, and for the story as a whole – it’s an amnesia story, after all – but I do not like reading first person present tense. Purely a matter of personal preference, but in the first few pages I disliked it enough to almost abandon the book. After a few chapters, I stopped noticing it quite so much, helped by the first person past tense flashbacks sprinkled throughout the book. Those flashbacks gradually fill in background on the amnesiac and provide additional information for the book’s plot. The first few are interesting in what they allow the narrator to remember – they continue to operate well throughout the book as a literary device, but they start to reveal the author’s hand at play when the narrator, through no real action of his own, starts being able to induce these flashbacks about particular topics more or less at will…but only uses this to recall information as it becomes relevant to the plot.
The flashback sequence has its own plot and climax of sorts, as the reader and protagonist ostensibly learn together the answer to the mystery of how the protagonist ends up where he is when the book begins and he has no memory. Aside from the author’s not-so-invisible hand aspect, I found this sequence satisfying for plot and character reasons, right up until we get the final answer, which feels like an unnecessary twist inconsistent with what we’ve seen of the character up to this point. Coming to that point, I as a reader am willing to accept the protagonist’s conclusion about his nature, but not his final decision. To discuss this in more detail would spoil too much, so I will refrain, but I think you will see what I mean when you get to that point.
Far more interesting than the flashbacks, though, and what kept me reading, is the present-tense plot. It’s still largely a science fiction man vs nature survival story, but with some intriguing idea-based elements and twists which Weir explores from multitudinous angles. Again, to say much more would spoil major elements of the book, so I will continue to refrain – it turns out that reviewing an amnesia book without including any spoilers is rather challenging. While Weir’s explorations of his core ideas are interesting and imaginative, I think more could have been done with them. I was left with a lot of questions, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but also experienced several “but why didn’t they think of X” moments, which does tend to be to a story’s detriment. Each of those moments introduced a certain distance between me and the story.
My wife told me she’d seen chatter in online fora about Project Hail Mary being a “mind bending” book. Maybe it’s because I work in the space industry and spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about many of the topics which this book embraces, but I found it straightforward and, if anything, too simple. Between my knowledge of storytelling and my knowledge of space travel and its companion sciences, I found myself ahead of the protagonist and the plot in almost every instance. Its more imaginative scientific elements are not explored in sufficient depth to differentiate them from similar implementations in other science fiction works; Project Hail Mary‘s strength lies in applying known science fiction ideas in a mildly innovative way, not in deeply and imaginatively exploring a new idea or new dimensions of established ideas.
This review’s tenor is largely negative, so you might be almost as surprised as I was to realize that…I liked Project Hail Mary? It’s certainly a quick, page-turning read that didn’t require much brainpower from me, which made it a welcome break from the Nibelungenlied during a stressful time when I decided I needed something more fictional and immersive than an ancient German epic (we’ll be reviewing that next week). Despite all of the above, I found the story more interesting in its speculation than The Martian, and its protagonist more sympathetic, which were enough to push through the stripped-down, banal prose and the first-person present tense presentation. It has just enough going on to enjoy as a space-faring adventure romp with no real surprises or mind-twisting concepts to contemplate, which it seems is what my stressed and sleep-deprived brain needed when I read it.
IGC Publishing 