Project Hail Mary

Project Hail Mary is Andy Weir's 2021 hard science fiction novel, his third after The Martian (2011) and Artemis (2017) and the book that re-established the Weir brand of one-protagonist-solving-physics-problems-on-page after the more mixed reception of Artemis. Ryland Grace wakes up alone on the Hail Mary, a spacecraft in deep space, with no memory of who he is or what he is doing there. Two other crewmates are mummified corpses in adjacent acceleration couches. The novel runs roughly half on flashback (how Grace came to be on the Hail Mary, the planet-killing Astrophage organism, Eva Stratt's Project Hail Mary itself) and half on present-tense ship-board problem-solving in the Tau Ceti system, where Grace eventually encounters a spider-sized rock-eating extraterrestrial named Rocky.

Weir's structural method is the same as The Martian: a single competent protagonist with a science background, a sequence of physical-engineering problems that must be solved correctly to survive, and a prose voice that earns laughs by treating disaster as a normal Tuesday. The Rocky relationship is the structural innovation of Project Hail Mary; the first-contact dialogue is rendered in the kind of patient communications-protocol detail that Weir does better than any contemporary science fiction writer. The Astrophage biology, the rotational-physics ship design, the spectroscopy puzzle that opens the novel are all handled with the kind of patient hard-science discipline that the Hugo and Nebula-eligible audience came for.

Recommended as required contemporary hard science fiction reading, as the natural next read for The Martian fans, and for fans of Kim Stanley Robinson, Greg Egan, and the broader contemporary hard-SF tradition. The Ryan Gosling / Phil Lord / Christopher Miller film adaptation is in production for a 2026 release. The Ray Porter audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.