Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (2021_ Andy Weir is certainly the most unique of best-selling authors.......a science nerd (and we're talkin' deep, deep, Phd-level science) with a warm heart and a wicked sense of humor.....
By combining all three of those qualities, he exploded on the publishing scene with the force of a galactic big bang with "The Martian".....a hot book and later a hit movie with Matt Damon.
Weir's back and for those who both laughed and thrilled to "The Martian" he's better than ever with a far more epic, ambitious, heartrending and humor-laden story of desperate survival against impossible odds.
His very flawed hero, Ryland Grace, a loner possessed of a brilliant mind, fled the scientific community to become a beloved Junior High school science teacher.
So how does he wake from an induced coma, afflicted with amnesia and inside a spaceship hurtling toward another star system.....with his only other two crew members already dead?
Piece by piece (in flashback chapters) it all starts coming back to him. Grace and his fellow astronauts were tasked with nothing less than saving Planet Earth from a voracious micro-organism that's sucking up the sun's energy.
The trip, a one-way suicide mission, was designed by a world wide multi-national congregation of scientists led by an indomitable force of nature, Dr. Eva Stratt. And if the "Hail Mary" crew, now reduced to a single man, doesn't figure out a way to thwart or defeat the sun-sucking microbes, it's Ice Age, End Of Days time for everyone on Earth.
Which leaves Ryland Grace, a wisecracking, most un-courageous science guy as our planet's sole hope for coming up with some genius solutions to save Earth from turning into a giant popsicle with nobody left alive on it.
And this is right where we'll stop describing anything further about what happens in this book, since Weir takes his story into a whole new fantastic territory you haven't seen in his previous books.
Like "The Martian", no end of harrowing, hairbreadth, life-or-death situations pile up one after the other on the good ship "Hail Mary" and you'll wonder how these many challenges, problems and outright catastrophes can ever be overcome.
But we should point out that you'll also smile, laugh out loud, and shed more than a few unlikely tears. When Grace is finally confronted with a decision that no human being could ever face or conceive of, his choice will tax your every attempt to read this book with dry eyes.
Fair warning though.......In addition to his wit and thrill-making, Andy Weir is all about the science......and from the first page to the last, the highly technical jargon and details are daunting, intimidating and take up pages and pages of stuff you'd need multiple Masters degrees to digest.
If you're willing to stay with it, (or dare we say, skim through the science blah-blah if you have to), Weir will take you on a wonderfully satisfying, emotional ride into outer space that you'll never find in any Disney theme park. We stuck with and so glad we did.
And we've never a read a final sentence that so perfectly captured the heart, soul and imagination of the novel that precedes it. 4 stars (****)
No comments:
Post a Comment