‘Project Hail Mary’: Know When to Fold ‘Em
Andy Weir’s 2021 novel uses a structural technique. And then overuses it.
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I really enjoyed both the novel The Martian by Andy Weir and it’s film adaptation starring Matt Damon1. I love Weir’s treatment of science sort of as Lego blocks: Just fit a bunch of facts together in different ways to get amazing results2! And in The Martian Weir’s kind-of-silly tone worked well, because stranded astronaut Mark Watney’s responsibilities are all self-centered: It’s only his life on the line, so his tendency towards morbid, nerdy humor fit very well.
Weir’s fourth novel, Project Hail Mary has the same general tone, as another white dude with a weird name (Ryland Grace) has to science the hell out of things. Except this time it’s the entire population of the world on the line, so the tone feels a little off, and I had a bit of trouble getting into the book. In the end, I really enjoyed it; Weir’s not the most graceful writer, but his enthusiasm is infectious, and there are some great ideas in the novel3.
Thinking about why I struggled to get into it, I zeroed in on the problem pretty easily. Weir uses an old-school, overused technique to structure his story: Amnesia4. Grace wakes up on a spaceship with two dead crewmates and no memory, and spends the first half of the book piecing together what’s going on5. This is borderline cliche territory—there have been so, so many stories generating tension and mystery via memory problems over the years, so it’s hard to get excited about one more. But that’s not the real problem—Weir handles his amnesia well enough, and it’s an overused trope because it works: It does, indeed, generate tension and mystery.
No, the problem isn’t that Weir uses this cliche. It’s that he overuses it6.
I Remember Now
In Project Hail Mary, Ryland Grace, a molecular biologist who abandoned his career to be a schoolteacher7, wakes up on board a space ship with two dead bodies and a robot arm for companionship8. He has no memory of how he got there or what he’s supposed to do. His memory comes back to him in flashes: The Sun began dimming, and a new form of life that drains a star’s energy is discovered. Dubbed astrophage, the world unites its resources to figure out a solution9. They discover that a star about 12 light years away is “infected” with astrophage but unaffected, and a mission is developed to travel there to try to find a replicable solution to save Earth. It’s a suicide mission, however, and only a small number of people can even survive the trip, making the potential list of viable astronauts very, very small.
The amnesia gambit is tired, but it works gangbusters, and it works gangbusters here. Through roughly the first half of the book the flashbacks introduce vital information and slowly assemble the puzzle. Grace finding himself alone in a solar system far, far away from home, tasked with figuring out this species-threatening mystery all by himself, is compelling, and Weir has fun with the whole “science, yay!” vibe10.
But around that halfway point, the flashbacks start to thin out, and their revelations become ... less revelatory, both because most of the mystery has been revealed and because any mildly attentive reader can guess the rest. They stop generating that mystery and tension, and become almost annoying11: The present-day narrative is the compelling bit of the story as Grace and an alien named Rocky race to solve the riddle despite incompatible language, biology, and technology. Every time we dip back into the past in the second half of the book, it erodes the momentum of the story and does very little else.
To be fair to Weir, he does ratchet down the flashbacks, and spends most of his time in the actually interesting part of the story. But it’s easy to see where simply having Grace regain his memory and dole out revelations on an as-needed basis without leaving the main narrative would work better12.
The Universe is My Chemistry Set
In some ways, Weir needs the amnesia gimmick because Ryland Grace is, like, super duper good at sciencing stuff. The story has some nice swerves, but Grace always figures out the answers eventually, slapping together noble gases and capturing microscopic organisms with elan. Once Weir introduces Rocky, a spider-like alien also desperate to save its homeworld, things get even less uncertain, because Rocky is essentially the “solve-it-all hacker” character of the book: Rocky is such a skilled engineer it can fix anything, including human technology it has never seen before, utilizing concepts its own people have never encountered13.
These sorts of the Fixit characters are also kind of cliche, for the same reason as amnesia plot tricks: They work. The weird thing about Weir’s fiction is that the fun is being along for the ride while a super smart person engages in Super Competence and solves seemingly impossible problems with all the knowledge you failed to learn in high school, but that fun only goes so far. You need a Rocky character in there to eliminate 30-page digressions into metallurgy and physics, replacing those with “Rocky fixed it.”
Between the can-do chemistry set energy of Grace and the impervious competence of Rocky, there’s almost zero doubt that they will figure it all out in the end. It’s fun, but that lack of mystery means you gotta inject mystery in another way if you want tension in the story. Enter amnesia, pursuing bears.
Eh, it works. Until it doesn’t. Just like my strategy of drinking all the alcohol in the house to “hide the evidence14.”
NEXT WEEK: Expats and the new Very Special Episode
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Damon always reminds me of the smartassed kids who made fun of me in grammar school, and thus I hate him.
I tried this as a kid with household chemicals and got some … surprising results. Fun fact: This is why I don’t have real eyebrows.
Is NOT THE MOST GRACEFUL WRITER BUT HIS ENTHUSIASM IS INFECTIOUS the title of my memoir? No, that’s a terrible title, but the vibe is right.
Look, if your next book pitch involves a character who can’t remember the last three days or something, you’ve got some work to do.
This pretty much describes all my Sunday mornings during my 20s.
This is what’s known as the Somers Whiskey Rule.
As one does.
Also as one does.
Right there is the truly speculative aspect of this book. In real life the sun would sputter and go out while the U.N. was still assigning committees.
That this vibe has a real danger of slipping into a real Professor on Gilligan’s Island Fitting Bamboo Together Into Impossibly Complex Machines vibe should be ignored.
The same way my hungover moaning elicits sympathy from The Duchess for a while, and then starts to enrage her.
Unfortunately, despite my genius I am unavailable to write every single book the way it should have been written. Mainly because nobody buys my books. There’s a lesson in there, but I refuse to learn it.
Meanwhile, I still have to recite “lefty loosey, righty tighty” any time I do work around the house.
I’m still under the delusion that if I don’t speak no one will know how drunk I am. This has resulted in some very awkward moments.
I loved this book. The best of Andy Weir's work, IMO. My favorite? The development of a shared vocabulary between Rocky and Ryland.