This book was a lend from Bryan and Elaine, both of whom had read it and suggested I read it too. It's written by Andy Weir, who wrote The Martian, which I haven't read but I have watched the film adaptation starring Matt Damon. As ever, mild spoilers follow.
The basic gist of the story is that the sun is dying, like a lot of other stars in the local neighbourhood. However, one star seems immune, so an international project is put together to launch a spaceship to that star, Tau Ceti, to try and find out why that star isn't dimming like the sun and other nearby stars. The spaceship is called the Hail Mary, a reference to a last gasp attempt at scoring in American Football, and possibly in other sports. Hence, Project Hail Mary.
The main protagonist - Ryland Grace - is a discredited scientist working as a high school teacher, who is called up to the project due to his discredited work now having some functional application in investigating the crisis caused by the sun's diminishing energy output. Just a note here - "Hail Mary, full of Grace" is the first line of the rosary chant said by Catholics as penance or invocation. So, a character called Grace on the Hail Mary spaceship? That wasn't an accident. I have a feeling Andy Weir felt well chuffed with himself when he came up with that.
The Hail Mary reaches Tau Ceti and discovers another spaceship already there. It's an alien ship, sent by another race seeking answers to the same problem - why is their sun dying? Grace and the alien pilot, who he nicknames Rocky, seek to work together to try and find a solution to the threat to both their worlds.
There is plenty of humour in the interactions between Grace and Rocky, particularly when it comes to explaining certain human and alien bodily functions. The idea of trying to explain sleep to an alien was amusing - "I can't imagine explaining 'sleep' to someone who has never heard of it. Hey, I'm going to fall unconscious and hallucinate for a while. By the way, I spend a third of my time doing this. And if I can't do it for a while, I go insane and eventually die. No cause for concern."
But it turns out Rocky does understand sleep and there is a whole alien cultural tradition around it that I thought was very cute and a bit sad. Still, Grace's description of it made me laugh.
The technology and science in the book felt reasonably plausible, even if the international cooperation on the mission seemed very far-fetched. Grace and Rocky have to do a lot of problem-solving and those problems are all worked out in more detail than was necessary. At some points there are some jarring bits of prose. The author has a bad habit of name-checking certain things like using "Excel spreadsheets", when he could have just used a generic word like 'database' for when Grace started to translate Rocky's communication.
I wondered if it was product placement for Microsoft, or whether it was designed to impress the readership, like we are meant to think 'ooh, the astronaut must be clever, he's using Excel!' But I was sceptical about how quickly Grace was able to work out communication with Rocky, so maybe there was some magic in his using Excel after all.
Another jarring aspect of Grace's first person narration is the way he interchanges metric and imperial measurements and then comments on it, pointing out that this is an annoying result of being brought up in America. It would have been fine if he only mentioned it once, but by about the third time it got irritating - yes, we get it, Americans have a quirky way of using both measurement systems. But, so do people from the UK. And nobody cares. I almost felt like the author had to make reference to it to deflect criticism for having a scientist using both sets of measurements.
But, having said that, Grace isn't a heroic figure setting out to save the world. He is a reluctant participant in the mission, a man thrust into an unexpected situation and doing his best not to mess it up. He carries the huge burden of being humanity's last chance of survival and maybe he can be forgiven for obsessing about whether he should be calculating measurements in centimetres or inches as he takes us through his story.
As science-fiction stories go, there is an air of hope to this book. Even our current climate change and rising planetary temperature crisis turns out alright in the end, because it buys humanity a few more years when the sun starts to get dimmer. As the first human to encounter an alien being, Grace goes beyond being an ambassador and instead becomes a partner in a relationship focused on saving both worlds. It makes a change from alien contact stories that focus more on fear and aggression.
However, at the same time, the positive nature of the book has a dark side. Faced with the climate crisis, it's hard to see where a 'Hail Mary' will come from, and the idea of international cooperation to save the planet feels like it will remain only possible in a work of fiction.
