“Weir’s finest work to date.” — Brandon Sanderson
—∞—
Andy Weir isn’t the first author to do Robinson Crusoe stories, but he just might be the best.
A Crusoe book has a similar premise as Daniel Defoe’s 1619 classic in which someone gets stranded on a real or metaphorical desert island and has little more than wits and phenomenal problem-solving ability to survive. Crusoe eventually gets help from an island cannibal who becomes his companion Friday just as Weir’s characters use their skills to find additional support.
In Weir’s blockbuster The Martian, the planet Mars was the desert island. The hero, Mark Watney, is an astrobiologist who applies extraordinary skills to save himself and the mission. (The book also came at an important time, reminding people who got their expert degrees at the University of Facebook what real science looks like, and that it matters.)
Weir’s follow-up, Artemis, didn’t reach Martian heights of success but moved the Crusoe premise to the moon, in which a street-smart young woman named Jazz saves the day on a lunar base under siege.
Weir’s attention to detail and scientific plausibility shine so bright in both novels that perhaps this one-time computer programmer doesn’t get enough credit for doing what all great fiction writers do: He creates really interesting heroes who aren’t cardboard cutouts, memorably brought to the screen by Matt Damon’s portrayal of Watney in the movie version of The Martian.
WEIR RAISES THE BAR FOR SCI-FI WRITERS
In Project Hail Mary (Ballantine Books), Weir’s latest, the “desert island” is a distant star system. Weir has stretched the Crusoe narrative to fit a more speculative future with a scope far beyond any of his earlier efforts. It’s a stunning first-contact novel that should raise the bar for every aspiring sci-fi writer who wants to try one.
It works on such a grand scale because of the effort Weir makes to describe believable technology and the challenges of long-distance space travel while also creating his richest characters yet.
The result is that Project Hail Mary is much more than a Crusoe plot. Underneath the story’s sweep breathes a buddy story involving the most improbable buddies you could ever imagine. Weir deftly explores how a human-alien first contact might unfold, including the difficulty of even establishing communication to address the highest-possible stakes: saving two worlds facing extinction.
For the human race, our hero is Ryland Grace, a scientist-turned-school teacher whose discovery of an energy-storage microbe called “Astrophage” gets him in the middle of efforts to repair a force that’s dimming the sun to the point where humanity faces a grim, horrific end of rioting, destruction and starvation.
The “Hail Mary” solution is using Astrophage to power a 12-year mission to the Tau Ceti star system, which has a sun seemingly immune to the dimming that afflicts other stars. Even then, while time will move more slowly for the astronauts moving at near light speed, it might be too late in the years that will unfold before a possible solution reaches Earth.
UNLIKELY CRUSOE AND HIS SPIDER-LIKE FRIDAY
Ryland is an unlikely hero. He has zero interest in being part of the crew but has no choice when an Astrophage explosion kills the scientist he trained. Then he wakes up from an induced coma to find out he’s the only one alive on the ship.
The ship has made it to Tau Ceti where he encounters an alien vessel piloted by a chunky, blind spider-like being with extraordinary senses, an unpronounceable name and very different biology. Ryland dubs him Rocky. Ryland and Rocky, who “speaks” only in tones, first have to figure out how to talk to each other and then whether it’s possible to trust each other and combine unique skills to try to save their homes. They can’t even breathe each other’s air without dying.
Rocky plays Friday to Ryland’s Crusoe, or maybe from Rocky’s perspective, he’s Crusoe and Ryland is Friday.
Just as in Weir’s other stories, the heroes probably solve a few more problems and know a bit more about too many things than are plausible, but the problems as well as the solutions are so fascinating, we really don’t mind.
Weir has given us a mind-bender of a book that will leave you pondering your purpose, what it means to be human, and what real friendship and sacrifice look like — even if it’s between a human and an alien. Andy Weir, you rock.
https://booktrib.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Andy-Weir-author-photo-credit-Aubrie-Pick-367×550.jpg
Photo Credit: Aubrie Pick
About Andy Weir:
Andy Weir built a two-decade career as a software engineer until the success of his first published novel, The Martian, allowed him to live out his dream of writing full-time. He is a lifelong space nerd and a devoted hobbyist of such subjects as relativistic physics, orbital mechanics, and the history of manned spaceflight. He also mixes a mean cocktail. He lives in California.
