A review by mmccombs
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

emotional funny hopeful reflective medium-paced

4.25

That was so much fun! This was a page turner and full of heart, it made me feel hopeful about humanity’s ability to come together to innovate in the face of insurmountable odds (feels very fictional but hey, a girl can dream). It was a great balance of nerdy and action, though I feel like some of the science got too in the weeds and started to feel unrealistic (I’m not an astrophysicist but I’d still love to know how factual things were). This is like the perfect book for people learning about the scientific method, the whole plot was basically like making a hypothesis, testing and retesting, and then drawing conclusions from your observations. And somehow I felt like this book could have kept going! I’m curious to see how this will work as a movie, it does not seem like the easiest thing to adapt, but I hope it will capture the earnestness, the hope, and the love of science this book provided!

As a super side note, I do feel as though there had to be a simpler way to go about solving this problem. If they had so many scientists dedicated to building this giant space mission, could they not have just spent the time figuring out how to kill the Astrophage on a mass scale (because they already figured out how they die) without having to find the specific thing that was working on that specific planet light years away? Also, what if the astrophage predator ends up causing a different issue, idk! The story was very fun so this doesn't matter, but I was kind of like, damn, I really feel like they had the brain power to fix this on their own!
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