Project Hail Mary kicks off with an intriguing premise: A man wakes up on a spaceship with no memory of who he is or how he got there. But as his memories gradually become untangled, he is suddenly met with another unexpected incident: the arrival of a gigantic alien spaceship.
A first contact story is nothing new — it’s the kind of far-future sci-fi story that has been a staple of the genre for decades — but Andy Weir’s 2021 novel, like his acclaimed 2011 debut The Martian, took great pains to ground the fiction in as much hard science as possible. Weir gave us lengthy descriptions about how gravity works, explained the intricacies of relativity, and mapped out a (somewhat) plausible situation in which the Earth would be plunged into an apocalypse following the discovery of organisms that eat stars. But it also made sure to do this with many, many jokes on hand.
