Proyecto Hail Mary

Ich war anfangs etwas überrascht. Stilistisch hatte ich den Eindruck ungeschliffene Fanfiction vor mir zu haben. Es wirkte alles etwas sprachlich einfach. Ich weiß nicht wie ich es besser beschreiben soll, ich hoffe ihr versteht was ich meine. Im hinteren Teil des Buches wurde dieser Eindruck dann aber weniger.

Inhaltlich ist es eine recht lineare Geschichte die in zwei Zeitebenen erzählt wird. Die aktuellen Geschehnisse und Erinnerungen wie es dazu gekommen war. Zusammengefasst, ohne viel zu verraten: Ein Mann, ein Schiff, eine Mission und ganz viel Wissenschaft.

Irgendwie wächst einem der Protagonist ans Herz. Er schwankt zwar ständig zwischen Wissenschaft und impulsiven Handeln aber das ist ja nur menschlich. Und so fieberte ich am Ende richtig mit. Insbesondere bei der Wendung als ich schon das Gefühl hatte das Buch wäre gleich zum Schluss gekommen.

Ich weiß echt nicht was sich deutsche Verlage denken wenn sie die Titel festlegen. "Der Astronaut"? Warum nicht den originalen Titel beibehalten? Insbesondere da das namens gebende Raumschiff im Buch auch nicht umbenannt wurde.

In Project Hail Mary, the sun is going out. Huge bummer. We also don't know why, and it's happening to many stars in the local area of the galaxy. But we figure out why! And we also find one system where the star ISN'T going out even though it should. So we gotta throw together a ship and crew as quickly as possible to investigate, find a solution, and get it back to Earth in time to save the sun. Enter Ryland Grace, one of the crew members of this ship. He doesn't know any of that though, because he woke up on the space ship billions of miles from home without his memory. As his memory returns, he has to work to figure out who he is, what he's doing, and how to save his home. After a shocking discovery in this alien solar system, he has new exciting opportunities to maybe make it back home too.

This was a lot of fun. Very much Andy Weir, down to the movie-like scenes and the quippy dialogue and the weird mix of isolation and hope you get from the story. I wasn't expecting this to be as hard sci-fi as it was, but I really enjoyed those parts of it. I'm not at all familiar with physics, chemistry, or biology, but I found its integration to be seamless and well-done. I found the story to be paced really well, jumping between the present, fixing things, solving problems, staying alive, running tests, and the past as memories return to our main character. We get to learn about the events leading up to this hail mary of a mission and Grace's involvement in it. I don't feel like this dragged at any point, and was a very quick read for being almost 500 pages.

There were aspects I think could have been improved upon. Personal taste, but I really don't enjoy heavy-handed quippy "marvel" dialogue, and that was pretty much every conversation in the entire book. I didn't find it funny or executed well. I'd rather have more authenticity, but I'd also rather have unique characters. Everyone important had the same personality, and everyone unimportant had some token personality quirk that never changed. I also found it hard to suspend my disbelief in some areas. Some things were just far too convenient or far too simple. I feel like, if you're going to commit to hard sci-fi book, then you need to limit the convenient coincidences that help your characters. But ultimately these things didn't detract much from my enjoyment. While it wasn't anything super groundbreaking, it was enjoyable.

If you loved The Martian, I think you'll like this a lot. Also I think if you like Blake Crouch, this would work for you, though it is a bit more lighthearted than something like Recursion or Dark Matter. Also if you like books that are paced like movies this will be perfect. If you like you science fiction to be deeply serious, like anything by Peter Watts or William Gibson, this isn't for you. It's also like.. the opposite of philosophical. Topical? So if you like commentary on the human condition, this doesn't have any of that. Just a lot of the human doing stuff. But I do guarantee you'll have a hard time putting it down!

After reading The Mote in God’s Eye, I realized that Garrit Franke, a fellow Fosstodon member, finished reading this book, so I decided to give it a try too.

I have to admit that at first I was a little bit hesitant about this book, because it is a written in first person, and it also starts out with ammnesia and also flashbacks. But after that I got used to the writing style pretty quickly and started to really get into the main story and the mystery behind everything happening around our protagonist.

The story follows a lone astronaut that finds himself facing impossible odds every step of the way. The way the plot is revealed and how it moves forward every chapter is great. The scientific elements are pretty accurate and that was something I found really interesting. It reminded me a lot of Jules Verne’s novels that usually felt like something that could be possible to do.

In this case of course the protagonist uses his scientific knowledge (as well as his memory slowly coming back) to figure out how handle his mission, which is pretty much to save the planet from certain demise.

I liked the setting and the characters that show up, there’s quite a bit of science tidbits I learned through this, and the moments of action and uncertainty are quite great. I could not stop reading many times because I just wanted to know what in the world would our protagonist do even just to stay alive to live another day.

I didn’t feel like the book was as long as it was, honestly. It was definitely worth it. I do think that it feels a little like a movie waiting to happen, the prose wasn’t as interesting and the plot ended up kind of predictable, and there’s a very wholesome twist at the end which is nice. Just a very fun read.

In Project Hail Mary, the sun is going out. Huge bummer. We also don't know why, and it's happening to many stars in the local area of the galaxy. But we figure out why! And we also find one system where the star ISN'T going out even though it should. So we gotta throw together a ship and crew as quickly as possible to investigate, find a solution, and get it back to Earth in time to save the sun. Enter Ryland Grace, one of the crew members of this ship. He doesn't know any of that though, because he woke up on the space ship billions of miles from home without his memory. As his memory returns, he has to work to figure out who he is, what he's doing, and how to save his home. After a shocking discovery in this alien solar system, he has new exciting opportunities to maybe make it back home too.

This was a lot of fun. Very much Andy Weir, down to the movie-like scenes and the quippy dialogue and the weird mix of isolation and hope you get from the story. I wasn't expecting this to be as hard sci-fi as it was, but I really enjoyed those parts of it. I'm not at all familiar with physics, chemistry, or biology, but I found its integration to be seamless and well-done. I found the story to be paced really well, jumping between the present, fixing things, solving problems, staying alive, running tests, and the past as memories return to our main character. We get to learn about the events leading up to this hail mary of a mission and Grace's involvement in it. I don't feel like this dragged at any point, and was a very quick read for being almost 500 pages.

There were aspects I think could have been improved upon. Personal taste, but I really don't enjoy heavy-handed quippy "marvel" dialogue, and that was pretty much every conversation in the entire book. I didn't find it funny or executed well. I'd rather have more authenticity, but I'd also rather have unique characters. Everyone important had the same personality, and everyone unimportant had some token personality quirk that never changed. I also found it hard to suspend my disbelief in some areas. Some things were just far too convenient or far too simple. I feel like, if you're going to commit to hard sci-fi book, then you need to limit the convenient coincidences that help your characters. But ultimately these things didn't detract much from my enjoyment. While it wasn't anything super groundbreaking, it was enjoyable.

If you loved The Martian, I think you'll like this a lot. Also I think if you like Blake Crouch, this would work for you, though it is a bit more lighthearted than something like Recursion or Dark Matter. Also if you like books that are paced like movies this will be perfect. If you like you science fiction to be deeply serious, like anything by Peter Watts or William Gibson, this isn't for you. It's also like.. the opposite of philosophical. Topical? So if you like commentary on the human condition, this doesn't have any of that. Just a lot of the human doing stuff. But I do guarantee you'll have a hard time putting it down!

This is my first review of a book and is a kind of reaction to the one star commentaries that I saw. For sure I have read The Martian a while back and I can see that this book is similar, but I think a lot of people enjoy it (like I did) because of those similarities. Sure, there are a lot of cliché characters but in the kind of hopefully vision of the future that is lacking right now. The stereotipe of scientists from Russia, China, America and other places that set aside differences to save the world is a much needed hope that if the world is at stake we will all come together. Sure, the book is not all fairies and rainbows, the hero is actually a coward sent against is will to save humanity and in the mean time there is almost a surety that there will be wars and the usual humans in the time of an apocalypse, but the overall tone is optimistic and upbeat and is what a lot of us need sometime. So is a fast and entertaining lecture, that you maybe forget after a while what is about, but you will remember that you felt good reading it.

I don't understand the hype. My main gripes with this book:
- The characters are one-dimensional
- The constant snark is off-putting, especially in the Audible version of this book.
- It was obvious that Grace should be the one to go. His refusal to go willingly was unbelievable. Sure, he did not want to die, but the prospect of a failed mission should have been just as dreadful.
- The mission was about studying Astrophage – why wasn't there an option to at least try to refuel? Astophage has a doubling time of 8 days, so there would be twice as much fuel available if they'd went a week later. It makes no sense to not make it into a round trip. It seems as if the writer created a forced plot point to make it a suicide mission to add some drama, to make it believable for Grace to not want to go. Still failed to make that believable, which pretty much ruins the character. He only remembers his initial unwillingness late in the mission, whereas he previously considered himself to be such a good human being for doing the mission. Wow, conflict! A potential for internal struggle! But it's not being put to use. It doesn't seem to weigh into his decision not to return home (he apparently does not feel shame, because he thinks he will be regarded as a hero).
- I found the speed with which Grace and Rocky learned to communicate by simply pointing at things and recording 1:1 translations of words and taking it from there within a day to be insultingly unbelievable, right from the start up to the point where Rocky effortlessly incorporates sarcasm and irony.
- There were also many missed opportunities. Look, when you're on a mission trying to defend your solar system from an invasive alien species that is on the verge of wiping out humanity, and you encounter another alien life form that is intelligent, breathes ammonia, looks like a giant spider with amazing engineering prowess, superior mental abilities and capable of interstellar flight, and the spider wants you to point out the exact location of your home planet on a model of your part of the galaxy, maybe you should have second thoughts about this? That would be not only believable, but trust issues would create much-needed tension and drama. Grace and Rocky hit it off from the start, are always kind and understanding and just work out a bunch of engineering challenges until they accomplish their goals. That was just boring.
- Everything about language, history and the nature of intelligence was unscientific and ill-informed. It utilizes an anthropocentric, essentialist conceptualization of 'intelligence' that betrays a misunderstanding of intelligence and natural selection. The whole tangent about intelligence being a function of the amount of gravity was utterly nonsensical.

That's why I'm only awarding two stars. The story lacked drama, the characters were one-dimensional and lacked development, the writing was bad; but the one quality that could have been redeemable – the science – was bad itself, which also made the rest worse. It's just a bad book.