Hello and welcome to the Blog Showdown!

This is where one of eight pilot blogs will be posted and the one that has the best engagement after three weeks from their posting will become the new permanent Monday blog!

Today we are going to be debuting Casually Reviewed, the blog where I talk about a piece of media, what it’s about, what I liked, what I didn’t like and who I would recommend that piece of media to.

The piece of media that I want to talk about today is…the book Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir!

Caution, major spoilers ahead.

Summary

The story begins with a man waking up from a coma. He is connected to several machines and has a set of robotic arms taking care of him, and while he is trying to figure out what is going on and where he is, he realizes his memory is spotty.

What’s worse is that while he is getting the understanding of his surroundings, he sees that there are two other cots like his, and when he goes to check on them the people that were occupying those cots are long dead.

As he begins to remember more and more things, he realizes something is off about his surroundings. While he can’t remember his name immediately, he does remember that he has a background as a scientist and through some experiments he realizes that he is in space.

He tries his best to remember what is happening, because while he was able to get to one room on his own, the computer is preventing him from proceeding forward until he states his name.

Eventually he remembers who he is. Ryland Grace, a molecular biologist turned school teacher who was called upon to go into space on the ship Hail Mary to help Earth solve a problem.

The issue is that a microorganism that is called Astrophage is absorbing a lot of the Sun’s light, and the rate that the light is being absorbed is rapidly increasing, which will spell doom for the Earth as the temperature of the planet will decrease, which will mean crop failures, civil unrest, and a whole lot of people dying.

Grace was approached by someone named Eva Stratt, who was given a lot of power and authority to work on trying to figure out how to solve the Astrophage problem, because Grace wrote a controversial scientific paper that may aid in figuring out how to deal with Astrophage.

As Grace starts to piece the puzzle together, he realizes that he isn’t in out solar system, but rather the solar system of the star Tau Ceti, which while it is infected with Astrophage, hasn’t become as dim as our Sun and other nearby stars.

For some reason Grace was chosen, along with his now deceased crewmates, to go to Tau Ceti and figure out why that is the case.

With the weight of that mission on his mind, Grace starts to figure out a plan to save Earth when he realizes that he isn’t as alone as he thought he was, when another ship approaches his.

This ship is from the 40 Eridani system, and the inhabitants of that system, a rock like spider creature that Grace call Eridians, are facing the same issue as Earth and has sent a crew to this system to figure things out. Unfortunately, much like Grace, almost all of the Eridian crew have died, leaving only one crew member to figure things out, who Grace calls Rocky.

It is up to the two of them to figure out how to fix their respective planets and get back home alive, if possible.

Flying High

As someone who was a enjoyed The Martian audiobook, I wanted to see how this audiobook held up, and as someone who does enjoy some of the more grounded sci-fi, I was curious about how this book would do, especially since this is also getting a movie adaptation pretty soon.

One aspect of the storytelling that I liked was that the story was asynchronous, meaning that it wasn’t told exactly in order. There were events happening in the present with Grace at Tau Ceti and flashbacks as Grace was remembering how he got to this situation in the first place.

Sometimes the flashbacks are triggered by him seeing something and it coming in to help him figure out his circumstances and other times the memories are triggered to help set up what’s going to happen next in the story, and it was pretty interesting way to present the narrative.

A lot of the story does use scientific jargon, but in a similar way to The Martian, Grace does break down a good chunk of the parlance to make sure that the reader understands what’s going on. While not done in the exact same way as The Martian, it still is done well that it is distracting, at least for me personally.

Grace as a protagonist has doubts of himself, but has the drive to figure out how to solve the issues he is faced with, including how to communicate with Rocky, and him being a teacher actually serves him well in that regard.

Rocky as a character is pretty interesting, being that they are an engineer and while they can make all sorts of things, there are some scientific aspects that Rocky, and his species as a whole, doesn’t know of.

There are some comedic bits and some dramatic bits, with the story having themes of unity to solve a problem despite geopolitical or interplanetary differences making things difficult sometimes being a solid enough theme to make the book enjoyable.

There is also a twist towards the end of the book that recontextualizes the entire story, and after having gone through the book several times, having that twist in the back of my mind does make certain scenes and character interactions feel deeper.

There are, however, some things that I wasn’t too big a fan of.

Set Adrift

While I understand the need to shortcut some aspects of the story, having a character like Stratt rides on the edge of being unbelievable in my opinion.

Her purpose in the story is to coordinate the best and brightest minds to figure out what Astrophage does, how it can be stopped, and do so in a way that cuts through the red tape of bureaucracy and delegation.

Stratt is given an unbelievable amount of power, enough so that she can order some pretty hefty demands, and while it makes sense that there needs to be a character that has to move the story along, it doesn’t seem as believable that all the nations would give that much power to one person.

What does save her from being a character that is too unbelievable is that she understands that once the Hail Mary launches, she will probably end up in prison because of what she has done.

She knows that there are a lot of choices that she makes are incredibly drastic and have major consequences, and that a lot of money is being spent on a mission that may not even work.

This also leads to one of my own criticisms of Andy Weir’s work is that there often is a bit too many things that are convenient that despite there being a logical reason for it, does fall on being a bit too convenient.

For example, one thing that the Hail Mary has is access to all the digital data made available on Earth and practically every potential program that they may need for the mission. This makes sense because the crew may not know what they need to complete their mission, but it is convenient that Grace can get whatever info he needs and whatever program he may need to do so.

There are a couple of other plot points that tend towards that “convenient” aspect, but that is too deep in the weeds of spoiler territory, but I will say that there is an aspect of the mission that was important that had not just one, but a couple of convenient solutions with one of them coming towards the end of the book.

Rating and Recommendation

Overall I would rate Project Hail Mary an 8.5 out of 10, and I would say that if you enjoy sci-fi that leans more towards the realistic with a couple of fantastical bits in terms of there being aliens, then you would probably enjoy this story.

Thank you for reading, see you next week with a new blog for the Blog Showdown! If you want to see more of this sort of blog, engage with it and we’ll see how it compares with the others!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual

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