Project Hail Mary - 7.5/10
Suspension of disbelief the novel.
Hard to say much about this novel except it was an extremely fun, addicting and emotional ride which got unfortunately plagued by the usual Andy "Weir-ness".
The hook of the plot grabbed me right from the beginning as the threat of earth dying looms overhead and the governments of the world get their shit together for once and start to work towards a solution.
So we end up with this loser nerd protagonist (usual in an Andy Weir novel) all alone in a spaceship with amnesia, and we follow him trying to figure out himself and his purpose there.
Now, all that is good and well. The mystery is handled and revealed meticulously, because you just can't stop reading it. You want to know what happened or what will happen next as it goes on because of the structure of the story.
The story is two parts:
- Spaceship
The best part of the novel. The whole scientific mystery and resource management was so fun.
- Flashbacks
Mostly hit and sometimes miss. It's hard to pin down what exactly, but my best guess is the characters make it a slog.
Andy Weir is at his best when writing about the ideas and the scientific stuff. But when it comes to humans, he fails. The story is filled with human characters that are one note and have no idea how to interact with human beings, or you can say Andy doesn't know how to write them. The jokes are awful too unfortunately.
But all of this can be easily ignored just because of the main chunk of the novel being insanely good.
Now the suspension of disbelief part. Well it's in the nature of the novel of this kind to eventually fall into the fantasy trap. The novel is hard sci-fi, which means all the science is based on the real world science and I can easily say that an immense amount of research went into this book. So there is no doubt that each scientific matter of the story was handled really carefully. BUT: there comes some scenarios that are so absurd that you can't help but feel it's extremely jarring.
The elastic that the suspension of belief is gets stretched too thin. But if you have a tolerance for that, good for you. But I felt it at times being a little out of place.