The Hail Mary Project

 I read The Hail Mary Project the first time in August 2021, and the following review was written then. Rather than write a new review, despite thinking the original review did not capture the enormity and beauty of the story, decided I probably could not do any better. This year in April 2026, it has become a movie with Ryan Gosling playing Ryland Grace and Sandra Huller playing Eva Stratt. As I reread the novel, I got through half of it before attending the movie with my daughter at her suggestion, and the second half of the novel after seeing the movie. I wondered how Stephen Spielberg could possibly tell this very scientific story, but as you might expect, he pulled it off beautifully. It still makes the most sense to read the book first, and then just sit back and enjoy the marvelous story telling by Spielberg.

Review:

While we at Men Reading Books do favor mysteries and thrillers, I tend to wander off-genre from time to time. But, Andy Weir has written a new sci-fi book. He wrote The Martian which was a marvelous story, and I only rarely read sci-fi. Like The Martian, his new book The Hail Mary Project was avidly recommended by my daughter who also does not read much sci-fi. Weir captured me from the beginning.

Ryland Grace was a disgruntled scientist whose predictions about finding life forms that were not based on water were laughed at and discarded by the scientific world. His feelings were hurt so he retreated to being a middle school science teacher where he could be adored and loved by his students. He was one cool teacher. But suddenly, a woman, Eva Stratt, introduced herself to him as the person in charge of the Petrova Taskforce, a group he had never heard of. She had read his thesis paper and insisted that she appreciated his creativity, his ability to think outside the box. Actually, she gave him no choice in the matter and she had the military might behind her to bring him along, willingly or not. It turned out that our sun was losing its power rapidly, and if it got just 10% cooler, life on earth would end. A solution had to be found and Stratt’s powers were being supported by all the most powerful nations.

So, it’s a story about saving the planet, but it’s much more. Grace is sent on an interstellar mission to learn about the creatures that were robbing the sun of its power and adopt that knowledge to saving the sun and the earth. Along the way, he becomes the first human to interact with an alien species, and he teams up with “Rocky” to solve the problems that plagued both of their worlds which were light years apart from one another.