Audiobook Review – Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, Narrated by Ray Porter (4.5/5 stars)
Reading Level: Adult (fine for YA and older)
Genre: Science Fiction
Length: 16 hours and 10 minutes
Publisher: Audible Studios
Release Date: May 04, 2021
ASIN: B08GB58KD5
Stand Alone or Series: Stand Alone
Source: Audiobook from Audible
Rating: 4.5/5 stars
“Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission – and if he fails, humanity and the Earth itself will perish.
Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.
All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.
His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, he realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Alone on this tiny ship that’s been cobbled together by every government and space agency on the planet and hurled into the depths of space, it’s up to him to conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.
And thanks to an unexpected ally, he just might have a chance.”
Series Info/Source: This is a stand alone book. I listened to this on audiobook, which I got from Audible.
Audiobook Quality (5/5): The narration was very well done; definitely one I would recommend listening to if you enjoy audiobooks. The chords/musical parts of the aliens are really well done and very creative.
Thoughts: This was well done and intriguing. The story is about a future Earth where we find out an alien lifeform is eating the energy from our sun, threatening to put the Earth into a new ice age. Ryland Grace is a middle school science teacher who gets haphazardly pulled into research on this alien life form because of previous research he did in college.
The book bounces back and forth between the present (where Grace is on a spaceship with memory loss) and the past (where we learn how Grace got to where he is today). I loved a lot about this book. I loved Grace’s sense of humor and the way he was able to extrapolate from his experience to figure a lot of things out. I do think at times the technical jumps he made were a bit contrived but they were fun all the same.
As with “The Martian” sometimes the story gets a bit bogged down by all the details. Don’t get me wrong, I am a scientist by trade and enjoy a lot of the scientific discussions. However, there are portions of the book where the story starts to suffer because of all of the scientific details that are included. These portions definitely dragged (especially mid book) and made the book longer than it needed to be.
My other small quibble is that, although I appreciated the irony of the ending, it left me feeling a bit unsatisfied as well. I do understand why it ended the way it did but that doesn’t mean I loved it.
My Summary (4.5/5): Overall I enjoyed this and am glad I read this. This is definitely a book that is made to be read on audiobook, you will gain a lot more from the story by listening to it. I do think there were parts of the story that were kind of slow and I felt the ending was a bit lacking. I would recommend this to those who are interested in humorous sci-fi dealing with space travel and alien encounters.
