🎧 Reviewed by LD | Rating: 3/5 | Steam: 🔥
⚠️ This is a full spoiler review. If you haven’t listened to Project Hail Mary yet — go listen first. We’ll be here when you’re done.
The Opening
A man wakes up in a med bay with no memory, two dead crewmates mummified beside him, and the slow realization that he is not on Earth. That is genuinely one of the most gripping openings I’ve encountered in a long time. And then the book proceeds to explain every single thought this man has for the next however-many months, and I started losing my mind.
The Full Story — Spoilers Included
The Setup
Ryland Grace — junior high science teacher turned the world’s leading expert on astrophage — wakes up alone on the Hail Mary mission ship with no idea how he got there. The book runs on a dual timeline: present day on the ship as he slowly pieces his memory back together, and flashbacks to Earth showing how the mission was built.
On Earth, the problem is called the Petrova Problem. Black dots — astrophage — have been discovered consuming energy from the sun and slowly dimming it. The discovery came through an anomaly near Venus, and scientists noticed that one star system — Tau Ceti — doesn’t seem to be affected at all. Project Hail Mary’s mission: get there and figure out why.
The woman running all of this is Eva Stratt. Presidential pardon, full backing of the US Army, does not mess around. She recruited Grace because of a paper he wrote suggesting water isn’t required to sustain human life. He was brought in to work on the astrophage problem — a researcher, a consultant. He was never supposed to actually be on that ship.
Rocky
At Tau Ceti, Grace discovers he is not alone. There is another ship. It copies his movements. He decides to interact — and what follows is honestly the best part of this book.
The alien gets named Rocky. Rocky is what Grace describes as a giant spider rock. He is an Eridian, from the planet Erid — ammonia-based life, sees through echolocation, builds things from a material called xenonite. Rocky’s entire crew of 23 people died from radiation during their mission. He has been completely alone in space for what turns out to be 46 human years. Rocky survived only because the astrophage near his engines happened to block the radiation and he was the engineer taking care of those engines.
They attach their ships through an airlock with a glass divider between them — two completely different species, two completely different atmospheres, trying to figure out how to talk to each other. This takes real work. They build a shared language together slowly through a computer, piece by piece, sound by sound, until they can actually communicate. And then they are up there together for a very, very long time.
The friendship that develops is the heart of this book. Rocky picking up Grace’s one-finger gesture for “one second” and using it himself. Rocky watching Grace sleep every single time — I guess that is their custom on Rocky’s planet. Rocky building himself a glass-panel room inside Grace’s ship just to hang out, because human science stuff way cooler than Rocky science stuff.
The Discovery
Together Rocky and Grace figure out that there is a planet — the home planet of astrophage. Grace tells Rocky that back on Earth, whoever discovers something first gets to name it. So Rocky names it. He calls it Adrian, after his mate — well, kind of. Grace is the one who gave it a human name, as they just have to substitute in something human to match Rocky’s sounds.
Together they identify taomeba, a microorganism that eats astrophage. They run experiments, confirm it works in both their atmospheric conditions, and eventually develop a nitrogen-resistant strain so that it will work on Rocky’s atmosphere. They figure out Grace’s fuel problem together, celebrate, and start preparing to part ways. Rocky asks Grace for a computer — he wants access to all human knowledge so his scientists back home can learn more. Grace asks for some xenonite. Done.
They are both a little sad about it.
The Truth
Through flashbacks, we eventually find out exactly how Grace ended up on this ship — because it was not voluntary.
The research center blew up. Dubois and Shapiro (the primary and secondary scientists) were scheduled to be there. The buildings were a crater. No sign of either of them. A miscalculation of astrophage caused the explosion, and now Stratt tells Grace that he has been the tertiary scientist all along — and he has to go. He is the only one left. He asks to think about it, and she gives him until 5 pm that day.
He shows up at 5 pm and he tells her no. And her security guard won’t let him leave. She needs him to go. He is the only one. He knows everything they’ve been working towards for years. He is the leading scientist on astrophage — it has to be him.
She tells him that he will be held in a cell for the next few days leading up to the launch, then just before launch he will be given a powerful sedative and placed into a coma and hooked up to all the life support machines. He will wake up years later in space.
She tells him: “I’m 99% sure that you’ll do the right thing, but I guess I can’t rely on 99%. Did you know that the Russians have a drug that makes you forget for days or even weeks about what happened? You’ll remember sure, but way after you’re already on this mission. And you’ll wake up from your coma. Everyone will just assume it’s one of the side effects and you will go on with the mission.”
Drugged. Against his will. That is how our hero ended up on his heroic mission. And that is why he had no memory when he woke up.
The Choice
Grace is heading home alone. He is bored, and he starts working on the probes — the Beatles, he calls them — prepping them to send back to Earth with the taomeba and all their data.
And then he smells something.
The taomeba got out of his mini farms. They’re leaking — he determines they are getting out through the xenonite containers. The same xenonite Rocky’s entire ship is made of. Grace has been watching Rocky’s ship flare for a month and not understanding why. Now he does. Rocky has zero protection and they’ve likely eaten all his fuel. He is in danger.
Grace has a choice. He can use his fuel to go home. Or he can burn it going back to find Rocky and run out of food himself. He’s already decided. Six weeks of searching through the vastness of space, and he finally finds Rocky — stranded, who had attempted everything he could to control the leak and failed at all of it. Grace tells Rocky he will take him home. And then he will die. No more food.
Rocky says no. You can’t die. You are my friend. Then he tells him to just eat the taomeba.
The Ending — Satisfied or Disappointed?
Grace ends up living on Erid. The astrophage kept him alive, but he was very malnourished — got scurvy and a whole other list of things on top of that. He was very sick. Erid’s government decided to do whatever it could to keep him alive, because not only was he instrumental in saving their planet, he is also a real, living, breathing alien, and that is very exciting for them.
He went into space in his 40s. He is 71 Earth years old now. Much of those years spent in space.
One morning Rocky comes in excited because the scientists just heard that the sun has returned to full luminance. Earth obviously got the taomeba and Earth saved itself with it. They made it.
Rocky asks if Grace will return to Earth. Grace doesn’t know. He says the Eridians could fuel up his ship and stock it with food and send him on his way. But he’s not sure. Rocky hopes he stays. Grace realizes he needs to get going — and the last thing we see is him, a man in his 70s, walking into a classroom where all the Eridians are sitting there, excited, waiting for him on the other side of his dome to come teach them.
Does Grace go back to Earth? We don’t know. All we know is that he thinks maybe one day he might.
The Steam Rating Breakdown
🔥 — This is hard sci-fi. There is no romance, no heat.
Would I Relisten to It?
No. And I want to be fair, because the storyline is genuinely interesting, and Rocky alone makes this worth something. But this is VERY very sciency. Like too much science. Trying to understand what they are calculating and figuring out takes away a lot of the enjoyment of the book. There have also been many flashback sections that I felt were incredibly unnecessary for the storyline.
Have you ever read a book and feel like you heard every single thought, every reasoning step and deduction that character had — ever?? You know exactly how they arrived at a decision or thought, even though you didn’t need to. That is what this book feels like. Every thought they have, every move they make FULLY explained into exhaustion STEP-BY-STEP.
I don’t need to know the math. I don’t need to know how you got to the math.
Three stars.
Where to Get This Book
📖 Physical Book
Amazon CA | Amazon US | Bookshop.org
🎧 Audiobook
Audible CA | Audible US
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Plot Twisted. 🔥
🎧 | Genre: Hard Sci-Fi | Steam: 🔥
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