With all the hype around the movie coming out soon, I decided to give Project Hail Mary a shot. I haven't read anything by Andy Weir before but I did enjoy the movie adaptation of The Martian. Given all the praise PHM gets on Reddit, I was pretty hyped. I love first-contact sci-fi stories so this seemed right up my alley.
Which may have been a mistake, and maybe my expectations were too high because I honestly thought this book was really, REALLY bad.
The premise and some of the plot developments are pretty much all it has going for. The writing in particular is just some of the worst I've read in some time. It legitimately feels like reading a high schooler's essay with how wooden and dull the prose is. Look, I know this is supposed to be popcorn scifi fluff. I'm not expecting Nabokov or Toni Morrison or anything for a book like this. Even then, large parts of the book were just painful to read.
The protagonist is also completely insufferable. Maybe it's my fault for being too terminally online on Reddit, but this dude legitimately felt and sounded like the most obnoxious, irritating Redditor you'll ever come across. The humour is cringe and eye-rollingly bad. I see a lot of people quoting dialogue and quips from the book, which sounded corny as hell but I thought maybe it's because of the lack of context but nah, it really is just that lame.
There is also almost zero character development or any kind of personality in the protagonist or any of the other side characters.
All in all, this was a massive bust for me. I was really looking forward to it too because again, I love these kinds of stories. It's legitimately shocking to me how big of a commercial success it's become but then again, you could say the same for Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey. This is just a nerd version of that.
by keepfighting90