What an amazing space ride The Hail Mary is

My copy of the book

 Some 7 years back, I was on a date for the movie of ‘The Martian’, at the phoenix mall. She had a sweet Tamil name. I thought we had a good time. After the movie, we went to a cookie shop nearby. I liked her. I am digressing. That was the first time I came to know Andy Weir. I was not keen to buy The Martian, but I got my hands on Project Hail Mary and boy, was I right?? Here, Weir takes us on an exciting interstellar journey with Dr. Grace, a molecular biologist and a school teacher, aboard Hail Mary far away from Mars, far away from our solar system for he is the one who can save the earth from an impending catastrophe of an alien organism eating sun like stars. He sets out to study the star tau ceti, which surprisingly, was unaffected.

Project Hail Mary is mankind’s biggest project, which is supposedly, the answer to the global dimming event was headed by Stratt, a powerful woman with absolute authority whose sole aim to complete the mission within deadlines. There are many instances where Stratt’s decisions were dictated mostly by the deadline. She was quite right. She reckoned that, should the mission be successful, mankind will have some time to respond, after the information is relayed from tau ceti. Dr. Grace, who was one of the first members of her team to build Hail Mary, believed in her firm leadership and vouched for her fearless decisions when she ordered to release methane from Antartica to reduce cooling of earth and to buy a realistic window for the Hail Mary succeed. But he would start to question his views on Stratt when he ended up being one of astronauts aboard Hail Mary.

Following this, Dr. Grace finds himself in many unthinkable situations in deep space and how he works, forms the story. Weir’s clean and emphatic writing throughout, render many exciting situations during Grace travel, much more gripping. I did not put down this book till I was done. In fact, I would say that this one of the books I read in a day or two. Such an engaging one it was. This book is now, among my space book favorites which are Hitchikers guide & rendezvous with rama.