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The Book Behind ‘Project Hail Mary’ Is a Sci-Fi ClassicJonathan Olley
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Project Hail Mary is about a nobody who wakes up on a spaceship light-years from Earth with no idea who he is or how he got there. Which sounds like a neat metaphor for several Hollywood acting careers I can think of. Not Ryan Gosling’s, of course. He’s always looked like he’s in on the joke.
In Project Hail Mary, which debuts in theaters this weekend, he plays a mild-mannered science teacher forced to piece his memory back together while on a mission to stop a mysterious, star-eating algae from killing the sun before Earth freezes over. Reviewers have gushed over the movie so far, some even mentioning it for an Oscars run in 2027.
Directed by longtime collaborators Phil Lord and Chris Miller (21 and 22 Jump Street, The Lego Movie, Brooklyn Nine-Nine), the movie has the distinct energy of The Martian, which also followed a lonely scientist tasked with saving Earth from space in an orange spacesuit. Which is no surprise, as it is based on a book by the same author.
But there’s one thing Matt Damon doesn’t have in The Martian that Ryan Gosling does: a wisecracking little alien friend called Rocky. As it evolves, Gosling’s tender relationship with Rocky starts to feel a lot like Tom Hanks’ and Wilson in Cast Away. Only this time, the volleyball talks back.
But back to the book. Project Hail Mary is based on Weir’s 2021 bestseller of the same name, which spent nine weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list and narrowly missed out on the 2022 Hugo Award for Best Novel. If you want to know more about the novel that inspired Gosling’s film, keep reading below.
The Accidental Astronaut
Weir is a slightly unlikely figure behind all this. After training as a computer scientist, he worked as a programmer on Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness—but was fired for poor performance. He kept writing anyway, posting short science-fiction stories to his website while working a string of other jobs.
Then, in the late 2000s, his mind turned to Mars. “I was thinking, how could we put humans on Mars… just designing a mission in my head,” he later said. “And then, as I realized all the things that could go wrong, I thought, This could make a good book.”
Not a grand visionary, by his own description, but rather “a science dork with the ability to write books,” Weir threw himself into the research—orbital mechanics, Martian conditions, the history of spaceflight, even botany. The result was 2011’s The Martian.
It was no overnight phenomenon. He began by posting chapters online for a small but devoted audience, who eventually persuaded him to upload the full novel to Amazon for 99 cents. It sold 35,000 copies in a month. A publishing deal followed. Five million copies later, Ridley Scott came calling, Matt Damon signed on and Weir’s career shot into orbit.
“I try to be scientifically accurate,” Weir, whose parents were a physicist and an engineer, said to a room of scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, last month. “That’s my whole shtick.”
Weir’s commitment to getting the science right is what makes his books so propulsive—authenticity as an engine rather than an obstacle. It’s also earned him fans in unusually high places: astrophysicists, astronauts, and even crews aboard the International Space Station, where his novels have reportedly made the journey into orbit themselves.
If you love Ryan Gosling’s Project Hail Mary, you should absolutely read the book that inspired it.Amazon MGM Studios
From Mars to the Stars
Project Hail Mary is Weir’s third novel after The Martian and 2017’s Artemis. He didn’t hold back on the science there, either. The book centers on a mysterious, star-eating algae called “astrophage.” It’s killing the sun and he must go on a suicide mission to stop it and save humanity. But it’s also a fuel, which can be used to fire spaceships further and faster than ever in human history. The science is in the details.
Weir has said the idea began with a simple thought experiment: what if a microbe could “eat” starlight – and everything else followed from there. He followed the logic – imagining a lifeform that could absorb energy, reproduce, and drift between stars—until astrophage emerged as both miracle fuel and an existential threat.
But really, like all good space exploration stories, it’s not so much about space exploration as it is about exploring human ingenuity, and out unstoppable drive to reach out and love. As Kirkus Reviews, gushed: “[It’s] an unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.”
But if you have to choose either the book or the movie? We highly recommend the latter—which Esquire’s Anthony Breznican thinks has a not-so-hidden meaning that you really ought to pay attention to.
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