Xenobiology for Engineers: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

I seem to be one of the few people who liked Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary more than The Martian. It's mildly spoilery to say that the xenobiological aspects are what I enjoyed the most. At other times I felt like I was reading someone showing their work on their physics homework, but if you've read The Martian you know what you're in for. To mildly plagiarize a review I saw elsewhere: if you liked The Martian, you will probably also like Project Hail Mary.

Weir writes what I call "Engineer's SF" rather than "Big Ideas SF." It's more about how you might solve various scientific problems than anything like evoking a sense of cosmic sublimity or anything. To use a distinction from Noam Chomsky: it's about problems rather than mysteries. And that's fine. That's what it is, and Weir is pretty good at it. I admit I skimmed some of the more technical solution stuff, but to each one's own if that's your thing.

I think I enjoyed the somewhat wider scope here (as opposed to The Martian), although the main character will feel like a familiar type. Readers of The Martian may be forgiven for thinking this one is also about Mark Watney, but with fewer swears (honestly, those 'gosh darns' grated on me a little bit, but not much. I don't want to be the mirror image of those people who clutch their pearls about a few 'goddamns' and 'shits' in their precious reading material. Ugh.)

There's not much about the plot I can say without some major spoilers other than what you can read in the book description. The sun is growing colder, threatening all life on Earth, and our protagonist has something to do with solving this problem and saving humanity. And then... well, some genuinely interesting science fictional stuff happens.

I do have some criticisms that might be a little spoilery as well. Our hero solves some problems (especially a huge linguistic problem) way too quickly and easily. He sometimes say things about 'humanity' that really only apply to some cultures (like totally ignoring the very real human cultures with base-20 mathematical systems, or the persistence of poverty and subsistence farming even in our current Golden Age compared to pre-industrial times). But these are the same cultural myopias you'd see on Star Trek or most SF written by white Americans, so I won't go too hard on him (it seems Eurocentrism runs deep, even into visions of the future).

I do recommend it, especially for those who prefer what I call Engineers' SF. While I genuinely enjoyed it and I'm glad I read it, I'm a bit puzzled how this got nominated for a Hugo. I mean, it's good, but I wouldn't call it Hugo winning material. It's not breaking a lot of new ground in the genre even if it does what it does rather well. But that's just one Hugo voter speaking, I suppose. To each one's own!

See also my Goodreads review.