Earth is in danger. The sun is dimming, losing energy faster than it should. The consequences are unthinkable. Forget global warming, the world will freeze to death.
Scientists of the world unite and find the reason. A strange life form, christened astrophage, is absorbing the sun’s energy and using it to migrate to Venus in order to breed and return in bigger numbers to start the cycle again. Good to find out, but how to fix the problem? A straw to grasp is that though the phenomenon is observable in most nearby stars, there is one that bucks the trend: Tau Ceti.
Dr Ryland Grace, who gave up a potentially brilliant academic career in science to teach high school, somehow gets head hunted into the Project Hail Mary team – so named as the hopes of the planet rest on a long hopeful shot, namely a thirteen year space flight to Tau Ceti to find out its secret. It is a suicide mission for the four crew, who must survive an induced coma, tended by robotic nursing for most of the trip, then send their findings back to Earth, using what fuel is left to power four tiny spacecrafts. Job done, the astronauts get to choose how to die.
Fortunately for Grace, he is not an astronaut, but as the novel opens with him waking up on-board, some last minute change must have occurred that his coma-fogged brain cannot fathom. From there the book twin tracks the ongoing mission with the back story.
Both breeze along from one scientific discovery, through setbacks, to the next problem only science can solve. It is a bit far-fetched, and when the Hail Mary gets to Tau Ceti, credibility is stretched to, or beyond, breaking point.
This is The Martian
supercharged to beyond reason, just about worth pursuing to get to a tense
conclusion, which is in doubt to the end.
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