Project Hail Mary

Project Hail Mary is a hard science fiction novel by the American writer Andy Weir, published in 2021 and shortlisted for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2022. Ray Porter's reading of the unabridged audiobook received the 2022 Audie Award in the Audiobook of the Year category, and the novel was adapted into a film released in 2026. It centres on a science teacher and former biologist who wakes aboard a spacecraft with amnesia.

Scientists notice the Sun losing brightness at a rate that keeps increasing, along with a faint infrared line running between the Sun and Venus, later named the Petrova line after the person who spotted it. Ryland Grace wakes on a spacecraft with two dead crewmates, a memory that will not come back and no idea why he is there. Bit by bit he reconstructs the mission and the task he has to complete alone.

What he does have is a classroom's worth of knowledge about biology and a ship full of instruments that will not tell him anything until he works out what he was sent to do. The novel alternates between the present aboard the ship and flashbacks to the years on Earth that put him there. As his memories return, Grace has to connect what he knows about the threat to the work he can carry out.

Weir writes the book as a sequence of problems solved with the equipment and knowledge available, and much of it is taken up with experiments rather than action. It is a standalone novel, and it is the author's third published novel after The Martian and Artemis.