Max McKinnon’s Reviews > Project Hail Mary > Status Update

Loving it. It has more hand waving and less actual engineering and science than The Martian, but overall I like it more. The story telling style is noticeably more cliffhanger after cliffhanger as well.

The pacing is phenomenal. Every now and then some piece of pseudoscience rattled off that’s very important to the plot has a hand wavy explanation and doesn’t hold up to scrutiny as well as it did in The Martian but what the hell, most of it is still epic and great.

Small spoiler alert

The book is very good so far and very engaging. Did I understand the situation wrong, or is there a gaping hole in the science of the plot: absorbing radiated energy from the sun doesn’t make it burn out faster. Maybe they are in the sun stealing mass, but it wasn’t clear. It sounded like they were floating near Venus.