Andy Weir and the Hail Mary Project

Andy Weir

Andy Weir became famous with his 2011 sci-fi novel The Martian, in which an astronaut is mistakenly abandoned on Mars when the third expedition must be hastily canceled because of a violent dust storm. The novel was the basis for a film, which bears the same title, and which made its author famous.

Weir is not a prolific writer. In 2021, his third novel, Project Hail Mary, was published. In my opinion, this is one of the seven best science fiction novels of all time. My other six favorite works in this genre can be seen here.

Project Hail Mary is a hard science fiction novel about space adventures typical of the genre. It deals with interstellar travel at relativistic speeds, encounter with extraterrestrial intelligences, or the invasion of the solar system by extraterrestrial life forms that threaten our survival. All this is integrated in a coherent way.

Weir's novel contains many hidden hints, easily understood by Catholics. I don't know if Weir is a practicing Catholic, but several points in his work are compatible with Catholicism. Let's see a few examples:

• The title of the work: Project Hail Mary. The interstellar ship in which the protagonist travels is called Hail Mary. No explanation is given why they gave that name to the interstellar travel project and to the ship.
• The name of the protagonist is Ryland Grace. In other words, the Hail Mary ship is full of Grace.
• The interstellar expedition is suicidal, because those who undertake it don’t have enough energy to be able to return. The protagonist, who is the only member of the crew to reach the destination alive, has embarked on a journey of no return to save humanity. Although his initial motivation may be debatable (see chapters 23 and 26), at the end of the novel he volunteers his life to save the population of a planet. Ryland Grace is thus a figure of Christ.
• The intelligent extraterrestrials that appear in the novel have religious ideas, as evidenced by the fact that their language contains the equivalent of the word Grace, so they can translate into it the protagonist's surname. See chapter 16.
• The first name of the character Eva Stratt may also have biblical connotations in this context.

C.S. Lewis

All of the above is quite subtle, and most readers won’t notice these associations. Perhaps this is, after all, Andy Weir’s joke addressed to Catholic readers. In any case, this novel fulfills what C.S. Lewis suggested in his article Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What's to be Said:

Why did one find so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to… But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world… one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.

But, when we are dealing with human beings, things are not simple. Andy Weir is much more complex than what can be deduced about him (correctly or incorrectly) by reading one or more of his novels. To verify this, one can read his short story The Egg, which is not compatible with Catholicism. Some readers have compared this story with Isaac Asimov's The Last Question, which I consider an anticipated literary version of the final anthropic principle. But it would be unreasonable to interpret Andy Weir's short story as an accurate description of what he thinks about God and the afterlife. As an author of novels, I am aware that not everything I’ve written in them coincides with what I believe to be true.

The same post in Spanish

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Manuel Alfonseca