Hail Mary
Andy Weir
November 24,2025
Overall I loved this book a lot. bought me a new passion for reading fiction.
Astrophage.
Astrophage (Greek for “star eater”), is an interstellar bacteria. sort of like the bacteriophage, but if it could somehow store neutrinos and travel at the speed of light. quite tacky, but leads to a very interesting storyline because they come to the solar system they start consuming the sun and sun starts losing its light. but on one star this does not happen.
and so the hero starts his interstallar voyage on a ship powered by astrophage, across entire galaxies and then waking up in a different galaxy, with his memory erased. being a scientist the protagonist moves pieces his past and figures out his future to make sense of things.
Communication with an unimaginable species
This was the most interesting part of the whole book for me. You have an organism (rocky) that can only “see” with sonar and then you have a human who can only use visible light to see. Yet they manage to find each other in the vast universe. and manage to communicate.
It was kinda preposterous that rocky had an easily translatable way through clocks. how likely is it that the clock is so easily decodable? between two space faring species. especially considering how convoluted human time keeping. but I’ll let it slide.
Beyond all the science and human struggle. It is an inherent story about friendship between two completely different species. In an incredible way this book made me feel good, in the end.