It took me a while to get into it, but I really ended up loving “Project Hail Mary.”

I went in completely blind, I had read the martian but knew nothing other than "there's a guy in space for some probably important reason."

And at first I though, "ok is this literally just gonna be the martian again? Snarky scientist main character stranded in space, probably has to get back somehow.

The writing style also wasn't for me. The prose was very simple and straight forward (which was somewhat of a relief, having recently read Neuromancer for the first time), but there were no particularly poetic descriptions or pieces of dialogue, which would also be fine if a lot of the other writing didn't feel so marvel-y and reddit-y. Ryland honestly comes off as a bit of a cringe loser sometimes, but what saves it is that that is not entirely out of character for him.

Bu the strength of the book, which was also the strength of the Martian, and what make sit such a page-turner is that it's just so damn satisfying how Weir presents you with a problem or a mystery and takes you through the steps to solve it. It's just addictive.

All of that get's turned up to eleven when we meet Rocky. I had no idea there were even going to be aliens in this book but about 150 pages in the story goes from Interstellar to Arrival and again it was just so fun to learn more about this alien and eventually learning to communicate. It just really worked.

I feel like the Eridians are a nice middle ground between aliens that are basically just humans with different ears (à la star trek, Avatar) and the barely unknowable mystery from deep space aliens (Arrival).

Because yeah at the en dof the day it's a story about the connection and cooperation between two (human) people. And I think Weir does a good job at portraying the similarities between humans and Eridians not as them being so much like us, but we being so much like each other.