Andy Weir is the author of The Martian, which I have not read. But I have seen the movie of the same name which was based on the book, and quite enjoyed it. The title character is not a sentient extraterrestrial alien being, but rather one of us, stranded alone on Mars when the mission of which he was a part gets into big trouble and the other members, believing him to be dead, return to earth without him. The book is the story of his very clever and resourceful efforts to survive and get himself rescued, and the movie at any rate was pretty enjoyable.
I would most likely not have read this book, either, in the ordinary course of things, but I've had occasion to run up and down the length of Alabama on I-65 twice in the past few weeks, and listened to the fourteen-hour audio version. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoyed The Martian, book or film, and especially to anyone who likes what's called "hard" science fiction.
Back in my teens when I read almost exclusively science fiction, that term was used to describe science fiction which is solidly based on scientific fact and theoretically plausible technology. Having written that sentence, I wondered whether the term is still in use, and it is: there's a Wikipedia entry for it. The other kind of science fiction, the not-so-hard kind, can be represented by Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, which, according to my recollection of it from sixty years ago, doesn't go to a lot of trouble to justify scientifically or technologically its depiction of a Martian colony, or its relations with that planet's indigenous Martians, but is more concerned with its cultural and political aspects.
Project Hail Mary is also distinctly hard sci-fi, and it's not unfair to describe it as a much higher stakes version of the same basic story line: there is an even more dire and extensive problem and the scientific and technological efforts to solve it are extreme. (The title, in case you don't know, refers to the "Hail Mary pass," a desperate last-second move in a football game, a long pass that's unlikely to be caught: say a prayer and throw the ball.) The problem–The Problem–is that the world is coming to an end, or at least coming to an end for a great deal of life on earth, because the sun is rapidly cooling.
And I'm not going to say much more about the plot than that, because even the scientific work involved in discovering the nature of The Problem is fascinating, and I don't want to give even that much away, much less describe the development of a just-barely-not-hopeless attempt–Project Hail Mary–at solving it, and how that plan works out. Most of the story, told in a very effective combination of flashbacks and current events, involves the narrator, Ryland Grace, a one-time molecular biologist now teaching middle-school science. I suppose it might be the fantasy of many very small-time scientists to make a discovery that will Save The World; Grace not only makes significant discoveries, but is very closely involved in implementing the project, with a resourcefulness at least equal to that of the Martian.
Mark Twain once said something like "I love work. I can sit and look at it for hours." My relationship to science is somewhat like that. I'm fascinated by the Big Picture provided by science, but not much interested in delving deeply into its complexity. This book provides just enough actual scientific information and thinking that I can enjoy the weaving of scientific fact and technological imagination into a story that kept my interest.
This is not great literature, but I found it fascinating, at least for the first ten or eleven hours; there came a point when the encounter with yet another major problem and yet another wild attempt to solve it became just a bit tiresome. I do have some reservations about the plausibility of several features and plot developments, but I can't discuss those, either, without giving away more of the plot than I want to.
This image does have a connection to the actual events of the novel. However, don't let it mislead you into thinking that the solution to The Problem involves lowering Ryland Grace into the sun. That would really be implausible.
Light On Dark Water 
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