Books like Project Hail Mary
What should you read after Andy Weir’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Andy Weir
- 2021
- 496 pages
- Science fiction
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after Project Hail Mary
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchThe Martian
Andy Weir
Weir's first and leanest: one man, a hostile planet, and a to-do list of problems that will kill him if he gets the arithmetic wrong.
- Problem-solving under pressure
- Jokes in the face of death
- Science you can follow
- No alien, no friendship
Best for an unlikely friendshipThe Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
Becky Chambers
If Rocky was the reason you got emotional, here is a whole shipful: nine crew members, several species, and almost nothing to fight about.
- An unlikely friendship
- Hope in hard sci-fi
- Jokes in the face of death
- Almost no hard science
Great matchChildren of Time
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Spiders on a terraformed world build a civilisation while a human ark ship circles overhead, and the eventual contact between them is the entire payoff.
- An unlikely friendship
- Science you can follow
- The slow reveal
- Spans millennia, no single hero
Best for the slow revealRecursion
Blake Crouch
Crouch runs the same engine: a scientific premise that keeps escalating past the point where you thought the book could reasonably go, chapter after chapter.
- The slow reveal
- Problem-solving under pressure
- Science you can follow
- Thriller pacing over character
Worth a look — with a warningSeveneves
Neal Stephenson
The moon shatters and humanity has two years to get off Earth; Stephenson works the orbital mechanics with the relish Weir brings to duct tape.
- Science you can follow
- Problem-solving under pressure
- One person against the void
- Lecture-length technical digressions
Great matchStation Eleven
Emily St. John Mandel
Also a book about people salvaging what matters after a catastrophe, though Mandel cares about the survivors' inner lives rather than the maths of survival.
- Hope in hard sci-fi
- The slow reveal
- One person against the void
- No science, no problem-solving
What should you read after Project Hail Mary?
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is The Martian by Andy Weir — weir's first and leanest: one man, a hostile planet, and a to-do list of problems that will kill him if he gets the arithmetic wrong.
If what stayed with you was an unlikely friendship, read The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers instead: if Rocky was the reason you got emotional, here is a whole shipful: nine crew members, several species, and almost nothing to fight about. Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky is the other strong option — spiders on a terraformed world build a civilisation while a human ark ship circles overhead, and the eventual contact between them is the entire payoff.
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