The authors of The Martian authors' new book tell the story of isolation and alien creatures threatening Earth

According to foreign media reports, Andy Will's debut "The Martian" protagonist Mark Watney mixed his own dung and soil on Mars, and then built a potato farm on the Red Planet and harvested potato tubers to survive. Will is adept at creating characters like Watney who deals with complex problems and explores science in the face of a mess of life situations, and will continue to be seen in his latest novel, Project Hail Mary.

Project Hail Mary bears similarities with The Martian and Will's second novel, Artemis. Artemis tells the story of a smuggler named Jazz who lives and works in the first city on the moon. But the new book's setting and philosophy are more ambitious, overcoming or rather avoiding many of artemis's problems.

The novel centers on Ryland Grace, who wakes up light-years away from the solar system feeling very confused and lonely. Grace, who is slowly recovering from amnesia, finds that Earth is in big trouble: a newly discovered alien microbe is draining the sun's heat. In a few decades, the Earth will enter an ice age and half of humanity will become extinct.

Through flashbacks, Grace learns that she was once a scientist but later left academia to become a high school science teacher, and his mission is fairly simple: save the planet and keep it from turning into a snowball.

Grace, like Watney and Jazz, who was previously created by Will, is a "repairer". Will puts his characters at a life-and-death juncture and asks them to overcome one challenge after another. His novels are widely praised for strictly following the principles of true science and true physics. Perhaps the use of spectroscopy in the novel to guide the reader and study infrared light may soon become boring, but Will rarely lets the details stand still.

Especially in Project Hail Mary, scientific explanation never gets in the way of the story. It energetically jumps from one question to another, each completed challenge interspersed with fragments of Grace's life on Earth.

Despite his success, Will doesn't consider himself a good writer, and in his opinion, he's not very good at character creation, but it can help solve this problem through background stories. "Mark Watney has no depth at all," he says, "and he's cute, but when you read the book, you don't know anything about him, you just know that he's a man who doesn't want to die." ”

Will said he was trying to "go the extra mile" for Ryland Grace. As the character's backstory is filled in, so does his reason for getting on the ship. At the back of the book, his companion—an engineering expert from a distant planet—joined him.

The first contact with Project Hail Mary is pleasing and differs from hard science, which gives Will the space to enrich Grace's character and also highlights the collaborative spirit of space science: scientists and engineers working together to push the boundaries of exploration. The resulting relationship has a satisfying reward, something That Will did not do in his first two novels.

Undoubtedly, of Will's three hard science fiction novels, Project Hail Mary is one of the most fantastic universes. As the science of starships and extraterrestrial life piled up, Will built a world that was more detached from ourselves than Mars or Artemis. Mars and the Moon are tangible places that immediately evoke images in the mind, but Project Hail Mary takes Grace far beyond these worlds — about 12 light-years from Earth. However, it makes people feel closest to home. This may be because in 2021, seeing Grace detached from human life, it's hard not to think about the pandemic. Most of us are slowly emerging from our long-term isolation – mainly through science and international cooperation.

Will has said in multiple interviews that the connections are just coincidences — the book was completed long before people fought the covid-19 pandemic. "Under all the same conditions, I'd rather the outbreak didn't happen at all," he said.

There is another threat lurking in Project Hail Mary. The earth-threatening bugs that appear in the novel are called Astrophage, which feed on sunlight and darken the stars, which scientists predict will lead to the collapse of the global food chain.