If there is a poet laureate of the "you can just do things" crowd, it's novelist Andy Weir. Weir broke into the mainstream with The Martian, a science fiction novel about a man stuck on Mars who ...

Among those bits and bobs in the case of Project Hail Mary is the sci-fi novel of the same name by Andy Weir, who also wrote the book that served as the source material for Ridley Scott’s The Martian.

He wakes up alone on a spaceship, barely able to speak, and somehow ends up Earth’s last, nerdy hope — armed with a dry-erase marker, a useless AI, and the kind of scrappy optimism that makes the end ...