Andy Weir’s ‘The Martian’ had a lone astronaut trying to survive on Mars, this time he has upped the ante by having the hero of Project Hail Mary attempt to save the whole of humanity. The story starts with Ryland Grace waking on a bed in a strange environment after a very long ‘sleep.’ He finds out more about his environment and in the process slowly remembers fragments of how he got in this strange predicament. It turns out that his controversial and derided views about alien life forms had made him choose a happier life as a science teacher. So, when an alien menace appeared he was the perfect candidate to examine the threat and help sort out a plan to stop it making our planet uninhabitable.

The beauty of this novel are the scientifically logical steps that are taken to beat an alien menace, neatly using its very own characteristics. On his mission to fix this mighty big problem Ryland must overcome many obstacles and mistakes of his own making. Just as the threatening life forms are very well thought-out and make more sense than most alien invaders – indeed they are worthy of our pandemic-stricken era – another alien life form joins forces with Ryland to eliminate the aliens which, unchecked, will snuff out the stars of both their home planets. Their relationship blossoms and together they struggle to find ways of communicating and sharing their knowledge for the greater good. Andy Weir superbly creates a genuinely unusual alien with its own scientific and engineering abilities that are the outcome of its physical characteristics and biological processes.

A theme of the book is one of cooperation, as on Earth every resource, country and scientist has to work together to stop us becoming as extinct as the dinosaurs. At turns enjoyable, funny and frightening, this is a gripping roller-coaster ride of a hard science novel.