Later in the book, he's joined by a crew mate - an alien engineering expert from a distant planet. As the character's backstory is filled in, his reasons for being on the ship become clear. Weir says he tried to "step it up" for Ryland Grace. "He was likable, but when you're done with the book you don't know anything about him other than he's a guy who didn't want to die." "Mark Watney had no depth at all," he says. Despite his success, Weir doesn't consider himself a good writer, and the backstory helps to address one of Weir's self-confessed weaknesses: characters. It bounces from one problem to the next with verve, interspersing each completed challenge with pieces of Grace's life back on Earth. Particularly in Project Hail Mary, scientific explanations never get in the way of the story's rhythm. Guiding readers through spectroscopy and studying infrared light could quickly turn dour, but Weir rarely lets the details bog down the pace. His novels have been widely celebrated for how strictly they adhere to real scientific principles and real physics. Weir places his characters in life-or-death situations and tasks them with overcoming challenge after challenge. Grace, like Watney and Jazz before him, is a fixer. Grace remembers, through flashbacks, that he was once a scientist but left academia to be a high school science teacher, and his mission is a fairly simple one: Save the Earth from becoming a snowball.
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