Ballantine Books has officially announced Andy Weir’s next novel: Project Hail Mary, which will hit stores on May 4th, 2021.
Word of the project broke earlier this spring when Deadline reported that film studio MGM had scooped up the rights to adapt it, with Ryan Gosling set to star at the film’s lead character and with The Lego Movie‘s Phil Lord and Chris Miller set to direct.
According to Ballantine, the novel is about “a lone astronaut [who] awakens to find himself on a ship deep in space, his crewmates dead and his memories missing. All he knows is that he alone must now complete a desperate, last-chance mission to save the Earth from disaster.”
In the press release for the book, Weir says, “I really cannot wait to get this one in people’s hands in May. It’s hitting a lot of those notes that people responded to with The Martian—but I also went for it in a big way with the science and the speculative aspects, and it took the story in some crazy and exciting new places.”
The novel does indeed sound a lot like Weir’s debut novel, The Martian, which followed a lone astronaut as he fought to survive after being stranded on Mars—which was also adapted to film in 2015 by director Ridley Scott. Weir’s next novel was 2017’s Artemis, about a woman named Jazz, who gets caught up in a conspiracy to control her settlement.
