After reading The Martian, I heard someone describe it as "that scene in Apollo 13 where they have to fit a square peg into a round hole or everyone dies? It's an entire book of that". At his best, Andy Weir can generate an engine that using this loop, and hanging everything else (plot, character development) around them. I felt let down by Artemis, it didn't have that same juice.

Project Hail Mary is a continuation of all the things that Weir does best. From the onset, discovering why he's in a windowless room with higher gravity than he should have, through the end, there are innumerable problems that he discovers, tests, and resolves. Similar to The Martian, a big chunk of Grace's excursion is written like a diary, which also fits this format well.

I'm still not sure Weir can write characters outside the narrow band of "slightly eccentric male scientists with a Science Job to do", and most of the other characters in the book fall into that category. The flashbacks introduce characters back like Strat that feel one-dimensional and lab-grown (almost like astrophage). I generally liked how the book structured the flashbacks to help flesh out the narrative (and introduces another set of environments for characters to run through the problem/test/fix loop).

It's never fun to say an author should stay in their lane, but at this point I know what I want out of an Andy Weir book, and this one delivers.