15 new Fantasy and Science Fiction books to read in 2021

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (May 4)

2021 will also see the release of a new Andy Weir book: Project Hail Mary. The author of The Martian is back with another science survival thriller — but this time, things seem far more complicated and dangerous. The Martian’s Mark Watney only had to worry about his potatoes, but the hero in Weir’s newest book will have to contend with a threat to the entire human species:

"Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish. Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it. All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company. His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it’s up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery—and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species. And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he’s got to do it all alone. Or does he?"

This sounds like a return to form for Weir, whose last work, Artemis, was a larger story about a criminal named Jazz trying to get by on the first lunar colony. With Project Hail Mary, it seems like he’s returning to the trusty formula of guy-stuck-in-a-desperate-survival-situation-in-space, but with a whole slew of extra twists. Hey, it worked well enough in The Martian, so I’d bite!

Project Hail Mary comes out on May 4 from Ballantine Books.