Ryland Grace

Ryland Grace is Project Hail Mary's first-person narrator and main character. He is an unmarried, childless junior high school science teacher who is plucked from obscurity by Eva Stratt to become a leading expert on Astrophage and, ultimately, an astronaut on the project's space mission. When the novel opens, Ryland is aboard the Hail Mary and has just woken from the coma induced before he left Earth. He is suffering from amnesia, and must gradually piece together who he is and why he is on a ship in another galaxy. In flashbacks to his memories from before the launch, Ryland (and the reader) discovers that he was chosen to study Astrophage by Stratt because of a research paper he once wrote that argued life did not require water. It was a controversial paper that attracted ridicule and caused Ryland to leave academia for the safety of a...