Mulga Bill's Hydration Vest

Le comte de Monte Cristo.

Isopod chilling under the Bear Tooth Head Fungus (god I wish that name wasn't such a mouthful)

I need to relearn gif making, but here it is in stills for now.

phm :: fleetwood mac

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in the book Grace spends 16 years on Erid before they ever receive any evidence that Earth's sun recovered from the astrophage dimming

how often do you think he wondered if he actually succeeded at all? like sure, he sent the beetles, but there's no guarantee any of them made it back. there's no guarantee humanity would be in any condition to utilize them even if they did

for a very long time, there's just no way to know

at least they definitely saved Erid. at least he has Rocky, and his students, and all the Eridians he helped save. and they like him enough and are grateful enough to build and maintain a habitat for him to live in. most of the time he probably jokingly refers to it as his zoo enclosure, just to watch Rocky puff up over it

@bucketofdeltav

I started this book this morning. I finished it now. It's surprisingly short, and at least compared to the last books I read, aggressively readable.

It's fun. It's a really fun book. Sometimes when a book is a little too stimulating I have to slow down and burn energy off, take walks, etc, but this never did that too me. It was gripping without being overwhelming, fun, carefree, enjoyable. Great way to spend a boring day at work. Work genuinely recommend to science fiction lovers.

The prose itself is a little odd. There's a sort of spectrum of readability with different authors - some view untangling the language as half the fun and thus write in a sort of intentionally opaque style (I'd accuse Cormac McCarthy of this, maybe Sam Kriss to a lesser extent), and others who view writing that's hard to untangle or understand as a failure of communication. Andy Weir definitely seems to fall into the latter. He has such a respect for engineering that seems to engineer his books to be reader-proof, unfuckupable.

It makes reading it a breeze. It's also kind of a boring approach. It gives his book a sort of fairy-tale quality. It's not quite that light, but it's uh... 2.5D? Right? The characters and the writing are not so streamlined as to be entirely allegorical, but they're also a little too twee for life. Andy Weir narrators are always this sort of emotionally constipated, relentlessly cheerful Ultimate Scientist. The side characters are fairly one note. Rocky is The Ultimate Engineer. Stratt is The Ultimate Project Manager. DuBois and Shapiro are frankly just autistic stereotypes. There's not much depth to them. I don't know that Weir actually knows how to make deep characters.

In this way, it reminded me a little of Aasimov at his worst. I don't know why STEM nerds turned authors have this odd fail state of over-fitting characters to their archetypes, but it's interesting. There is something clasically nerdy about seeing Man As For The Categories instead of The Categories There For Man.

As far as themes go, it has overt messages of techno-optimism. There is a horrible problem in this book, and we do overcome it, mostly through the power of science and creative thinking. There's a surprising amount of human-pessimism in the book too, but its implicit and maybe not intentionally put there by the author. There is this sort of yes, people can get along now, but once the going gets rough, of course we're all going to turn on each other. Of course we can't be trusted. Hell, half the success of the Project Hail Mary team seems to come from their ability to flaunt normal rules. There's this underlying, frustrated feeling that all of this could be accomplished today if the public would just get out of the fucking way and let the adults take care of business.

It kind of rubs me the wrong way, honestly. It's not an explicit message so it's ignorable, but I really like stories where humanity as a whole makes sacrifices, works hard, and finds itself worthy. The hyper individualist approach always has this sort of weird bitterness to it, as if the human species doesn't really deserve to continue, except that it produces such exceptional individuals that they redeem the whole group.

One of the most memorable scenes in the movie is when he’s IN the Petrova Line, and he’s having a moment. Because it’s beautiful. It’s destroying galaxies, uncountable lives, but it’s still beautiful.

'good luck' on a sticky note on ryland's coma suit

the use of the videolog as a way to convey the inner monologue to the screen

grace rocky save stars

the scene where they activate the IR view when ryland is doing the petrova line EVA collection at tau ceti and he's amongst the astrophage. god

just the entire execution of rocky and eridian language. PERFECT. that last scene where ryland doesn't need the translator? god

eva stratt double parked coffee

BLIP-A DESIGN. XENONITE DESIGN. ERIDIAN DESIGN. all impeccable.

'time to go fishing, question?'

the mental health screen room and rocky getting to experience bits of earth via it

the music while the hail mary and the blip a start spinning in sync. actually, just all of the music

ryland grace earth hackey sack packed on the hail mary, presumably on stratt's orders + ryland grace nerdy as fuck graphic tshirts packed on the hail mary, presumably on stratt's orders

implication that PHM sent a military jet to grover cleveland middle school to draw those 'save the world' pictures within 3 days so that they could send them with ryland on the hail mary. GOD.

nannybot -> armando. also ryland calling the ship 'mary'

not strictly within the movie but the tagline 'believe in the hail mary'. yeah.

yao and ilyukhina's collections of photographs and the way ryland cries over them when he does the space burial. they were his friends. he can't remember.

the scene where he's walking through the dark tunnel in the orange eva suit and it's like the inverse of the iconic 2001 space odyssey shot

he bikes to work and it's not for exercise

he vomits into a traffic cone after the supersonic jet ride

he runs from the baikonur facility and claws at the earth under his nails before getting sedated. one last look at the sky.

"WHOOMP THERE IT IS"

ryland grace in his classroom looking at the taped-up line running from venus to the sun that he's made to try to explain to his students what no one understands

ryan gosling's delivery of I showed you a clock and now youre showing me a clock <- THATS A NERD! THATS MY RYLAND GRACE!

"of course i'll watch you sleep, buddy. you gotta promise me you'll wake up though" just kill me now

grace getting to see the the blip-a! also, grace only remembering he didn't volunteer when he sees the light refracting off the blip-a.

rocky make door you close door

AND MOST OF ALL. they. made rockys handprint a scar on grace's arm. forever.

things I missed most from the book that weren't included in the movie

"I don't know if you can hear me. but i'm here, buddy, I'm on your hull!!" movie scene was good but grace clinging onto the blip-a thwacking a wrench into the hull in desperation while space is cold and grey and unrelenting in its darkness and silence around him and he doesnt know if rocky is dead. grace, question? you are here, question?

coma resistance gene plotline. this is FOUNDATIONAL for my understanding of stratt to sending ryland. if she could she would have gone herself. any of the PHM biology techs could have feasibly gone in the movie-verse. but they can't. it's one in 7000 and their next option is a distillery worker from paraguay. ryland grace, microbiologist sentenced to marytrdom by his own genes.... its delicious

doomed climatologist of all time, francois leclerc. he runs the numbers and knows we have nineteen years. he snaps and tells stratt 'this isn’t some optional outcome.' he nukes antarctica and cries. he has no choice

the fact that in the book grace is forced to work on analysing the probe samples and getting roped into PHM. in the movie he says 'I want to help earth if I can!' in that scene w the earth beanbag... its imperative to me that he literally never asked to do any of this at all

"how have you been lately" "dr shapiro and I have begun a sexual relationship"

steve, creator of the beetles

"do not fuck up my house, roscosmos bastards" ilyukhina line you are sorely missed

dmitri and grace bonding over puns and spin drives

'you are a fundamentally good man, dr grace.' 'you're murdering me.'

"why did the kiwi government think you were embezzling millions of dollars" "probably because I was embezzling millions of dollars"

dr lokken and dr grace's panspermia feud

the emotional whiplash of "Sorry, Rocky" after grace realises he can only go back to the blip-a OR earth to “I know you’d love a beetle to take apart, but I couldn’t spare one.”

the desperation of circling the petrovascope to locate the blip-a in increasing 5* slants not knowing if he's going to find anything.