so after i watched project hail mary i bought the book and as i was reading i decided to compile a list of differences i noticed (mostly things that were left out of the movie), i thought people might be interested so here you are:
grace actually goes back to his teaching job after he figures out what astrophage is made of but upon seeing his kids he has to explain whats happening with the sun and decides he needs to save them. he finds stratt and begs her to let him experiment and she grants him three of the something-hundred astrophage she has
grace doesnt have any clothes when he wakes up, and he also has a tube in his dick and up his ass
it takes many scientific calculations to figure out the difference in gravity on the ship, and even then it takes him remembering something else to figure out hes on a spaceship
i forget if this as mentioned but the reason they're in comas is because of an experiment done that basically concluded that if locked in the spaceship conscious for over three years the crew would likely harm themselves or each other (they can also survive the coma thanks to a certain gene only a small portion of the population possesses)
also cant remember if this is in the movie but grace doesn't swear (he's a teacher so ofc) and when he wakes up with no memories he has the funniest reactions to him saying things like "holy moly" and "what the fudge" (see also: oh shucks and dang it)
grace calls himself emperor comatose and the great philosopher pendulus when he cant remember his name
carl is one detail they added that i really liked, in the book grace is completely alone in his adventure learning how to breed astrophage
he calls the robot who takes care of him the nannybot
ik this is in the movie but like. stratt has FULL POWER of EVERYONE. literally every country. grace is experimenting on some chinese navy ship they end up calling "stratts vat"
ONE OF MY FAVS grace actually throws up when he first enters zero gravity, he's absolutely terrified and has to hold his puke in his shirt so it doesn't become a choking hazard (understandable that they left this out its gross but i liked the humanity of it).
grace doesnt have fun t-shirts like in the movie which i was disappointed by but it makes sense that they wanted to make him more fun to look at
ok ik this was in the movie too but this dumbass actually just opens the container (or doohickey, as he calls it) rocky sends without any real precautions, literally touches it with his bare hands and almost gets burned
grace is actually famous in the science community for his paper
STRATT LITERALLY HAS AN INTERNATIONAL TREATY THAT SAYS SHES IMMUNE FROM ANY FORM OF PROSECUTION FOR ANY CRIME ON EARTH
the coffee pouch given to grace has the exact amount of cream and sugar he prefers, aka stratt knows his coffee order and thought to include it
they have to pave the sahara desert yo breed enough astrophage to power the hail mary
in order to buy enough time for the data to come back the have to increase green house gas emissions. they NUKE antarcica
grace actually communicates with rocky with the same grammar and basic words as rocky does with him. makes more sense than the advanced communication in the film
in the movie, i remember rocky's visit including gravity, in the book thats not possible as to "create gravity" the ship has to be spinning. rocky has to detach the tunnel so the ship can spin and they can use the lab equipment basically he cant just roll in like the movie but it was funny so i forgive them
grace actually memorizes what different eridian sounds mean. the computer doesn't translate out loud (understandably they had to change it)
rocky's ball mostly relies on magnets to get him around
stratt originally wanted the entire crew to be only heterosexual men because she didn't want there to be any sexual tension between crew members but she was overruled
eridians are hermaphrodites meaning they possess both male and female reproductive organs. they reproduce by laying eggs next to each other and then one egg absorbs the other
the reason grace's name is so short in eridian is because instead of making up a name like grace does for rocky, rocky just uses the eridian word for grace
the orginal scientist for the mission and his backup are fucking and for some reason feel the need to very bluntly tell grace
literally everyone involved in the hail mary mission thinks grace and stratt are fucking
theres a very uncomfortable conversation where grace and stratt ask the crew members how they want to die. the russian crew member ilyukhina requests by heroin overdose
in order to save rocky grace has to let the ammonia from rocky's environment into the ship and its a whole thing where he seals him in the airlock
grace builds a thingy to help get the soot out of rocky after rocky saves him but it ends up being nearly fatal (the soot wasn't soot but the eridian equivalent of scabbing)
graces entire left arm gets burned saving rocky
theres a whole thing where the predator of adrian, which they call taumoeba eats all the astrophage in the fuel tanks and then they have to use the beetles to get to rocky's ship to get more astrophage
oh also the reason rocky has so much astrophage is because the eridians didn't understand time relativity or whatever and so they didn't realize rocky's trip would be much shorter than the time spent on erid. he made it to the right system by pure luck
stratt calls grace a coward and yells at him about all the cowardly things he's done in his life when he refuses to go on the mission (including saying the reason he's not in a relationship is because he's scared of getting his heart broken which as an aroace grace truther i take offense to)
the karaoke scene doesn't happen
one of the things grace says while arguing with stratt is that he deserves to live. i think he said that in the movie but it still made me cry a little bit
stratt lies to yáo (the crew captain) about grace going voluntarily because he refused to go with someone who was forced. they keep grace locked in a cell for the days before the launch and then sedate him
fact: grace actually learns he was put on the ship against his will (or in his words that "he's a coward") on page 395 of 478
i cant remember if this happen in the movie but grace gives rocky a laptop and rocky creates a whole thing so he can use and understand it
rocky makes an entire new fuel tank so grace can get home fast enough to not run out of food
grace doesn't even have a duffle with his stuff like the other crew members, instead its just the guy he had to replace
when grace and rocky are saying goodbye rocky goes "you face is leaking" which i find hilarious
another line that made me cry: "it feels wrong to sleep without someone watching" from grace, after he and rocky go their separate ways
it takes grace literally forever to figure out that the taumoeba he made evolved to get through xenonite i was STRESSED OUT
i feel like this wasn't clear enough in the movie, but grace turning around to save rocky isn't just him knowing he cant go home. its him giving up his actual life. dying. because as far as he knows, theres no way for him to survive on erid. he has no food (eridian food doesn't work) no way to grow things, he cant even survive in the eridian environment. he's giving up his life to save rocky and billions of other eridians
about every eridian scientist on the planet came together to create life support systems for grace
grace survived off taumoeba for the first few years on erid, now he eats "meburgers" which are grace's cloned muscle tissue so he can eat meat. he says he doesnt feel bad about eating human meat because its his
grace is pretty sure hes fifty three, though a definite seventy one years have passed on earth since he was born
fun fact: the dialogue and graces thoughts both change to use eridian numbers instead of earth ones
rockys dialogue becomes fully causal like normal human dialogue, including swear words and stuff like "'cause"
• grace has a keyboard to speak in eridian to his students
aaaaand that's an anticlimactic wrap! thank you for staying to the end, this was brought to you by a week of me pulling up my notes app every couple pages to write things down. go read the phm book if you haven't already!
