outside the government

hello, average tumblr user. your challenge is to name a canonically lesbian female character in the tags of this post. if you name a male character for any reason, you will be shot in the head. good luck.

i must say, i am a huge fan of when a book is in the middle of a very exciting plot containing many interesting problems when out of nowhere for a few pages it's like, "hey by the way, real quick, here's a detailed explanation of the city's water filtration system! i'm telling you this for a reason and you should worry about it. anyway! haha okay back to the plot" and you just get to be Scared for a while

fyi to those of you who still haven't read the phm book, you're missing out on some pretty hardcore Yearning after grace & rocky part ways. there's whole chapters of grace like, staring sadly after rocky's departing ship in the petrovascope every single day while thinking mournfully about how great his best friend is and how much he wishes rocky was there, before doing an insane amount of complicated relativistic math to calculate the exact moment when he'll no longer be able to see the blip-a's light in the distance bc he already misses rocky so much. it's great stuff

Just finished rereading Project Hail Mary again and it’s really interesting that Stratt is not a scientist. She’s an administrator, a politician, a leader. Not a scientist. She’s surrounded by some of the smartest people in the world, and they’re speaking in very science-y terms, and she has no idea what is going on. So what does she do? She turns to Grace and asks him to explain it to her. And he does, he explains the very complicated stuff in a way she, a non-scientist, can understand, because he’s a teacher. That’s what he does. It works very well from a narrative perspective because you, the reader, also don’t know what all this stuff means, so Grace explaining it to Stratt also explains it to you. But I also think maybe this is part of the reason Grace became so important to Project Hail Mary, why Stratt dragged him around everywhere- and she really does take him everywhere with her- not in spite of the fact that he’s a junior high school teacher, but because of it.