Fascinating bits from the book, having read to the halfway point:
Grace isn’t depressed primarily because he’s woken up weak and alone and stranded in space. That part engages his curiosity as well as simple fear. He’s much more overwhelmed by the astrophage situation, when it comes back to him; and he’s mourning his team. Every time he thinks of them, before he even remembers them properly, he starts to cry. His depression seems like loneliness at its core—he needs people to care for. Feels like that foreshadows how he’ll feel about Rocky.
He also thinks warmly of his friend Marissa (old roommate’s ex, still meets him regularly—he can keep a friend!), and Steve (the Carl prototype), and Dmitri, the Russian scientist who makes an astrophage pun—he immediately invites him out for drinks. He enjoys people. He gets annoyed easily but moves on easily too. His internal monologue on the Mary, pre-Rocky, is just constantly returning to everything he loved about his dead crewmates and wishing they could have seen what he’s seeing. It’s not even that he feels sorry for himself all alone—it’s that he adored them for themselves.
Grace is given first look at the astrophage specifically because he’s a middle school teacher; he’s not functionally important in the scientific community, and they need someone brilliant but expendable. Stratt is afraid astrophage might kill whoever works on it (is it radioactive? infectious?), and if that happens she wants it to happen to a lone guy who won’t be too missed, so they can learn from his death how to protect the more important people who work on it later.
And they had no intention of letting him go on working on it! Since he doesn’t become infected and the astrophage disproves his theory, they send him home. But then he has a panic attack teaching his class realizing that they’re all going to deal with the apocalypse. He storms back into the facility demanding they give him astrophage to work with, because he has to do something. I love that, and it feels like it makes his horror at being ordered to go himself even more poignant. He understands the stakes. He’d storm a high security facility for the stakes. He just doesn’t want to die.
He’s completely terrified of zero G—has a phobia of falling. He expects the fear and tries to psych himself up for it but as soon as the engines cut out he doesn’t just scream, he flails and curls up into fetal position and vomits into his jumpsuit (because even while having a full breakdown he remembers the dangers of free floating liquids and aspiration). But in twenty minutes he’s figured out how to get around while floating and is starting to have fun. Everything that terrifies him also wakens his curiosity, and that saves him over and over.
His mind moves a million steps a minute. He thinks of every possible outcome and wants to test them all. He’s deeply impatient—keeps skipping important steps in his science to move faster. The unbalanced centrifuge in the movie actually makes sense when you know he did things like freehand the nanosyringe which should have been attached to a precision machine because he was annoyed and “felt like getting stabby.” He’s also not fully aware how exceptional his mind is—repeatedly excuses his encyclopediac knowledge of physics and complex near-instantaneous mental math with “science teachers know things.”
Not only is he confused and embarrassed by other people’s sex lives, he doesn’t notice at all when people are into him. Dr. Lokken (book-only character) is constantly arguing with him but gets flustered when he smiles at her or praises her ideas, tries hard to convince him of her theories, and looks to him for grounding when shocking things happen; he is simply baffled at this.
Grace theorizes that an ancestor of astrophage is the source of interstellar life—that as it traveled between planets and stars to breed it shed cells onto planets capable of supporting water-based life, which evolved into humans, Eridians (yes, they’re also water-based), and whatever else may be out there. Rocky says that only the two of them met because any other planet with life less advanced wouldn’t be able to travel in space, and more advanced planets could solve the problem without leaving. Eridians and humans are both at the stage of development where they needed to go see Tau Ceti for themselves to learn the answer.
Grace is not just a yapper but a very good listener, when he doesn’t have a theory to prove. He’s gentle with Marissa on the day astrophage is identified, with Stratt when she’s panicking about putting the crew in comas, with the climate scientist grieving the changes to earth needed to survive, with Rocky when he’s asking for help in sleeping and explaining the crew deaths. He’s the one who puts a hand on the divider and tells Rocky he doesn’t have to be alone anymore. Grace may be blunt but he’s deeply empathetic—profoundly good traits both for first contact and for a middle school teacher.
He’s also so observant of the different ways Rocky shows emotion—a quaver for surprise, standing taller when he’s happy, lower notes for grief, trilling ones for excitement and shock. He doesn’t rely wholly on the translator, only for what he can’t remember—he’s deeply attuned to Rocky from the beginning and enjoying their complimentary differences. He just wants to share what he can. We couldn’t ask for a better Sol ambassador.
