seneca!

she still wears the corny science t shirts but she puts a white button up on over them so everyone knows she’s self aware about it. she’s the most insufferable woman to ever live.

astrophage. taumoeba. rocky. the hail mary. humanity itself. nuking antarctica. eva stratt.

like the book gives you really good reasons to fear all of these things. they are all reasons to believe in the pessimistic outcome. but they’re also reasons to believe that things are going to work out, but crucially, only if enough people believe hard enough in that happening that they work really, really hard to make it happen.

grace as the protagonist is so fascinating for this, because he’s fully on the hope side. he’s so primed for optimism and believing in the good in everything that it turns him into mr avoidance and blinds him to reality. but it also makes him like really good at functioning in the apocalypse. what do you do when you wake up on a spaceship with two dead guys and no memory of who you are and oh also you’re on a suicide mission 12 lightyears from earth? uh. you like science right? space is super cool, now you get to do a whole bunch of really cool science in space. just focus on that.

the problem with that is that as soon as the cost of the good outcome gets too high and he can’t avoid it anymore, he breaks down. he has no idea how to actually deal with it. by the end of the book he’s learned to hold both the hope and the fear at once because circumstances have forced him to, and it allows him to be fully selfless in a way he couldn’t be before. he acknowledges the cost of getting the good ending in a way he never did on earth and accepts that he has to pay it or else it won’t happen.

totally unrelated to one another, i’m sure

first two scenes are from the book, chapters 4 and 15, edited slightly for format