it’s about belonging to something

minimalist pencil sketches of cats by Shou Xin (手訫)

the martian is the story of one man stranded on mars with barely enough food and supplies to last him a calendar month, let alone the 14 that it inevitably takes to bring him home.

mark watney's rescue means millions of dollars in unplanned expenditures, cooperation between multiple nations that frankly have no stake in the life of one american astronaut, and risking the lives of 5 of his crew members. it is a story that makes you tackle the fundamental question of: "how much is one human life worth?"

the answer, the book (and its equally well-executed movie adaptation) offers, is everything.

they could have simply called it a day and told him that it was untenable, that they cannot possibly be asked to risk the lives of the rest of the ares iii crew. but they did not. they did not, because they deemed that no cost was too high if it meant that there was even a snowball's chance in hell that they could bring that one man home.

project hail mary, on the other hand, is a complete 180.

here, the fate of an entire planet's survival rests upon the shoulders of one rather unremarkable man. ryland grace is a middle school science teacher, whose only claim to fame is a controversial research paper. it is a story that forces you to confront the question: "how much do you personally owe humanity when its fate hangs in the balance?"

once again, the answer is everything.

ryland is not the brightest person on the planet, nor is he the bravest. he doesn't choose to be involved in saving earth, and he certainly doesn't choose to be sent on a suicide mission away from it. in project hail mary, one man has no choice but to shoulder this burden for the sake of humanity. and, it turns out, he's not the only one carrying this responsibility.

somehow, both books provide the same answer and message, only in somewhat different ways. they both serve to convey that life, no matter the scale, is worth preserving.

that when it comes to one man stranded 140 million miles away, no cost is too high, no risk too big, because his life matters. he matters. and he matters not just because he volunteered to go up there, or because it wasn't his fault, or because they know he's out there. he matters because he exists, and that is more than enough to do everything possible to bring him back.

or that no personal cost is too high to pay if you are the one person that can actually save humanity. the people may be faceless, nameless crowds to you, but their lives are worth saving simply because they exist. they exist, and that is plenty reason to doom yourself to certain death if it means that there is even a single chance in hell that you will save them. you don't have to be talented, or remarkable, or necessary to matter.

the world is counting on you

AYYYYYYYY SPACE MOVIE !!!!!!!!

Grace isn’t depressed primarily because he’s woken up weak and alone and stranded in space. That part engages his scientific curiosity as much as primal 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.

I love how much Grace personalizes inanimate things. His whole ship is full of newly canonized mechanical friends and pets. The man just wants someone to love.

As a kid he used to daydream about being an astronaut and meeting aliens! Hate how he got there, love that he got to after all.

In the flashbacks Grace is consistently surprised when people like and respect him. He’s blown away to find out he’s the top scientist on Stratt’s base. He’s befuddled at being chosen to teach the crew about astrophage biology. He’s absolutely baffled that he’s asked to talk them through the ways they want to die post-mission, because, and I quote, “Stratt said something about the crew liking me more than anyone.” He seems to like and care for them all, even the ones who annoy and confuse him. But he still seems shy with them, rarely asking for more than room to work. And he had no idea other scientists from his former field would think to recommend him to Stratt, and doesn’t seem to properly process that even when she tells him.

Being (my read) audhd and a very young upstart in a very small field with all eyes on him really did a number on him. I don’t know if he’d gotten a lot of argument when he was assertive about his ideas as a student, and had thought it would be different and he’d be appreciated properly in the field—or if he’d always had teachers who were thrilled by his creativity and was brought up short by established scientists wanting more proof for bold new ideas. Either way, when he met pushback he lit a match to his career and left, and here he is years later still convinced people will find him something between frustrating and forgettable, and nothing more.

(The audhd loneliness of not reading cues well enough to know if you’re endearing or annoying people, or when their mood switches or why—it’s exhausting. No wonder he prefers teaching kids, who take his bluntness and snarkiness easily since they’re at a blunt and snarky age, and who are simply looking to him for the shared joy of daily infodumps. But—naturally enough in a facility filled with the top researchers in the world—almost his entire core team reads neurodivergent, to me. That might be why they enjoy and understand him so much more readily than he’s used to.)

In the crisis, Stratt’s anger when he refuses to go really reinforces his idea of being both frustrating and forgettable. She tells him she knows him, that he’s a coward. She calls him a dropout and accuses him of being a teacher only for the respect the children give him, not because he really cares about them. She says she only kept him around as a possible replacement for the science team, not because she really needed a middle school teacher (the opposite of what she says earlier—“there’s more to him than that”—which begs the question of how much of what she’s shouting is just bullshit. It still hurts to read). She says he is a good man but not strong enough to earn her respect.

I don’t know how much of her anger is because of everything she sacrificed for this. I don’t know if she talks to herself like that when she’s scared. I don’t know if she says any of that hoping it’ll galvanize him to prove her wrong, or if she believes it all. I do think she’s describing his shadow self pretty well—the most selfish and lonely parts of him. But I don’t think that’s even close to the whole of him. Even before he’s sent, he pushes and pushes through fear, shock, loneliness and dismissal to be where he is and do everything he can. He does it even though he’d rather be home, with his favorite diner and his friend Marissa and the fog over the Bay and the classroom where he feels safe and loved. He stays where he thinks he’s nobody, out of his depth and outclassed, to fill his part.

And aboard the Mary, that’s what he keeps doing, through the genuinely terrifying amount of setbacks as he and Rocky work on getting the taumoeba ready to take home. Things go wrong over and over but they keep on. When he finally remembers everything that happened with Stratt, it’s right after an essential astrophage test fails completely, and Grace spends maybe five minutes being profoundly heartbroken not that he was kidnapped or demeaned or betrayed, but that he hadn’t had the courage to volunteer for this. And then he gets back up and keeps working. It’s the bravest thing he does in the book, up till the end.

It also really gets me that Rocky coming to comfort him is what gets him up again; and almost the first thing Rocky says to him is, “I know you,” just like Stratt did. But instead of following it with, “You’re a coward,” Rocky says he knows Grace has another idea, because that’s who Grace is: he wants to understand, he wants to help, and he doesn’t give up when he’s needed. And while Stratt tells Grace, “You avoid risk like the plague,” Rocky tells Grace his next idea is too dangerous; but Grace says simply, “It’s worth the risk.” That could say a lot of things, but one thing it tells me is courage is not singular. It comes from all of us together. Stratt couldn’t shame courage into him, but Rocky could call it out as simply as saying they would do it together.

Rocky takes good care of Grace—makes sure he rests; teases and praises and pushes him gently. Reminds him he’s his friend and he wants him safe. And Grace takes very good care of Rocky in turn. Since Rocky showed up Grace has stopped breaking down over his dead crew. He still thinks of them fondly, but now that he has someone to tend to the grief is not crushing. He puts all his spare energy into making sure Rocky feels welcome—fills his living quarters with Rocky’s supplies and his work area with tunnels for him, answers all his million questions with joy, listens when Rocky is mourning his crew and the lonely years alone, praises and encourages him when he’s scared. He gets better and better at reading Rocky’s body language. He grumbles at him sometimes, but he keeps a fond eye on everything Rocky needs to be happy. Grace tends to his loves.

And he doesn’t seem to think it’s especially brave of him to do all the things he does. Not even rescuing Rocky after the spin out—in the book he’s the one who hauls him back into his habitat, and the blast of ammonia nearly blinds Grace, burns his body and his lungs. But he just does it, the same way he just does everything he can to save Earth regardless of the danger. He never questions whether it’s worth caring so much—for his planet, for his students, for his friend.

His utter joy and relief when Rocky tells him there’s a way for him to go home collapses into sadness when it’s actually time to leave Rocky and go. He won’t let Rocky take down his tunnels before he leaves—claims it’s so Earth scientists can study them but it’s clearly that he can’t bear it. He says there’s no joy left in the going, even to see Earth again, and for the first time since Rocky arrived, he cries tears of grief.

He sits and watches Rocky’s ship for hours, until it’s out of sight. Only then does he start for home.

He’s really not ready to go. He can’t stop thinking about how far away Rocky is getting, and how wrong it feels to sleep without him watching; and how the Earth he’s hurtling towards will have passed him by a full generation—his students grown, his friends and coworkers in grandparenting stage, while he’s still young. He does keep planning experiments, papers, Taumoeba calculations, all on his own, just like he did before Rocky. But it’s so clear he will never stop mourning Rocky if this goes on. “I wish Rocky was here,” he says, “I always wish Rocky was here.”

(This doesn’t mean he stops being funny. When the taumoeba get out and he’s trying everything to not end with his ship dead in the water, he calls them “little punks” and tells his taumoeba sterilization formula, “Go forth, my minions, and cause destruction!” Later, desperately running circles while searching for Rocky, he notes that he’s doing “the astronavigational equivalent of donuts in a parking lot.” He is nothing if not ready to laugh.)

So when he gets down to the final choice once more, the same one he couldn’t do for Stratt—go home and live, or go rescue Rocky and Erid and die—it somehow feels like a foregone conclusion. He is facing his own death by starvation, and he mourns; but he says, “All I see when I close my eyes is Rocky.” All the time he had aboard the Hail Mary to learn the habit of courage helped, I think. But being loved helped most. He knows when he dies, he will die held, not alone, satisfied with his choice.

“Aw, you know, they expected we’d kill each other. It’s a long way to Tau Ceti.”

“Long way to Erid now. No kill me, please! - Is joke. Am too strong for you.”

“Heh. Yeah you are. Don’t wanna kill you, anyway. I’m - really glad you’re here.”

“Glad too. Mm. Need word.”

“For?”

“Gives good feeling.”

“Like. You like it.”

“Rocky like Grace.”

“Oh. Oh, I like you too, Rock.”

***

“Grace is tired.”

“'m ok, bud. Wanna do a couple more calculations now we’re past the asteroid belt, make sure Mary has our new trajectory nailed down.”

“Ship puts nails in flight path, question?”

“Earth saying.”

“Grace is yawning. All teeth, open throat, look scary. Many times now. Math will be wrong.”

“Yeah, fine, maybe I am tired. What about a movie before bed? You, me, laptop?”

“Watch Atlantis with explorer Thatch.”

“Third time! You really like that one.”

“Is good movie...Grace say ‘like’ for self and for movie. Is too soft word. Need stronger one.”

“Ah. Um. Stronger?”

“Feeling stronger for person. Grace is important.”

“R-respect? Person you take seriously.”

“Rocky feel respect for Grace. Come rest, give respect to brain.”

“Ha. Well. I respect you too, um, a lot, really.”

“Is very good. Show Milo Thatch go on adventure, find friend, get brave.”

***

“Exosuit will be finished soon. Then I can help you like Earth crew would. Help you get better.”

“You help me plenty. I'm just mopey. Um. Homesick, not actually sick. Not your fault.”

“Is actually sick. Thinking machine says humans social animals, need pack, get sick like this when they are not touched. You need hugs and cuddles. Exosuit will make me better crewmate.”

“You’ve always been the best crewmate. You know, I respected my crew, and I guess they respected me, but I never felt I belonged with them. I remember that now. I liked them, but I was lonely with them. Not like with you. ”

“Respect does not mean belonging, question?”

“No – um, no, not really. Means you give weight to what they say, who they are.”

“You don’t have weight. You are light like hatchling.”

“No, that’s – Hey.”

“Teasing you.”

“Yeah, got that. I’m a hatchling?”

“I could lift you, one hand, easy. You are baby. Need new word.”

“For?”

“Person you feel strongly for. More than respect. Belong together. Good to travel a long time together. Still know they are kind when they tease. Feel better with them near.”

“That’s – that’s trust. That’s – yeah.”

“Yes, Rocky trust Grace.”

“Thank you. Um.”

“Finish this exosuit, pick you up in one hand, okay. Show you are baby.”

“Fine. Fine, I trust you too. You finish that thing and you can throw me around all you want.”

***

“So. You like your house?”

“Oh, my God, Rocky. This – this is incredible.”

“The door is good?”

“I really like the door, bud.”

“The bed is too soft?”

“No, it’s great. I know it’s not how you guys sleep, not firm enough to perch properly on, but soft is heaven for sleepy humans.”

“Good, good. Come in here. Surprise! Sprouts from the ship growing in the ‘sunroom.’ Shaped like the don’t go crazy room, huh? But the plants are real this time, see?”

“God, they’re real. This is real. This is – tell Adrian, tell everyone, top-notch human habitat. Incredible choices. You even brought Armando.”

“Good good good. We worried – you might not feel at home here.”

“You really were worried, huh? C’mere, fist bump. Of course I feel at home. Nobody ever worked this hard to set up a habitat for me. Man, and I used to wish Earth hadn’t trusted me so much. Never ever thought I’d make it like this. If five-year-old Grace could see me now! I live in space in a space house and my best friends are space aliens!”

“You are our best alien friend. But you say trust. Earth ‘trusted’ you?”

“Crazy, isn’t it?”

“But they sent you away. They can ‘trust’ and still force you to go?”

“Yeah. Yeah, if the job needs doing.”

“Mm. Hate that. Need a word.”

“What kind of word?”

“Something more than trust. Would not send you away. Would keep you close as long as you are happy. Would feel what you feel – would feel everything together.”

“Love. That’s – love.”

“Rocky love Grace.”

“Oh. O-oh.”

“Love, love, love Grace. Grace – you are crying? You are okay?”

“I’m good, Rock. I’m so good.”

“Love you. Always love. Could hug if you would sit down. Too soft to hug standing – will knock you over. No stronger than a hatchling. Yes, good, thank you. Hugs make you cry more?”

“Make me this happy, pal, that’s just how it goes. I’m going to sit here and cry on your shiny little exosuit, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“Could pick you up with one hand.”

“But you won’t. You’ll let me cry all over you. Because you love me.”

“Leaky human.”

More studies of Dr. Ryland Grace from Project Hail Mary, ft Rocky, aka the two bestest of friends ever from the best movie and also book ever oh my god

'Despite everything, it's still you'