all I can keep thinking about is how Project Hail Mary is a horror story with a single ray of hope from Grace’s perspective. You wake up on a ship with no memory (the corpses of your friends on either side of you, but who are they?), and the more you remember, the more ways you learn you’re not coming back from this: first, because the world has most likely ended, then, because you’re lightyears away from home completely by yourself, then, because this is a suicide mission and the fact that you survived is a fluke at best. The only thing to come out of this (other than hopefully saving humanity, but you can barely remember them right now, and even when you do you won’t be around for the conclusion of that, so. What does it mean for you right now?) is someone who cares about you despite being a literal alien. And every day you wake up, you know you are trapped in a place you were forced to be in and yet can never leave unless you want to die, /knowing/ you will in a few months no matter what you do, and then even when learning there is a chance for survival it will come from the skin of your teeth: that even then you will be dying but not yet dead, and all in front of the only person who will ever understand where you’re coming from. The fear evolves then from not just your own safety but what will happen to your best friend if you don’t make it, because he can’t pilot your ship and you can’t take care of yourself the sicker you get and in order for him to even be able to help you stand on your worst days he has to go on a frickin’ EVA, essentially. Wholly dependent and still forced to be functional when you’d rather just curl up in a ball in the control room and cry. And then, after all of that, having to decide between preserving your own humanity and assimilating into the culture of the one that loves you and saved you, because you couldn’t relate to humans anymore if you tried (or at least, that’s what you tell yourself) but you’re still so human it hurts (it hurts all the time anyway, of course, but still). Enough that you know when you die, you will die hundreds of years before your best friend does, and then you will leave him on his own. How is that not a bittersweet horror?
