Thinking about book!Stratt and her impassioned attempt to make Grace understand when he says no, and thinking of Sandra Hüller's amazing acting during the chase scene and how she shows her sense of disappointment and betrayal in these beautiful, minute expressions. Thinking of the ways in which Grace betrayed her in so many ways despite the ways in which Grace had time and space to comprehend his unique skills and integrality to the running of the whole project. Thinking of the ways in which Grace's cowardice includes the refusal to face facts and think through not just what came next, but what came After the launch-- thinking through how badly Grace betrayed Eva Stratt, and not the reverse;
Eva Stratt, who took on an impossible burden, willing to go into it all on her own because no one else was willing to shoulder the skies
Eva Stratt, who sought out every possible scientist and engineer and resource able to think big about potential alien life and everything else they would need to combat the threat
Eva Stratt, who makes sure well in advance that she has permission and resources for world-saving work
Eva Stratt, whose selection of a fringe microbiologist with a genius for explaining dense terminology to lay people yields quicker, more productive decisions and avenues for research than any hidebound academic
Eva Stratt, whose microbiologist-teacher-translator understands how to administer too many projects and too many demands on his time and still carves out time to do more because that's what teachers do
Eva Stratt, whose right-hand man has answered, advised, and absolved her as they made horrible decisions that were the most likely to succeed toward the largest and best end of them all
Eva Stratt, who shared almost all of her plans and projects with her fringe microbiologist, teacher, second in command, project partner, her friend
Eva Stratt, who could trust her friend to make sound, difficult, scientifically valid, potential-maximizing decisions on the world's behalf because he loved it as much as she does
Eva Stratt (movie), who cannot be seen to falter or yield if any of this is going to work, takes a long moment of softness to try to offer some kind of assurance, camaraderie that they are all in their separate tasks still all in it together
Eva Stratt, who finds out at the last minute, on the precipice of deadly delay or potentially world-saving success, that her friend is a naive fool and a coward who never understood her or the mission and what was at stake after all
Eva Stratt, who'd hoped she wasn't alone in the willingness to do anything to save as much as they could
Eva Stratt, who found herself alone in making the world's hardest decisions, whose once-co-lead refused to help her make the awful, desperate, necessary decision to kill him together
Eva Stratt, whose friend betrayed her by never thinking all of it through. Betrayed by her right-hand, trusted project co-lead, translator of science bullshit, radical innovator and methodical scientist, who refused to follow the facts all the way to the proof he should have seen long before. Betrayed by her once-friend, now just Crew Member Number Three.
Eva Stratt, who loves the world enough to give up someone who has made her life and her work bearable, even as her once-friend proves his love is not the awful, all encompassing love that both she and the world need
Eva Stratt, who shoots her once-friend and still brilliant and innovative scientist into space anyway, because she has no other choice and now neither does he
Eva Stratt, who stands alone after the launch, and who'd hoped (in the quiet of her carefully cordoned-off heart) that Grace would be by her side-- shouldering the heavens, pushing that boulder, stealing fire over and over until the sun brightened again or they'd wrung out every last gasp
Eva Stratt, who was right in thinking she'd stand alone at the end
I need a thousand fics from the in-canon Eva Stratt Was Right fanclub posthaste.
One of the things fandom does is woobify characters— we know that and in lots of cases it's fine, but it also flattens characters who are legitimately crunchy, chewy, interesting, messy characters who aren't pure little cinnamon rolls, etc.
In looking at Ryland Grace, it's understandable why people would woobify a character played by a handsome and charming white dude. No shade to Ryan Gosling, it's just the patriarchy and white supremacy and capitalism guiding our narrative tastes to simplify and absolve the "good guy," and to hell with nuance.
One of the things media adaptation does, however, is also woobify and flatten out characters with more meat (and fewer Hollywood good looks) on the page.
In condensing the book to the movie, the directors made some choices that (understandably) take us out of Grace's head— there is so much interiority in the book, please go read it— by adding in Carl so he has someone to explain science to, and by using the video log device to put Grace's feelings and thoughts on the board for the viewer to understand.
Weir (I am sure) pre-contemplated movie adaptation in writing PHM, and the narrative tool of amnesia flasbacks on screen alongside present tense action is excellent storytelling that unfolds perfectly on the screen as we, alongside Grace, learn who he used to be and see who he's becoming as the action commences.
I wanted to think some more about what Grace's refusal of the call means, and the ways in which both the book and the movie do and don't elucidate his literal reconstruction of personhood and re-finding community.
It is impossible to show everything that happened in the book on the screen, so it's understandable that most of the scientists and all their work gets cut— which is a shame because speculative science and people passionate about their fields is something Weir writes really well. I would have loved tons more Komorov and Hatch.
The directors do a really affecting job capturing Grace's cowardice at the end— and his confession to Rocky is an acknowledgment of his own hypocrisy in saying he put the kids first above all, except getting on the damned rocket.
In other ways, though, the directors do Grace's character a disservice because its very clear in the book that while Grace's first memories coming out of his coma are of understanding himself as a teacher, and in having legitimate love for his kids and desiger for them to learn, throughout the book it is also clear that being a teacher is a second career, and he never got over the self-inflicted trauma of tanking it all.
Grace is a scientist first and foremost. He is imaginative and smart and capable of thinking across multiple fields and breaking it down for students, Stratt, world leaders, and most importantly to Grace, other scientists who don't speak each others' jargon— he is a teacher. He can model examples. He can build demonsrtative and analytical tools on the fly that yield results. But those skills in teaching and demonstrating never change the fact that first, he was a scientist who nuked his own career out of arrogance.
Movie!Grace gets a few lines about blowing up at the conference and being drummed out of the field, then nobly goes on to teach as a fallback career before his brilliant fringe theory is recognized by Saint Scapegoat Stratt and he's brought back and into the scientific fold to translate but also to research and teach. When he freaks out in the "I'm not an astronaut" scene and thereafter, we see that he's making a hypocritical and cowardly excuse— wanting to stay and go back to his kids to teach them— when really he's just afraid of being alone and in the spotlight to produce world-critical results, because yeah, Grace, how did that work out the last time?
Book!Grace repeatedly gets laughed at and argued with and challenged by other scientists at the start of the book— or looked at sideways— until his far-out-thinking leads to scientifically reproducible, practically achievable results, and he gets the chance to finally (finally!) prove at least one part of his initial theories correct— the Goldilocks zone is an arbitrary human hypothesis, and the universe and life is much bigger and weirder than that. He disproves— in the case of astrophage— his "life doesn't have to be water-based"— thesis, but that doesn't matter to him and his ego because he did get a chance to prove himself partially right, and his is very in your face about it in every confrontation and memory thereafter, in book and on screen.
Grace is brilliant, no question, and he is broadly brilliant, not just in his initial field of expertise— he applies the adaptability and "how to demonstrate this" mindset he learned in teaching and backs it out into thinking across literally every scientific discipline working on the Petrova Task Force. He is made (passively, without his having to apply or be interviewed) the chief science officer, almost immediately, and despite the fact that some people continue to argue with him, his ideas win out. He is respected and followed because of his academic credentials and his ability to demonstrate he still knows how to do rigorous science— and now, how to work with others and how to get others to work. He doesn't recognize that hierarchical authority, mistaking it instead for individual scientists respecting other individual scientists, but it is there on the page.
Book!Grace learns, from his work as a teacher, how to keep the conversation going to get everyone to ask questions and explain ideas and put the math on the board to engineer systems and think of failsafes and contingencies, but he is also doing hard science along with everyone else on the vat— that, and administering the work and backing up Stratt as they jet around the world to key decisionmaking meetings and scientist recruitment.
What the movie elides in an even more exaggerated manner than the book is Grace's arrogance and fear, and how those are still not resolved when he's shot into space.
Grace is someone who always wants to learn more when it comes to knowing and explaining science. But at the same time, Grace's shame at being laughed out of his field is based in arrogance, not humility. He is ashamed and angry that his theory wasn't listened to. He is angry that people didn't take him at his word. It's reasonable to assume this was the first time he faced a real intellectual disagreement with his work. He is a know-it-all, still standing up for his theories and arguing with people who are contrary to him (primarily Lokken in the book and the movie) because how dare they contradict his self-image of smartest boy in the room? He presumed himself an authority and refused to work within his community to advance his hypothesis. He held himself apart and above professional norms in presenting his work, and then ragequit when the community pushed back and said "you need to do more work to prove this."
Grace is angry and ashamed and afraid that he "lost" academia and the chance to practice hard science because he still thinks— knows— he was right. It is late, late, late in the book, and late into his journey into space before he learns to put aside the need to prove himself right (return to Earth, be a savior, prove panspermia, further disprove Goldilocks) in order to actually pursue real science framed through the lens of the vocation he learns through teaching (put the results into action to benefit the world outside the lab.)
Before launch, Grace clings to the self-image that everyone else was wrong, so he had to nobly find something else to do— which ends up being a teacher.
I do legitimately think he unexpectedly finds himself loving teaching and the kids for their own sake. But pre-launch Grace never really learns the lesson of how to be humble and play well with others. He's the prime mover causing all his own losses in his career and life.
Both movie! and book!Grace do all these weird internal narrative displacements where he aw-shucks-es himself and puts all the weight of the decisions he's helping Stratt make back on her shoulders. He does it because subsconsciously he knows— the last time he was fully in charge of the way he ran his career, he ruined everything. He is terrified of failing again. He is terrified of being in the spotlight to prove himself right, and not being able to prove himself in the moment to universal acclaim and applause. He is terrified of being in an even worse situation than he's already put himself in his arrogance to demand everyone approve him in public for his wild theory. He doesn't want to put in more work, consistent with the scientific method, to prove himself right, and to produce sufficient incontrovertible facts that his conclusions must be taken as sound.
So as long as he's "just following orders" from Stratt, or just implementing curriculum as a poor public school teacher, or otherwise deluding himself about being a cog in a larger system instead of acknowledging he's actually the power transmission, Grace can flatter himself and find comfort. He can behave immaturely and rudely and get away with it, because he's "just" a pet scientist.
He also takes comfort is being the "cool" teacher. He takes comfort is working among other scientists who (this time) listen to him and consult with him. He gets a second chance to be folded back into the scientific community again and have his work be reviewed and accepted. He is desperate for re-inclusion in the hard-science community, even as he is responsible for allowing himself to be driven out in the first place. A one in a million coincidence (extraterrestrial life operating outside well-understood, in-sol-system norms) vindicates his fringe theories and wins him a chance to "do over," once again within the hard science community he values— so long as it validates him.
I bet book!Grace was well-loved as a teacher by his students and parents. I bet book!Grace stuck up for other teachers and for school budgets and resources, mostly. I bet book!Grace was also a pain in the ass if he thought a teacher was half-assing it, and I know book!Grace was probably condescending as hell to other teachers if he thought were Doing It Wrong— because Grace never lost the conviction that he was right, he only lost the community that up to that point had supported him in that self-image.
Shooting him off into space neither returns him to the safety of the classroom where teaching is probably something he thinks is easy and where he is cool and inspiring, nor does it leave him on the Vat as Stratt's second and CSO to the PTF. The Vat at the end of the world is safe— he's been annointed with authority by someone who doesn't care that he flaunted the norms of academic etiquette, because it turned out he was at least partially right, and that was enough at the end of the world that the risk of not addressing his other unproven hypothesis was set aside.
Stratt bestows grace upon Grace by forcing other scientists to contend with him as he is, and insisting on his reinclusion in the scientific echelons— because she doesn't have time for academic norms to play themselves out. We see it in the ways he's coddled, and his immaturity and informality is coddled instead of corrected.
This failure to challenge his ego is Stratt's real disservice to Grace. His arrogance in blowing up at the conference makes him not just immature and self-destructive and the author of his own indignities, etc., but also a bad scientist. Peer review of your research and hypotheses, testing and retesting based on questions from peers, consideration of alternate theories and testing those in comparison with your alternate hypothesis— that's the scientific method.
Presenting a paper that is so outrageous that your peers and the upper echelons laugh at you or cannot understand what you're trying to say are yes, on the one hand, humans being afraid of new things and stuck in their own orthodoxies and egoes, but on the other hand— if you're really a scientist, and your aim is to advance the ways in which the world (universal) can be known and understood toward the betterment of all (universal), then refusing to take the pushback of the peer review process to further refine and explain your theory, or perhaps (as may have been the case here) refusing to document enough facts and demonstrate sufficient testing in support of your initial publication is arrogance, not credibility. What kind of real scientist blows up the first time they are seriously challenged in an area that a serious intellectual ought to understand isn't just exciting but scary, and hard to imagine, and deserving of further, slow testing?
Grace is the archetype of the mad scientist before the fall, all arrogant brilliance of someone who refuses to entertain any questions about their works and swoops off in a dramatic exit rather than put up with anyone daring to question his status as Special-est Boy. That he doesn't become a mad scientist— or a Redell— is testimony to his essentially benevolent nature, but his departure from academia and his retreat into teaching is proof of his fear of rejection, and the way that fear drives his cowardice and his unwillingness to put himself out in front again.
Book!Grace muses about how he doesn't know why Stratt keeps delegating stuff to him that isn't science, even as the rest of the Vat acknowledges his power and doesn't challenge him because not only are they afraid of Stratt, they recognize and respect that Grace has knowledge and intuition and curiousity and power in his own right. He fails the scientists in ways we don't see on screen or on the page in really coming into that authority to, and he fails the scientists and the world in the ways in which he defers to Stratt and refuses to think of more failsafes for crew selection.
Why only two teams? Why not three? Who are the further failsafes and redundant experts? Stratt has unlimited power, and by delegation, so does Grace. Why doesn't he insist on more than two teams? He is a scientist, he knows that the scientific method requires testing and retesting and introduction of new facts to the scenario. Why doesn't he spend more time telling Stratt that two teams isn't enough? And why doesn't he recognize his obvious position as third?
Acknowledging those facts would 1) introduce variety and possibly challenges (threats) to his enclosure, and 2) make him the agent of change, rather than the safer role of self-imagined lackey. If he's just a lackey, he can't possibly be so important that they'll send him into space.
He needs the delusion— an internally inconsistent one— that he is Stratt's Special Boy and also Not That Important, Really— to maintain the illusion that he is comfortable with just teaching, and that being the cool teacher is his real calling, because it means the scientific work as a mistake rather than a deliberate action, and his current set of choices are Right and Correct.
When Stratt makes that call to Grace from inside the house, and reminds him that oh, no, you're not just a teacher and you never were, and re-casts his Specialness from "accepted number two" to "capable fringe scientist who is going to have to trailblaze again," she rips the carpet out from under him and dumps him back to the moment where he ragequit the scientific stage because they weren't acting the way he thought they should. He's being selfish, and worse, he's ignoring the pure scientific fact of it all. He is, again, being a bad scientist.
It's only in space, and through the clever back-and-forth memories versus current experience framing that we and Grace learn— oh, this guy's kind of an asshole. A funny one, but dude does NOT want his bubble disrupted. He accepts there's a job, and is at root benevolent enough and intellectually driven enough to do it depsite his fears, but— he places himself in the position of being a teacher to Rocky and it takes him a while to accept that Rocky has things to teach him outside of the science work.
Grace has to be stripped of his former self-conception and reduced down to first principles (curiousity, know-how, willingness to test and re-test, general benevolence, desire to increase the net sum of knowldge) in order to make him get out of his own way and grow as a person and as a scientist. He has to unbecome Ryland Grace, earthling, to become Grace as he is at the end of the book, and that unbecoming has to be forced upon him because of his cowardice and prior mistakes and unwillingness to accept his own failures before he can rebuild.
It's only through repeated failures and unpredictable, untested events and yet-explored external universal forces (literally) that Grace learns he can't control his place in the future, nor can he insulate against future mishap or failure. There is no unified field theory of who Ryland Grace is that he can take comfort in. Instead, one step years ago, then the next, then the next, unpredictably and in intersection and overlap with uncontrolled variables (including Eva Stratt, Chaos Angel) led Grace to where he was now, both under his own ill-understood determination, as well as being dragged, kicking and screaming, into a narrative space-faring capsule that forces him to come face to face with who he is, was, and can be— a chaotic but interwoven theory of self that sums up as: Teacher. Scientist. Coward. Savior.
Grace hypothesized that life radically different than the "just right" zone he lived in was out there, but it's not until he's evicted from that comfort zone and has to live outside his own preferred environment that he discovers everything that's really worth knowing— himself, the astrophage cure, accepting there are some things he may never know or prove right or wrong, and the reason to look forward in life, despite knowing there's death at the end of it all.
Risking yourself for your companions, because you love them more than yourself, regardless of whether anyone sings your praises at the end of it all, and doing your best with what you have in the moment and placing your hope and your work in the hands of those who come after?
Grace modding and sending off the Bee/Beatles, accepting that he and Rocky didn't test for an unknown variable in the limited time that they had, revisiting his old work to find a different solution (inescapable Taumoeba container), and turning back to find Rocky rests on his finally learning to let go, and his acceptance that there are always going to be things he's going to have to learn that he just can't predict and be ready to counter correctly the first time he's challenged. But he learns, before regaining his memories of being a coward, to be a better scientist and person. He is open to Rocky's ideas and expertise, and is open to exploring his methods instead of his own. He doesn't assume he's more right than Rocky— just that there is a different perspective than his and that they are both working toward shared knowledge.
And once he becomes a better scientist and a real friend, he recovers his memories. He learns he's a coward. And he proves himself wrong in the end, leaving behind the old understanding of Ryland Grace to accept a new working hypothesis— that Grace in space has a friend and that friend has a world that deserves saving.
Grace refuses to place trust in himself or in Stratt. At least Stratt "betrays" him for the better end, though he betrays her first by refusing to accept the facts as they are. He learns from his own betrayal of Stratt and of Eather to trust in the end.
To trust that others will do their best to do their part and that the past work others have done will carry Grace's message back safely enough to be acted upon. To trust that Rocky won't have given up in whatever time it takes Grace to find him, because Grace didn't know himself before now, but he knows Rocky and he has the humility and faith that the two of them working together will complement each others' weaknesses to come up with a real solution.
Do the work. Share the work. Let others continue the work after you, even if you can't control later interpretations. Do all that with an open mind and an open heart, continuing to ask questions and being willing to listen.
You only find yourself by losing yourself is a storytelling trope for the ages, and when Grace gives himself the grace of not letting his past messiness get in the way of his turn toward the future, we get to learn from him as he learns from himself.
There's no unified field theory of Pure Cinnamon Roll Ryland Grace. He is a sopping wet mess of a chaotic, contradictory man, and he doesn't get to rewind the past and resolve and control of all his past missteps in order to reconcile all the relative factors. He can't fully quantify and know all the factors, but he learns to accept that chaos and just pay attention, revising his world view as he goes.
Entropy is unavoidable, death too, but there's a lot to learn and share and enjoy before then, no matter how your particular time left stretches or compresses relative to everything else. Grace learns that, and hopefully, despite book! and movie! canon's elisions, so do we.
Crossposted at AO3 with some of my other PHM Meta and Fic.
A reminder that darker fiction has a right to exist and explore themes that people are uncomfortable with. Yes, even if it's romanticized. Yes, even if you personally don't like it.
Authors have always written about things that they don't agree with morally, and I hope to god they always will, despite how shitty people treat them for doing that now.
“what are you doing this weekend” i am going to fantasy land. i am hiding under the covers in bed. i am making things up. i am contemplating events that didnt happen. i am talking to fake people. i am listening to my tunes. i am envisioning scenarios
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