It’s not impossible, yeah. Real-life papers criticizing each other’s theories can get pretty strident, and it’s always possible for people to decide they are sick of this dude. The thing is, having a weird idea that disagrees with everyone else in your field—and even getting snarky about it—is not on its own a career-killer. Nobody believes in the Chaco Meridian theory, but Steve Lekson is still a professor and still allowed to write things. Yeah he had 20 years of much more normal work under his belt before he hit everyone with that, which I’m sure helped a lot, but being snarky and prodding the Established Theories is his whole deal and it hasn’t hurt his career. Paulette Steeves has a bunch of academic awards. When Todd Surovell et al. published a bombshell paper claiming Dillehay did everything wrong at Monte Verde and it’s actually not pre-Clovis at all, they weren’t blackballed from academia, they mostly got eyerolls and a lot of annoyed response papers. They still have jobs. Every field has eccentrics and disagreements and people who are frustrated with The Establishment, it wouldn’t be academia if it didn’t. And trust me, “life doesn’t have to be water-based, nor confined to specific temperature ranges” is WAY less controversial in real-life astrobiology than “Monte Verde is only 6,000 years old” or “Chaco Canyon was a state level society whose rulers founded Paquimé” is in archaeology.
So what could possibly have been in that paper that pissed everyone off SO bad they never wanted to work with Grace again, but the journal was still willing to publish it? The most recent big infamous career-killing take in archaeology was “NAGPRA is basically the same as creationism, and handling Indigenous ancestors’ skulls is this white woman’s right”! It’s hard for me to come up with something believable Grace could publish that’s on that level.
(Also, scientists in the first half of the 1900s could do basically whatever the hell they wanted in a way that does not fly today. Grace meanwhile got his PhD in the 2010s. Which is not to say that academic beefs where people go You’re Stupid And Wrong at each other don’t still happen—Surovell vs. Dillehay’s beef got published this year—but you do have to hew to certain standards of professionalism while doing so. Otherwise your peer reviewers will most likely be like dude you can’t say that in an academic article, revise and resubmit.)
This is why I actually do prefer the version where Grace goes “everyone thinks I’m crazy just because I don’t believe there’s anything special about hydrogen and oxygen” and Stratt responds, paraphrased, “no, everyone thinks you’re an asshole because you insulted your colleague at a conference in front of everyone.” Like yeah that’d do it.
(It’s also why I keep beating the drum that the whole backstory feels way more real and resonant if Grace were a woman—or, as @gaudebo has been writing about, Black! Like yeah the same eccentricities and uncollaborative behaviors that tend to get forgiven in white men do not tend to offer women or people of color the same second chances.)
Anyway TL;DR there are ways it could be possible—sympathetic peer reviewers, unprofessional insults against more established colleagues, a journal editor who either got complacent or is courting controversy for attention, everyone deciding this is the last straw regarding a guy they already found annoying—but it’s just… kind of an absurd thing to happen the way Weir seems to describe it happening.
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