Part one ended on a question. We’d seen that Project Hail Mary charts every territory — the physics, the biology, the institutions, the history — only as far as its hero’s footprints go, and that the map turns blank or invented in the same place every time: wherever a true survey would have centered other people, diluting the one Great Man. The emptiness of everything around Grace is the precondition for the centrality of Grace.
So: who is this man, and why does the whole world bend toward him?
This is the part where I stop talking about tractor beams and start talking about people. It’s also the part where a second reading of the book — one I owe entirely to my wife Alison — is introduced, and we’ll see which one fits better.
Phenomenal Cosmic Power
Start with Stratt.
Stratt is the administrator placed in charge of Earth’s survival, and her power is unlimited. She voids copyright with a wave. She forces scientists to work for her. She flies Grace supersonically around the world for meetings in an age that has somehow forgotten how to videoconference. She violates national airspaces and prison safeguards. She commandeers militaries — aircraft, aircraft carriers, and even nuclear arsenals. Every member nation of the UN signs on to grant her this authority — every one, unanimously, which is not a thing that has ever happened or could happen, for any purpose, let alone a standing dictatorship over the planet’s resources. (And the UN doesn’t even have the ability to grant anyone that authority. The UN mostly exists to allow nations to publicly negotiate and posture with each other. It can’t really force any member nations to do anything.)
As worldbuilding, it’s nonsense. And none of it is even necessary — the plot would survive Stratt having ordinary, large-but-bounded institutional power. So why is it there?
Well, notice which way the path of nonsense leads. Stratt’s impossible authority does one thing reliably: it inflates the importance of the man standing next to her. Because Grace isn’t just on the team. He’s her confidante. Her number two. The one she trusts with everything, the one she pulls aside, the one whose judgment she defers to over credentialed specialists. There’s a whole scene (the one where they watch a launch) whose only function is to establish that Grace is Stratt’s special boy, and that the powerful people in the room look to him. He protests, weakly, but gosh darn it if he doesn’t realize they’re right. Grace gets to be both the humble everyman and the secret genius, with a powerful woman on hand to keep insisting on the genius.
Now, often, in a certain kind of book, you have a special hero man who is paired with a female romantic interest who is little more than a foil who encourages, inspires, and pushes him to succeed. She represents qualities that the hero needs to conquer or bring into himself in order to win the day. This is a hero / anima pattern. But that’s not exactly what’s going on here.
Stratt isn’t a romantic interest, and she doesn’t need saving. She’s the powerful one. But she keeps telling him how exceptional he is. She keeps him close. She praises him as uniquely capable and special, even while ostensibly dismissing him as a “junior high school teacher.” It’s a hero / mother pattern. This kind of pattern usually exists in stories to be defeated, because the hero really can’t come into his own while he’s under a mother’s wing.
But this is how a certain kind of man recognizes his importance: by pleasing the Mother. Again, hold that thought.
Silly Rabbit, Morals Are for Kids!
There’s a recurring motif in Project Hail Mary — perhaps the deepest theme of the book. Again and again, a crisis appears in which some egalitarian or humane commitment must be rationally set aside for the greater good. This is presented as just hard-headed maturity. The grown-ups are doing what soft people can’t. Grace and his gang even speculate that, once they’ve saved the world, they’ll be dragged before the courts and convicted of terrible crimes. They laugh ruefully. All part of the job!
The clearest instance is the response to the food math. Faced with projected famine, in which half of all humans will die in the next 20 years, no one suggests eating less meat, or phasing out ethanol. (75% of our food production goes to feed animals and cars.) Or having fewer children. Nope! Gotta warm this planet up! The solution is to detonate nuclear weapons in Antarctica to release methane and warm the oceans. It’s unthinkable violence presented as simple arithmetic. We even have a character who claims to be a hippie environmentalist as he pushes the button, saying, gosh, in this case, it breaks my bleeding heart, but there just isn’t any other answer.
Elsewhere we get the suggestion that low standards of living make a population healthy and tough, that we’ve gone soft (which is roughly the opposite of what the demographic and health data show). We get Africa’s poverty explained as a shortage of resources, when Africa is resource-rich and its poverty has far more to do with debt, extraction, and inequality the wealthy world actively maintains. And Stratt would have preferred a crew that’s just three heterosexual males, since there are more qualified male astronauts available (it’s just a fact!), and there wouldn’t be any icky romantic tension on board. Everyone knows, of course, that heterosexual males never disagree or fight about anything.
The humane and liberal options, when they’re even acknowledged, are reliably cast as naïve luxuries that a serious person discards when the stakes are real. The book’s deepest assumption, stated quite explicitly, is that in a true crisis “things are very easy,” with no real moral dilemmas. There’s just the obvious correct action that weak people flinch from, because they’re brute force, dangerous, and immoral.
Anyone who’s worked an actual emergency knows it’s the reverse. Crisis is triage. It’s a blur of impossible choices made too fast, the awful ones that haunt you afterward. The fantasy that catastrophe simplifies ethics — that it hands you permission instead of taking it away — is the same fantasy, wearing a lab coat, that lets one man be the answer to everything.
The Unauthorized Biography
There’s an alternative reading available, though; one that turns all these inconsistencies and problems into assets. Maybe the problem isn’t with Weir, but with Grace. Maybe Ryland Grace is not an enthusiastic, cheerful, brilliant man. Instead, he’s a psychopath. Possibly even a serial killer.
Intrigued? Let’s review the evidence. The classic signs are:
- Bed-wetting well beyond the normal age
- Cruelty to animals (zoosadism)
- Firesetting
- An inappropriate, distant, and / or suffocating relationship with the mother.
You can see samples of these in actual serial killers like Edmund Kemper and Ed Gein. The “classic” signs are derived from the theory developed in 1963 by John Macdonald in his influential paper “The Threat to Kill”, and they’re often found in fiction and other media. But real psychopaths don’t necessarily have any of these indicators. Here’s what to really look out for:
- Lacking moral conscience, feeling no remorse
- Calculating
- Highly adept at manipulating others to get what they want
- Charming, and can easily mimic normal emotions to blend into society
So let’s bear all these in mind, and take another look at the book, and see what jumps out at us.
Heretic
Look at that! First page: bedwetting. He wakes up in bed and yanks a catheter free from his penis. This produces a dribble of blood that he fixates on. A conceptual commingling of blood, urine, and the bed, which triggers traumatic memories. Then robotic arms, who barely listen to his cries for help and information, emotionlessly tend to him. He is infantilized by an emotionally unavailable mother figure. Grace is telling on himself from the very first page.
We have already seen a lot more evidence for the hero / mother pattern with Stratt. As for the zoosadism, and the firesetting, let’s put a pin in those. For now let’s follow these memories elicited by the dribble of blood, and see what we can see of callousness, manipulation, charm, and calculation.
Grace is a scientist with a bold idea: that life could arise without water. Now, most scientists disagree, but they’re not dogmatic about it. It’s not heresy to suggest it (the way, say, the electric universe “theory” is). There’s just no evidence for it. But Grace feels like his ideas are ignored, so he writes a blistering article in which he doesn’t merely argue his case but eviscerates by name everyone who disagreed with him, salts their fields, and dances on the ground. The funding evaporates. The job follows. And Grace retreats into a private narrative of persecution: the lone genius, too brilliant and too honest for the small minds around him.
He becomes a middle-school science teacher. And he is happy there, truly happy, which he sees as evidence of his own humility. The great mind content among the children! But his pedagogy rewards students who can shout out memorized facts (even if the facts aren’t quite right), and he is always guaranteed to be the smartest one in the room. He has found, in his exile, the safest possible kingdom.
Amnesiac
Then the world starts to end, and the world comes looking for him, because his heresy is suddenly the only science that makes sense. Enter Stratt, who is everything Grace has been waiting for: a powerful female figure who recognizes him, singles him out, keeps him close. He idolizes her instantly and completely. He narrates her, throughout, as omnipotent and maternal. He joins the team, and in his telling the team is a backdrop, if they are mentioned at all. The real work, the decisive insights, the moments that matter, accrue to him. His colleagues are competent the way furniture is competent. He is the one who sees. He charms them, and they love him. And even though it turns out that the astrophage do use water, he’s still the center of everything.
And he’s assigned to work on the mission to Tau Ceti. Is the Earth, in fact, trying other solutions (astrophage lures, space diaphragms, birth control, meat rationing, etc.)? If so, he doesn’t deign to mention them. The Tau Ceti mission, his mission, is the only real hope for mankind.
But he is not assigned to go on the mission. Instead, there is a strong and reliable Chinese man, a Black French man (who carries on a relationship with his backup replacement), and a lively, funny Russian woman. Grace is sidelined; he is not to be the center of the story. But then, a mysterious accident kills the Black man and his backup, leaving a gap that only Grace can fill.
Then all three of them are placed in comas for the trip, to prevent violence. Why would they be afraid of violence?
Years later, he wakes alone, with no memory of what has gone before. But genuine amnesia has chaos, terror, disorientation. Grace is calm. He is orderly from the first minute. He catalogs, he deduces, he calculates, he proceeds. He is, in his telling, almost giddy with the speed and expertise he brings to figuring out where he is and what has happened.
Is it possible he already awakened once before? If so, does he remember it, if only subconsciously? Does that somehow inform his actions now?
After the bed-wetting incident, he finds his two crewmates dead in their bunks. He compares them to Halloween decorations. He does not dispose of them. He does not examine them. He does not ask the obvious urgent question: whatever killed them, will it kill me? Does he already know how they died? Later, when their names come back, he cries, once, for a paragraph. Then he puts them out the airlock and does not cry for them again.
But he does calculate that their deaths mean more food is left for him.
Controller
He breaks his way into the control room. He tells us that he has to speak his name to open the hatch. He says this is a competence test, added to make sure that the coma survivors were lucid enough to operate the ship. But that’s not how you test competence. Is it possible that this “test” is a cover story to hide the fact that the hatch was designed to keep him where he’d been put?
In the control room, he finds out that the computer system has lots information about how to operate the ship and the purpose of the mission. He doesn’t take a few hours and learn as much as he can. He declares it boring and ignores it. And when he discovers the ship has a cargo hold, he does not go and inventory it. He says, gosh, it seems cramped and dark, and closes it up again. A man alone on a vessel he can’t remember, facing a mission he doesn’t understand? Why would he not look? This is now three times we’ve watched Grace refuse to investigate a critical source of information — the bodies, the documentation, the hold. Is there a part of him that already knows what is waiting below?
Let’s turn now to his relationship with Rocky. He watches Rocky sleep; he watches him eat; he watches him defecate. Grace has excuses for these violations of personal boundaries, of course. Rocky’s species wants to be watched sleeping! It’s for science! But do his excuses make sense?
He claims Eridians can’t predict how long they’ll sleep, and can’t be woken up at all; and so they like to be guarded while they sleep. Grace is just doing Rocky a favor. But then why, when Grace oversleeps for two hours, is Rocky supposedly frantic for him to wake up, screaming and pounding on the barrier between them? Why would he assume Grace will awaken at any particular time, and why would he think Grace could be awakened at all? It’s contradictory; it makes no sense. We never hear Rocky’s perspective in his own words, unfiltered, without Grace explaining, narrating, translating. What part of this nonsense is truth, and what part is excuse?
And Grace claims it’s for science that he needs to watch Rocky eat and defecate. It’s just too bad that it makes Rocky uncomfortable. But does he take any notes? Or make a recording? Does he take any measurements? Does he ask questions or ask for explanations? Is it science, or something darker?
Grace often uses science to justify terrible things. Let’s see a few more examples.
Pyromaniac and Zoosadist
Firesetting. On the planet Adrian, Grace intentionally drops the Hail Mary’s engines into the atmosphere. Its spin drives heat the atmosphere up so intensely that the air begins to ionize, creating a massive blowtorch effect. (He had to do this, of course, to gather astrophage for science. He had no other option. Ever.) And remember earlier, back on Earth, Grace’s team detonates dozens of hydrogen bombs in Antarctica, releasing deadly methane into the air and scrambling the world’s currents, weather, and ecology, in order to raise the planet’s temperature one or two degrees.
Now let’s turn to animal torture. Taumoeba, an alien life form, is the astrophage predator. They decide to bring it back to their star systems to save their worlds. But here the text and reasoning becomes incoeherent again. Apparently the Taumoeba would be killed by the nitrogen in the atmospheres of the astrophage breeding planets (Venus and Threeworld, the corresponding planet in Rocky’s system) and so they need to figure out a way to protect it. Grace’s idea is simply to breed it for resistance, poisoning each generation with more and more nitrogen, allowing evolution to find a way to gradually build up tolerance. He doesn’t know, and doesn’t care, how nitrogen poisons it, or how it will develop resistance; it doesn’t matter to him. He’s just going to poison millions of alien beings until he has a strain that is useful to him.
If you, dear reader, don’t think this is a clear enough example of torture, then consider the scene with animal testing earlier in the book. Grace and Stratt visit the lab of the company developing the coma survival technology, and they actually enter a room with a dozen unconscious monkeys hooked up to medical apparatus. Grace tells us he is uncomfortable, and asks if he has to be here. (He doesn’t. They’re here to discuss the technology, not look at the monkeys. The meeting could have been an email.) Grace says he understands animal testing is necessary, he just doesn’t want to have to see it. And Stratt tells him, “Stop being an asshole.” They then discuss the technology with the monkeys slowly dying around them.
Set aside the implication that if you are made uncomfortable, then you’re also an asshole. There are two reasons why Grace narrates this scene. First, he’s performing his discomfort for us. See, he says? I hate animal cruelty. Even though Mommy disapproves of how idealistic and weak I am. And second, he wants an excuse to show us the animals being tortured. And when it’s over, the monkeys are never mentioned again.
Traitor
Back to the Taumoeba. As a side effect of the breeding program, Grace creates Taumoeba that can escape Rocky’s main multi-purpose building material, xenonite. Rocky’s fuel is consumed and he is left drifting in space. This is presented as an accident. But is it?
By this point, the Taomoeba have escaped to eat astrophage more than once. The Taumoeba and the astrophage must be contained at all costs for the journeys back to their homeworlds, so you’d think that extraordinary precautions would be taken to keep it in check. Backup containers, nested containers, containers lined with different kinds of material… But, in Grace’s telling, simple, single-layer xenonite canisters were all they used.
And to be fair, how likely was it that the Taumoeba would escape? In 140 years, E. coli has never figured out how to escape from glass or plastic. But even if it did, Rocky, for certain, should have prevented the accident, or at least handled it properly once it happened. He was the ship’s engineer; he was the most familiar with his fuel systems and with xenonite itself. Once the Taumoeba started to escape, he should have been able to contain it. He would have a plan in place for just such an event.
Instead, by Grace’s account, Rocky is caught completely unawares, loses all his fuel, and just gives up, sitting despondently alone in his ship until Grace arrives to rescue him. How likely is that? In fact, how likely is it that Grace would guess so quickly that Rocky would need help? After all, Grace was able to contain the outbreak. Rocky should have been able to do the same.
This sequence of events is so implausible that it casts the whole story into doubt. And as we’ve seen so far, the more implausible the story, the more likely it is that Grace is twisting the narrative to cast himself as the hero. Unlikely accidents killed his crewmates on Earth and his crewmates on his ship, placing him at the center of the story. And now Grace has happened to Rocky as well.
Prisoner
But, once he is safely away, he has plenty of time to think, and years of solitude ahead of him, with nothing but justice at the end of it. On Earth, he would have to answer uncomfortable questions about what happened to his four crewmates. Does he reconsider? Does he hatch a new narrative — one that casts him back in the role of Rocky’s savior, of the self-sacrificing hero who cannot ever return home?
Yes, perhaps it would be better to choose a different path — one where he chooses the terms of his imprisonment. He selects, as his keeper, the one being he already knows to be gentle and curious and inclined towards compassion. It is a well-worn trope of the true-crime catalogue: the criminal who wants to be caught, and wants a kindly warden.
So the book opens with Grace in a little box, and ends with him in another one. Two sentences, in the penal sense, bracketing the whole tale. We start with exile that is also confinement, and end with confinement that is also exile. These are the two common ways that human society has dealt with psychopaths — the ones who we simply cannot live with. In this reading, the book is tackling the question of how to deal with these incurables, these madmen who believe ethics and compassion are luxuries that mature adults must cast aside. But it offers no real answer.
At least the man inside his cage is happy. A settled, content, comfortable prisoner, who never grieves, never wakes screaming, never once is visited by the faces of the people who died beside him, sealed away forever in a lifeless dusty cage surrounded by giant eyeless singing spiders.
In the closing scene, Grace quizzes a class of Eridian children: what is the speed of light? Less than half of them remember. Yet Eridians are supposed to have perfect memory. As an authorial slip it’s just a continuity error. As narration, it’s one more place the mapmaker has gotten a telling detail wrong. Once again, Grace is the smartest person in the room, with memory even better than Eridians.
But Eridians Don’t Have Mirrors
And so, dear reader, we have surveyed the evidence for psychopathy, and have found an uncomfortably large number of diagnostics. It paints a dark portrait indeed. It’s a distorted, goateed mirror universe of what was intended, but it was all too easy to make. And it is a direct consequence of breaking the contract with the reader. You don’t get to promise rigor, wave away the language and the physics and the psychology, and arrange the world to flatter one man, without consequences. And in this case, the consequence is that your map is drawn so badly that the reader is left wondering if it represents a different territory entirely. In other words, did Grace break the narrative contract? Or did Weir?
Did Andy Weir intend to write a murderer? Of course not. He set out to write a hero, with great enthusiasm, and meant every cheerful word of it. But the book he actually put on the page can be read, cover to cover, without changing a single fact, as the serene autobiography of a man with little self-awareness, a compulsion to embellish his importance and downplay everyone else, and an inky black void where remorse should be.
The Eridians can keep him. And God help them.
