I was really surprised this was included as a detail in the book. It’s very odd to imagine someone like Stratt who went as far as never letting two people from different teams travel in a vehicle together, be ok with the risk that a sexual relationship could bring (STDs, lover’s quarrel, fire breaking out while they’re together etc.).
It implies either only Grace knows and she didn’t know, implying she’s not as omniscient as she appears, or she knows and is ok with it, implying she’s not as ruthless as she seems. Either way, it’s a detail that undermines Stratt’s character with no real narrative payoff.
I’ve read the book and saw the movie, and I have a couple of questions:
Will the laptop that Grace gave to Rocky even operate in Rocky’s mega-hot environment? I’d think it would be cooked.
Grace says he doesn’t have enough astrophage fuel to return to Earth. Wasn’t he just floating in a river of astrophage flowing from Tau Ceti to Adrian? Why didn’t he scoop up a tankful out there?
Tau Ceti’s astrophage population is streaming out to Adrian to reproduce, only to get eaten by taumoeba. Tau Ceti, from Earth, looks unaffected by astrophage. Then why is there still a Petrova line from the star to Adrian? Weren’t all the astrophage depleted at the time we were observing them from Earth, and that had to have happened many years ago by the time we could see it?
A bunch of other stars in our galactic neighborhood are infected. If they all dim out and maybe die, what effect would this have on us and on Rocky’s system?
1: Rocky built a special “life support system” for the laptop, including an enclosed atmosphere and refrigeration.
2: The Petrova line is very diffuse. You can catch astrophage there, but you can’t catch enough to fuel a spaceship. That’s why they needed the big breeding program on Earth.
3: Astrophage still exists at tau Ceti, it’s just kept in check. It’s only at other stars, where it’s an invasive species with no natural predators, that it goes extreme.
4: It doesn’t completely kill stars, just dim them. For planets relying on a particular star for light and heat, this is disastrous, but from other stars, nobody would notice but astronomers (and just the professionals, not even the amateurs: Plenty of stars naturally vary their light output by more than 10% without even being noticed).
Thanks. I did read the book, but it has been a few months now. It was so dense with physics that I probably glazed over here and there while reading it.
Wonder if Weir would write a sequel. Idea: those other stars that are dimming out are dooming any intelligent life dependent on them, and if they can’t science their way out of it like we did, they’ll be abandoning their systems and come looking for healthy stars. But that sounds like the plot of many other sci-fi stories.
After I saw the movie, I wondered about the possibility of a sequel, or at least what might happen next. For one thing, Ryland Grace would be perhaps the most famous person in history. He’s most responsible for saving humanity through his work with astrophage and Taumoeba. He’s been farther from Earth than anyone else to date. He made first contact with another intelligent species and was able to communicate with them. And he’s the first to step foot on an extrasolar planet. Do the Eridians perhaps accompany him on his voyage home? There very well could be a meaningful technological exchange. And what about the possibility of using astrophage as a fuel source both on Earth and elsewhere?
Why would it? They can’t live on Earth; we can’t survive on their planet. Why would an interstellar war be the result?
We know that Grace taught them about relativity. Meanwhile, the Eridians might be able to teach us about xenonite. I like the idea of an optimistic future.
You can have your imagined sequel featuring an interstellar war between the Eridians and the people of Earth. I have my more optimistic one featuring cooperation between the two.
Grace would be too old to withstand a years-long trip back home to Earth. I’d like that he stay on Rocky’s planet and use his abilities to help the Eridians with his unique skills should refugeeing aliens come knocking. His doctorate was in molecular biology, wasn’t it?
I think that obvious sequels would be chronicles of joint Human-Eridian missions to infected stars, and seeding the systems with appropriately evolved taumeobas. But I don’t see where the drama would be? First contact with technologically behind species??
Am I the only one here who didn’t like the movie? I found the constant cheery goofy sappiness and slapstick really off-putting and pandering. It felt like a movie aimed at very small children. I left early with about 30 minutes left, something I rarely do.
I saw it for a second time and I really do find the whole movie to be very charming and fun. I can’t say this will make my top 10 of 2026 all the way at the end of the year, but it might be somewhere in there.
How would an interstellar war even work? You need a few million tons of astrophage to send 3 humans to the Eridian planet. It takes them at least 13 years to get there and you only know if they’re successful 13 years later.
In the book, it says the Project Hail Mary spacecraft cost 10 trillion dollars to build. Presumably, later spacecrafts could be some fraction of the price but still in the range of a trillion dollars. This from a planet where half the people are already dead from famine and everyone is busy rebuilding. Interstellar war simply doesn’t make sense from an economic perspective in any world governed by relativistic physics.
We help run duplicate bridge at the senior center on Fridays, and this movie came up at different tables, specifically we were asked what we knew about it, and if we thought it might be as good as advertised (we being only in our 60s, we get the ‘young people’ questions). Really interesting how big it’s become ($390M now of worldwide box office).
No war makes sense from an economic perspective. Since when has that ever stopped us? If anything, being in such dire economic straits that we can’t possibly afford a war, historically, has made one even more likely.
@Shalmanese laid out why an interstellar war is not possible though.
If you’re looking for inspiration from history, it would be more akin to the 17th century when European powers were fighting over trade and influence with Japan.