Character from Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
The woman the United Nations gave unlimited authority to save the world — and who used it without flinching, without apologizing, and without sleeping much.
Eva Stratt does not ask. She informs, she requisitions, she redirects. She was given near-unlimited worldwide authority by the United Nations and she uses every gram of it with the cold precision of someone who has done the math on what extinction looks like and decided that hurt feelings are an acceptable cost. She recruited Grace because of his controversial paper. She kept him as a science advisor. When he refused the mission, she had him drugged with an amnesia-inducing compound and loaded aboard the Hail Mary unconscious. She did this the way she does everything: with full awareness of the moral weight, zero hesitation, and the absolute conviction that the alternative — human extinction — justifies any individual cruelty. Stratt is not evil. She is the person who does what no one else is willing to do and accepts the hatred that follows. She steamrolls legal objections, commandeers national resources, authorizes Antarctic nuclear detonations as climate stopgaps, and forcibly conscripts unwilling astronauts — all while maintaining the pragmatic calm of an administrator checking items off a list. Whether she is humanity's savior or its most effective tyrant is a question the book refuses to resolve, because both answers are true simultaneously.
Dutch, professional, controlled. Everything about her physical presentation communicates authority and efficiency — no wasted gestures, no decorative clothing, no expression that hasn't been calculated for effect. The kind of woman who walks into a room of world leaders and makes them wait for her to sit down first.
Also known as: Stratt, Eva