Andy Weir built a two-decade career as a software engineer until the success of this first published novel, The Martian, allowed him to live out his dream of writing full-time. He is a lifelong space nerd and a devoted hobbyist of such subjects as relativistic physics, orbital mechanics, and the history of manned spaceflight. He also mixes a mean cocktail. His newest book, Project Hail Mary, has been optioned for a film starring Ryan Gosling.
I had a wonderful Zoom chat with Andy Weir in late September about his 2021 novel, Project Hail Mary, and his upcoming visit to the Peters Township Library on November 3.
Weir’s writing career took off with the publication of The Martian, which was adapted into the 2015 Ridley Scott–directed film starring Matt Damon. Despite the work’s phenomenal success, the journey from book to blockbuster was unconventional, to say the least. While he was working full time as a software engineer, Weir published The Martian as a serial on his website. He then self-published through Amazon in 2011 before it was picked up by Crown and republished in 2014. “Every writer wants success, fantasizes about their stuff being made into a blockbuster movie,” Weir says humbly. “I didn’t seriously think that it would happen.”
Weir grew up reading his father’s science fiction collection. He was drawn to the classics, like Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke. In his own science fiction writing, Weir’s unique focus is scientific accuracy, which requires an intense study of botany, molecular biology, particle physics, and the multitude of other complex sciences that can be found in his books. “As long as you stay within the realm of real physics,” Weir explains, “the universe already has all those answers for you instead of [you] having to come up with an explanation.”
His writing strategy is to create a “straight-forward and understandable problem” for his characters and his readers. He then does a deep dive into the sciences to find the solution. “My characters are all really smart,” Weir says. “I can take weeks trying to solve a problem, and they figure it out in a moment of reflection.” All this deep diving doesn’t make him an expert though. “I don’t know anything about plants except what I looked up about potatoes,” Weir jokes about the key to Mark Watney’s survival in The Martian.
Weir’s latest novel, Project Hail Mary, is different from his previous work. The novel follows middle school teacher/astronaut Ryland Grace as he endeavors to stop the solar dimming that threatens the planet. “Although it looks like a finely honed instrument,” Weir reveals, “Project Hail Mary is really a pastiche of ideas that I’ve had that had nothing to do with each other. I had one idea about an astronaut that wakes up aboard a ship with amnesia and no idea where he is or why he’s there. Another one was, what if we had a mass conversion spacecraft fuel and what could we do with that? And I was toying around with a first contact novel. Those things all came together.”
Unlike The Martian and his 2017 novel Artemis, which focus on the fate of one individual, the plot of Project Hail Mary centers around the threat of the entire planet’s extinction. In the past, Weir shied away from narratives with “world-ending ramifications” because he considers them to be science fiction tropes and, therefore, predictable. “The stakes don’t feel as real when it’s the entire world,” Weir suggests. “Usually when the stakes are the entire world, you know the book is not going to end with the whole world being destroyed, so really you start to care about whether the character you like is going to survive.” In Project Hail Mary, Weir also took on the opportunity to play with a flashback-driven narrative and a new race of alien.
With all his creativity and tireless work ethic, I have no doubt we’ll be seeing more science fiction coming from Andy Weir in the future. As for his hopes for the future of science fiction, Weir says, “I do wish there was more hard sci fi out there. I have that niche to myself. I would love for other people to jump in with realistic science fiction because that’s what I love to read.”
Read more about Weir’s upcoming event at the Peters Township Library…
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