Imaginary Worlds - Weir Science

Episode Date: May 13, 2021

When Andy Weir wrote “The Martian,” he self-published the chapters to his website -- never expecting the story to become a best-selling book, or an Oscar-nominated Hollywood movie. His new novel, “Project Hail Mary,” is generating a lot of excitement, and he's already sold the movie rights. We talk about why he sometimes misses his old life as a cubicle dwelling engineer, the pressure of not being considered a one-hit wonder, his biggest pet peeves in sci-fi stories, and how far he’s willing to stretch his heavily scientific approach to imagine something much more fantastical.   Today's episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Want to advertise/sponsor our show? We have partnered with AdvertiseCast to handle our advertising/sponsorship requests. They’re great to work with and will help you advertise on our show. Please email [e-mail] or click the link below to get started. Imaginary Worlds AdvertiseCast Listing Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Crypto trading involves risk of loss. See Kraken.com slash legal slash ca dash pru dash disclaimer for info on Kraken's undertaking to register in Canada. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. Andy Weir has been an inspiration to a lot of up-and-coming writers who've always hoped that if they're talented enough, if the material is good enough, they'll be noticed and they will find their audience. Andy spent years working as a computer programmer. And during that time, he tried to get his fiction published. But after many rejections, he decided that writing might just be a hobby.

And then he started writing The Martian. He was publishing chapters to his blog, and the buzz around the Martian became so huge, he eventually got a book deal, and the book was made into an Oscar-nominated blockbuster movie starring Matt Damon as the astronaut Mark Watney, who got stranded on Mars. Let's do the math. Our surface mission here was supposed to last 31 souls. For redundancy, they send 68 souls worth of food. That's for six people. So for just me, that's going to last 300 souls, which I figure I can stretch to 400 if I ration.

So I've got to figure out a way to grow three years worth of food here on a planet where nothing grows. Luckily, I'm a botanist. Andy Weir's third book, Project Hail Mary, just came out. It has a similar premise about an astronaut who's stranded in space, but the story goes in a very different direction. And by the way, this episode will contain a few spoilers about what happens in Project Hail Mary.

When the story begins, the main character, Ryland Grace, has woken up on a spaceship with total amnesia. He doesn't know how he got there, and the rest of the crew is dead. Slowly, his memory comes back in a series of flashbacks, and he remembers that the Earth's atmosphere is being threatened by these sort of alien parasites, and he was sent to another star system to find a solution that could save humanity. The book is a total page-turner, but I was trying not to rush through it because I was enjoying the story.

And even though the book just came out, Andy Weir has already sold the movie rights. Ryan Gosling is attached to star in it. When I got a chance to talk with Andy Weir, I wanted to start with his origin story because he studied computer science in college. And I was curious, even back then, did he know that he wanted to be a writer? And I was curious, even back then, did he know that he wanted to be a writer? I always wanted to be a writer. And when the time came, you know, when I was about to, you know, go to college and I had to say like, OK, what direction am I going to go with my life here? I really did heavily weigh like, OK, should I should I go to try to be a writer or should

I be an engineer? I decided I wanted regular meals. So I went for engineering instead of writing. And I really enjoyed being a computer programmer. I liked that. That career really worked for me. I did it for 25 years. I'd always been writing this whole time, by the way. I wrote two other books before The Martian. They just sucked, which is why you've never heard of them. But and then basically The Martian became this unexpected runaway success, which enabled me to stop being an engineer and follow my writing career. But it wasn't like I take this job and shove it situation.

I really liked being an engineer. And I actually specifically really liked the job I had at that time. You know, I stayed on much longer than I needed to. The Martian was already on the New York Times bestseller list before I put in my notice, just because as an engineer, you never want to leave in the middle of a project and leave the rest of your team hanging. So I was like, okay, I want to stick around until the next release and other stuff. But really, it was just excuses to stay in that environment, I think. in that environment, I think. Well, it sounds like, I mean, like how much do you miss going to the office? I do. Yeah, I mean, like what was it like to adjust to the sort of solitary life of being a writer?

Well, you know how everyone in the world just had to recently adjust to a solitary life because of the pandemic? I had to do that in like 2014 or, yeah, 2014. Basically, all my professional life, I had worked on teams, engineering teams. There's a team of people and there's a real feeling, especially among the engineers, of teamwork. Like we are a unit. This guy knows all about that part of the code. This guy knows all about that part. This guy knows it. It's like, okay, there's a problem over here. That guy will take care of it. The problem over here, she'll take care of it. Or it's time to implement this new feature. Okay, let's all talk about it and figure out the best approach. It's a lot of teamwork. And I really enjoyed that. And it was a bummer to say goodbye to that, because as a writer, you are very solitary. And I'm a fairly social guy. I like to interact with

people. I like to talk to people. I like to chat with people. And at the time I was single. And so I was just home by myself all day. I went to like zero social interaction all day long. And that was, that was a little rough on me. Well, it's funny because I keep thinking about the Martian and Project Hail Mary, because I mean, they're both about these astronauts who, you know, really enjoyed working with a crew or with a team. And, you. And the sort of isolation that they feel in space, there seems to be some resonance with what you're going on personally to some extent. Probably. I mean, my life is much happier now

than it has been for most of my past. I've been very lonely a lot in my life. Just a combination of being an only child, divorced parents, and my mom and I moved around a lot. So I didn't really get to make that many friends very quickly. And then later in life, just not a hit with the ladies. But now I'm happily married. I've got a family. I have a much better life. But loneliness was basically a constant in my life for a long time. So I guess I wrote about isolated characters.

You know, maybe the connection between me and these characters is wish fulfillment in that they are alone and they aren't lonely. Mark Watney almost never throughout The Martian, like in the whole book, he almost never talks about loneliness. He's always just actively trying to stay alive and stuff like that. And I guess maybe it's just being made of whatever it is that people are made of that where you can be alone and not feel lonely. Maybe that's a fantasy of mine because I'm not made of that. I really don't like being alone. a fantasy of mine because I'm not made of that. I really don't like being alone. The other thing too, I was thinking is, you know, when I'm reading Project Hail Mary, I mean, there's just, I kept thinking about like the, you know, pandemic life and kind of the isolation that we've all been going through. Did the writing of this book overlap with the pandemic at all? No, not at all. I finished the book before the pandemic began. Yeah. A lot of people say like, oh, this has a lot of shades of the pandemic. You can really see it.

I'm like, nope. It just took a long time to get it into print. Now, here is where I need to reveal another spoiler because there is a plot development that happens early in the book, which I really wanted to talk with him about. In fact, it happened so early on, it defines the rest of the story.

So here it is. The main character, Ryland Grace, was sent to this faraway star system because these alien parasites are threatening the Earth's atmosphere. And this is happening across the galaxy, except for this one other star system. And Ryland needs to figure out why. And that's when he runs into an intelligent extraterrestrial, an alien who's flying a spaceship on the same mission to the same star system because his planet is also being threatened by these same parasites. And this alien looks like a giant spider inside a stone-like casing. Ryland calls him Rocky. And they learn to communicate using the only mutual language that they know, science. And their relationship is

actually very sweet. I've never seen an alien-human bromance develop with a creature that looks like something out of a sci-fi horror movie. The publishers have tried to avoid any mention of this alien in promoting the book. But the book itself contains a spoiler on the back cover. George R.R. Martin made a poll quote for the book, a blurb. And if George R.R. Martin gives you a blurb, you put it on the book in big, bold print. You know, he's a big deal. He says, like, this is a great story with, like, a really cool dude and a competent alien and all this neat stuff. And we're like, okay, well, we don't want

anyone to know that there's intelligent alien life in the book, but we're going to tell them that on the back of the book also. Oh, well, whatever. Now, part of what makes Andy Weir stand out as a science fiction writer is that up until this point, his work was very heavily grounded in real science. That was a big selling point of The Martian. So what was it like to apply his rigorous scientific method to creating aliens and alien civilizations? We'll find out after the break. A special message from your family jewels brought to you by Old Spice Total Body. A special message from your family jewels brought to you by Old Spice Total Body.

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But a box fan? Happily, yes. A day of sunshine? No. A box of fine wines? Yes. Uber Eats can definitely get you that. Get almost, almost anything delivered with Uber Eats. Order now. Alcohol in select markets. Product availability may vary by Regency app for details. Project Hail Mary is the furthest that Andy Weir has gone into speculative fiction. And he approached this challenge the way he approaches everything, by getting down into the nitty gritty.

First of all, he decided that this alien, who Ryland calls Rocky, came from a real planet in the Eridani star system. And he figured out how the atmosphere and the gravity on that planet would affect the way that this creature moved and even the speed of his thoughts. But then Andy realized he had a problem, or a problem for a writer like him, who likes to be as scientifically accurate as possible. He had intelligent life evolving in multiple star systems. Some scientists believe this is very possible. The universe could be teeming with life.

But Andy is doubtful. It bothers me when there are coincidences in books and stories and stuff like that. So to have all three of those stars all have life around them, that just seemed like really a hell of a coincidence. That was one problem I had. And the other problem I had was I did not want to invent all the way down at the molecular level, a completely different means of life existing. I didn't want to invent an entire fictional molecular biology. So I solved both of those

problems by saying there was a panspermia event. Life evolved originally in the Tau Ceti system, and different forms of life evolved to travel in space. It's just single-celled organisms. But the fundamental cellular biology of life is pretty much the same. Well, it's funny. You were talking about life seeding across the galaxy from a single source. There's an episode of Next Generation where they discover that all the different aliens in Star Trek come from the same source. And it was like this one humanoid alien that was kind of a combination of all their different ears and foreheads.

Right. And that is an interesting attempt to explain it. But I don't like it because it's very clear that on Earth we evolved from smaller, completely different looking animals. So if you're going to come up with a scientific explanation, I don't like that. I actually think a better one is what the original series came up with, which kind of got lost track of over time. But there was an ancient unknown alien race known only as the Preservers. And the Preservers would basically take life and make backup copies on other planets. And so that's what happened is that the Preservers copied probably humans around to all these other planets. And then a few million

years of evolution happened and everybody's got their differences, but they're all still very, very similar. That's a better explanation. Now, in any creative field, especially a creature design, when you're coming up with an alien, I mean, you have this sandbox to play with where you can really do anything. When you were trying to create this different sort of species of aliens, especially with Rocky and his species, were there moments where you're just like, ah, this isn't going to work? I mean, was it just purely fun or was there kind of a learning curve? There was a learning curve. There were a bunch of things. Well, I started off with my deep disdain,

not disdain, that's not fair. I started off with how frustrated i am by stories where the aliens just happen to be totally comfortable in our environment that always bugged me i'm like what are the odds on that like some alien life form evolved on another planet another environment it just happened to have the same everything i get it in that it makes it a lot easier to tell stories if your aliens and humans are in the same physical location, but it always bugged me. So I started off by saying, I want my alien environment to be utterly incompatible with humans and vice versa. Another thing that always bugged me is just kind of the presumption of what the biology would look like and act like and feel like. So I tried to make

it as different as possible. I did have a bunch of ideas for making the aliens like very, very different, but I decided it was a little too far and would get in the way of storytelling. Yeah, it's funny. I mean, you've mentioned a number of pet peeves you have about sci-fi. And I mean, some sci-fi is really wacky. I mean, with Marvel, it's like they've got time travel and magic and aliens. But then there's stuff that's kind of more in between where they like try to have a set of consistent scientific rules, but then they kind of fudge, you know, a lot of it. It's not really based on science. Does that bother you more? Much more. I don't need scientific accuracy in my sci-fi for me to enjoy it. My favorite science fiction property that exists

is Doctor Who. And I like it more than Star Wars. I like it more than Star Trek. And I love Star Wars and I love Star Trek, but I love Doctor Who. And that is about as far from, you know, realistic science as you can possibly get. Your listeners can't see us, but you can see me in the background. You see there's a TARDIS on my shelf right behind me. There we are. Yay. Okay, listeners, he's showing me his 10th Doctor figurine with a light-up sonic screwdriver.

Very nice. So I'm a big Doctor Who fan. So obviously, I don't need science to be authentic for me to enjoy science fiction. I also love Star Trek and Star Wars and all these pet peeves I have about aliens. Star Trek does that always,

all the time, every single time. But I don't care. The only thing that bothers me is if you're going to come up with a set of rules, you have to be consistent. Whatever fake technology, you got a warp drive, you can go 100 times the speed of light. I got no problem with that. Physically impossible, still got no problem with that. But you have to be consistent. There's an episode of classic Trek where they travel from Mercury, the planet Mercury, to the planet Earth. And it takes them a while. And I'm like, it takes light, which goes warp one, seven minutes to get from Mercury to

Earth. OK, so you should be getting there in like no time at all. It should be like done. You know, so explain yourself. And so that's why, you know, I don't like it when there's inconsistencies. So when you start a book like this, do you start with a huge amount of thinking and world building and figuring all the math first before you even write a word of it? Well, I have a general idea usually in my head. I don't usually write it down of the story beats.

Here's what I want to have happen. It'll be like five items. It's not like this long, complicated list. Then I will go deep, deep, deep down the rabbit hole on the math and science. I'll do tons of research and I'll try to work all that stuff out before I start to write anything. Because oftentimes when I'm doing that research is when I discover things that I didn't know or hadn't considered, or I do all the math and this thing works out to be a way different than I kind of assumed it would. And so I have to rethink my story and my primary plot lines. I kind of like it when that happens, because oftentimes when you sit there and do all the math and work through all the science, it provides you with new plot complications or problems for the characters to endure. So I read an interview where you made a really interesting point

about how much it bugs you in movies where astronauts act more like high school students. Childish, yeah. It's funny, yeah, because until I read that, I hadn't even thought about that before, but it's true. I mean, not only do you have to have all this training to be an astronaut, but they weed people out to make sure that they have kind of this emotional sort of disposition and temperance

to be able to survive these long missions. Right. It drives me crazy. I understand why it happens because conflict is the basis of fiction. You need to have some sort of conflict or you don't have a story. But it's a cheap kind of shortcut to create conflict among your protagonists. kind of shortcut to create conflict among your protagonists. It's like manufactured conflict. And it drives me crazy. I'm like, this is a crew. This is a bunch of people in space who have probably trained together for years. And now they're just like at each other's throats for no reason, or they can't stand each other. And I'm like, this is not how that works. Yeah. When you first started writing like way, way back, I mean, I know a lot of writers will often say that what inspired them

to write was that they went looking for a certain kind of book and they were surprised it didn't exist. And then they thought, well, maybe I'll be the person to write that book. Did you have a similar moment where there are like certain kinds of sci-fi books that you wish were out there and you decided, well, maybe I'll just create those? I kind of backed into that, maybe. I wrote The Martian really for, you know, because at the time I was just hobby writing. I didn't imagine it would become a commercial success. I had a regular mailing list of people who like to read my stuff of about 3,000 people. And they were all hardcore nerds, like dorks who like to see the math play out. So I wrote The Martian for them.

I was saying, I'm writing for a very, very teeny tiny audience of people who want to see all the math. And so I wrote it for them. I have no idea really how it got such mainstream appeal. It's basically 360 pages of algebra questions. But for whatever reason, people liked it. OK. And then I found out that I was

now in a niche of hard sci-fi and I'm like, okay, well, I like to write it and I really like to read it, but there really isn't much out there. There's very, very little out there. These days there used to be a lot more. There used to be more. Yeah. Like Larry Niven was mostly hard sci-fi, but I've always liked hard sci-fi. And after The Martian, I thought like, well, that did really well, made into a movie. Everybody's heard of it. I bet you there will be a bunch of hard sci-fi books coming out soon because of that was successful. Then I'll get to read them and I get to enjoy it. And it didn't happen. So I remember when your second book, Artemis, came out, I was reading interviews where you're saying that you definitely felt this fear of like, oh, my God, is this going to be my sophomore slump?

And it sounds like with this book, it seems like you're having more fun or you're still feeling this adjective like, oh, no, now it's my third book. And I really felt good about this one. I don't I have imposter syndrome like you wouldn't believe. Like after the success of The Martian, I'm like, I have no idea why that got popular. I don't know what I did right. Now they want me to write another book. And I'm like, okie dokie. I've never considered myself a particularly good writer.

And so I said, well, I'm going to try to become a good writer while everybody thinks I already am one. I'm just going to see if I can sneak in there and actually get good at it when nobody's looking. One thing is in The Martian, there was no character depth or development whatsoever. Like all you know about Mark Watney after reading the whole book is he's kind of a smart ass and he didn't want to die. That's literally all you know. You don't know anything about him deeper than that. And he undergoes no change whatsoever during the entire book.

Like he has no growth at all. And I'm like, okay, for Artemis, I decided I want to make a deeper, more nuanced character who's complicated, more flawed, and undergoes change and becomes a better person by the end of the book. And that's what I did with Jazz Bashara, who's the main character of Artemis. And what I did with Jazz Bashara who's the main character of Artemis and what I did was I made her so flawed that it turned a lot of readers off a lot of people just found her obnoxious and they just had a difficult time rooting for her because so many of her problems were self-inflicted and so I kind of I kind of went too far down that character nuance um I I often say this like Mark Watney is the idealized version of me. He's all

the parts about myself that I like and none of my flaws. And the parts that I like, it's magnified. I'm good at science. He's great at science. I'm a smart ass. He's incredibly smart ass and funny as hell, but he doesn't have any of my fears, my neuroses, my flaws and stuff. Jazz from Artemis is more of the real me. She has my flaws. She has her like, she's lazy. She often looks for an easy way to do something and that ends up causing her problems. If she'd just done it the hard way in the first place, it would have been a lot better. She makes mistakes. Yeah. And so on. And I guess what i found out is people like the idealized version of me a lot more than they like the more realistic version of me so um for project hail mary though rylan grace is my attempt on that one was to make a flawed yet likable main character and also for

once not just to be an aspect or reflection of myself. I wanted to come up with a character and not be limited by the constraints of my own personality. Just say, okay, he's his own person. He's a different person than me. And that really helped me because I don't put a lot of thought into depth or complexity when I'm kind of basing a character on myself. But for Ryland, I'm like, he's a different person. He thinks a different way. He does things a different way. It was my first time making a lead character who wasn't just me in a mask. Well, it's interesting because I was asking before about like, you know, was there a learning curve in the alien biology and stuff like that? But it sounds like there was more, you had more of a, like a larger, you've had more of kind of a larger learning curve over your entire career in terms of

just, you know, figuring out how to learn to write. That's much more difficult and much more stress inducing for me than the science in my book. I'm good at science, or I should say, probably more accurately, I am confident in my scientific abilities. It remains for others to say whether or not I'm actually good at it. But I'm confident enough that I don't feel nervous about, you know, I'm like, okay, I'm going to come up with this. And oh, this will be the science behind how this thing works. And here's the science behind how that works. And I'll come up with all that.

And I will feel totally confident about that. It's my writing skill, character interplay, depth, complexity. It's those skills that I'm really not confident about and always trying to improve on and work on and get better. That must be weird. If you're going through that and you feel like you have imposter syndrome, you've got this huge spotlight on you while you're doing that. You're not exactly, it's like a child actor. The whole world watches them grow up. The whole world's watching you learn how to be a writer. Or a one-hit wonder band. And then Artemis was not nearly as well received as The Martian.

And I think part of the reason is because people were like, they wanted another Martian. They wanted another book that would grab them like The Martian did. And I just, I did not provide that. I think I might have in Project Hail Mary. We'll see. Writers don't ever feel confident. Like I like to say, give a man a book, you entertain him for a night. Teach a man to write, you give him crippling self-doubt for life.

And I actually feel confident about Project Hail Mary. I think it's going to, I think it's going to do well. So I have actually just one last question and I want to shift gears a little bit. will. So I have actually just one last question and I want to shift gears a little bit. You said that you don't particularly like dystopian or post-apocalyptic stories. And I actually feel the same way, but for me, it's more that like the world is already scary and I'm scared for the future and I want my sci-fi to reassure me and not, you know, kind of reconfirm my worst fears. But I was curious, what are your reasons why you don't like those genres? Well, I actually do like some dystopia stuff, but I like post-apocalyptic stuff. I like Mad Max,

stuff like that. I actually enjoy that for some reason, where it's anarchy and a very small number of humans surviving. In style. Yeah, that's right. I mean, if you're not wearing like barbarian furs with a razor sharp boomerang, don't even talk to me. Right. Yeah. But what I don't like is a lot of sci-fi has fallen into the mold of being this miserable fascist dystopia state where the evil fascist government is in total control and there's this downtrodden, impoverished class. And for whatever reason, teenagers doing stupid crap is very important to society. I understand where it comes from because it's a very easy premise to start with. You don't need to explain why a fascist totalitarian regime is bad. The reader

immediately understands it and they side with the characters and so on. But I just think it's trite and overdone. But also more importantly, I think it's inaccurate. Depictions of the future are often shown as this notion of like, we are currently in the peak happiness of humanity and it's all downhill from here, or that we're already on the downhill trend and that things are just going to get worse and worse. And it's going to, there's this technophobia and this general miserable view of humanity that I don't hold. Maybe I'm a bit of a Pollyanna, but I say over time, the world just gets better and better. It just gets to be a better and better

place to live in. And as proof of that, I would ask you, pick any random year in history, and then pick the year 100 years before that. Then ask yourself which one of those two years you would rather live in. I think we can all agree that 2020 sucked, but I would rather live through 2020 again than 1920. I've lived my whole life without ever seeing a no-colored sign on a store window, and none of my friends have died of typhus. And I guarantee you, people in 2120, or even ignoring the pandemic, let's say people in 2125 would much rather stay there than live in 2025. I certainly hope so. Well, that is it for this week. Thank you for listening, and special thanks to Andy Weir. By the way, enrollment is still open for my summer course

on creating your own podcast. The course is taught through NYU, but it's virtual, so you can take it from anywhere. You can learn more at NYU's website. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook, I tweet at emalinski and imagineworldspod and if you really like the show, please leave a review

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