No surprise: Andy Weir loves science

ProWritingAid’s “Science Fiction Writers’ Week” was fantastic. While there were many interesting sessions, my highlight was the interview with Andy Weir, the author of The Martian. You know, the book that Hollywood adapted into the mildly successful movie with the same name and features Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, and Jeff Daniels. 

Anyway, the session was a lot of fun and I decided to share a few excerpts from his interview with Hayley Milliman. Here is what Andy Weir said about…

…his career path:

I always wanted to be a writer. When I was eighteen and it was time to go to college and choose a major, I deliberated between software engineering and literature.

I decided I wanted regular meals and went for software engineering, and that was a good call. But I was always writing, trying to break into the market. “The Martian” was my third full-length novel.

…what draws him to the sci-fi genre:

I love the science. I love taking a little bit of physics that I made up and running with it.
…the source of his ideas:

I think most come from daydreams. I’m always thinking about random ideas. In almost all of my stories, the central premise is something that has been done before. […] A guy stranded on Mars isn’t even sci-fi. It’s a man stranded on an island, it’s like Robinson Crusoe. A survival story. It’s been done a million times, but I did it my way with the science.

“Artemis” is about a city on the moon, but I did it my way. It’s not a unique concept. “Project Hail Mary” is a first-contact story. I always wanted to do a first-contact story where the aliens don’t look like humans with some forehead bumps and are not comparable with our atmosphere.

…how he knows if a story is good:

When I’m working on an idea, I work on the science and research first. That’s always my favorite part, anyway. But when it’s come to the actual writing, I don’t really know whether or not the book is going to suck until I’ve written a few chapters and got a feeling of how the characters are developing and how the story flows.

I’m in the very early stages of my next book now and I can’t guarantee if that is what I’m going to publish. I’m certainly having fun with the research. I got a good premise, and I got some cool made-up physics for the story. I got somewhat nuanced characters, which I’m always trying to do because the character’s depth and complexity are what I’m worst at.

…his characters:

Mark Watney is not a deep character. He was a likable character, and people enjoyed spending time with him, but he didn’t have any depth. For example, you know nothing about him. When you read the book, at the end, all you know is that he is smart, he is snarky, and he didn’t want to die. But that’s it; you know nothing about his history.

Mark Watney is my personality with the bad stuff removed. He is all the aspects of myself that I like, and none of the stuff I don’t like. And of the stuff I liked, it’s magnified. […]

In my second book, “Artemis”, I tried to put more of that in. So, I went out of my way to add depths and complexity to Jazz. She is more like the real me when I was her age, at 26. The realistic flaws that I had at her age.

…his research process:

It looks like google. Scientific information is very easy to find online. It is publicly shared. The people who created it are proud to talk about it, especially in the space industry. I happen to be in a field where the stuff I need is very well documented online.

…the accuracy of his science:

I like to delve into science and try to make things as scientifically possible. I do enough research to make the book internally consistent. […] I understand enough of the basics that I can learn what I need to learn to get the answer.

I got a lot of people pointing out flaws and errors in my books, and I always tell them to bring it on. […] I love that. Especially when I hear some nerd checked all the other stuff, too, and it passed muster. […]

The beginning of “The Martian” simply could not happen. […] I knew that at the time I wrote it. But first, I figured, I’m just writing a story that I’m posting on my website. No one will ever care or double-check this. And second, it was a person versus nature story-and I wanted nature to get the first punch.

I had another idea. Instead of it being a storm, it could have been that they were doing an engine test, and something goes wrong, and all hell breaks loose. And either they launch the ship now or lose it. But, again, I decided it was a person versus nature, and I wanted nature to proactively get the first hit it. Only much later, after the book had been made into a movie, and it had become popular and I got to go to NASA, and people said, ‘You know, Mars has lightning’.

Profile:

Andy Weir built a two-decade career as a software engineer until the success of his 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.