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- [00:00]
A
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Inklings Book Club podcast. My name is Jack Edwards, and today
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we are meeting one of my heroes.
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This is the second installment of our Project Hail Mary extravaganza. You know where this is going. We've already met Ryan Gosling, Phil Lord, and Chris Miller. Today we are meeting Andy Weir, the king of sci fi. Come on. Andy Weir's first novel, the Martian, follows Mark Watney, an astronaut mistakenly presumed dead and abandoned on Mars by his crew during a dust storm. Of course, it was made into a major motion picture starring Matt Damon. Stranded with limited supplies, he uses his skills in botany and engineering to survive while NASA tried to conduct a very dangerous rescue mission to get him back home. In that book, the world fell in love with Andy Weir's writing, and he followed that with another novel called Artemis. In Artemis, we follow a lady called Jaz, who is living in the first city on the moon. And then came Project Hail Mary. And Project Hail Mary, I think, has been the gateway for many people, myself included, into science fiction. We follow science teacher Ryland Grace as he wakes up on a spaceship with no recollection of how or why he is there. As his memory slowly returns, he discovers he is the last surviving person on a mission to to space to understand a substance called astrophage. Astrophage is causing the sun to die out, and scientists have discovered a distant planet that might hold the key to destroying it. Ryland Grace has to use his scientific training to finish the mission entirely alone, but he then meets an unlikely ally in space. Project Hail Mary then develops into a story of friendship, of communication, of understanding, but also personal resilience. It is both laugh out loud funny and cry your eyes out heartbreaking. It is truly a modern sci fi classic, but also just a modern classic in general. It's a fan favorite and I know so many of us were delighted to find out that it was being adapted into a film. In Tuesday's episode, we met with the team behind that film, producer and star Ryan Gosling, who of course plays Ryland Grace and brings him to life in such an excellent way. And of course, the genius for filmmaking
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duo behind the film, Lord and Miller.
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But this is a book podcast and so of course, we needed to speak to the author himself, Andy Weir. So please enjoy this episode as much
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as I enjoyed recording it. Andy Weir, welcome to the Inklings Book Club.
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C
Hello.
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A
Now, tell me when it came to crafting Project Mail.
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Oh, dear.
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C
Project Mail.
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Project Mail.
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Harry, we've got off to a terrible start.
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C
Project Harry Mail.
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B
Let's Go with that again.
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C
Start again.
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When it came to first crafting Project
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Hail Mary, what came to you first? The voice?
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The crisis? The dynamic? The setting, or something else entirely?
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The fuel. So, like, the first, the kind of kernel of the story was I wanted to know, like I wanted to make a story about what happens if humanity right now, not in some distant, vague future, but right now, had the technology to have mass conversion based fuel. And so then that's where everything started from. And then astrophage was the MacGuffin that enabled that. And then I went through a lot of revisions on how we could acquire it. Didn't make sense for us to invent it. I was like, what if we find a crashed alien spacecraft? Well, then all the other tech on the alien spacecraft would be way more interesting, so no good. What if we acquire some fuel and the rest of the spacecraft, you know, it crashed like 50 million years ago, and so it's all rotted away. I'm like, okay, then we use the fuel and then we're done. How do we make more? Like, well, what if the fuel can make more fuel? What if you, like, if you. It's a reversible reaction, so if you shine light at it, it makes more of itself. And I'm like, well, that sounds like life, right? Something that absorbs energy and makes copies of itself. Sounds like life. I'm like, okay, so what if it's just an alien microbe that does this? Yay. And so I'm like, okay, that explains how they got it. Now I can start having them colonize Mars and Venus and all this stuff like that. And just, oh, as a side note, they'd have to make sure none of that crap got on our sun. That'd be catastrophic. And I'm like, okay, no, back it up.
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That's the story. Yeah, there's the story.
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A
Okay. And so then, of course, we have
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this incredible central protagonist, Ryland Grace.
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How does his voice come to you in those early stages?
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What did that look like to discover Ryland?
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C
Well, so Ryland was the first main character that I ever made that wasn't just based on my own personality.
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B
Right.
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C
Like, Mark is. Mark Watney is just me with all my good traits magnified and all my bad traits erased. Right.
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I do, honestly.
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C
Yeah, that's what he is. And then Jazz Bashara from Artemis is like a more realistic depiction of me the way I was when I was 26, making. Which is how old she is in Artemis. Like, theoretically smart, but making really bad life decisions. Most of the bad Things that happen in my life are of my own doing and so on. So even though, yeah, you see a 26 year old Saudi woman who grew up on the moon and you think this guy. But no, she really is a self insertion character. And then finally we come to grace and I'm like, I'm trying to grow as a writer. I want to make a character that's not just me. So I started with some core traits to him. He's, he's scared, he's pathologically averse to conflict. He's, you know, he's, but he's, he's maybe even naive, but kind and optimistic. And, and these are to a point that it's like a character flaw. Because what I learned from Artemis is if you make a really flawed character, the reader will have a hard time rooting for them. But if you make a character who is slightly flawed in ways that maybe we're all flawed, then I think we've all felt that way before, like overwhelmed, feeling unqualified and feeling scared. Like we all understand that feeling. And so that's kind of the core of what I was putting together for Ryland.
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And I think one of the reasons
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that so many of us have fallen in love with Project Hail Mary is
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that it feels like a very optimistic
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way of looking at the future. Kind of gives us hope. Right.
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So I wanted to ask you, do you think that optimism is something that
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you have to choose every day or does it come to you quite innately?
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It is my natural state of being. I'm a very optimistic person when it comes to, to humanity. I can be pretty pessimistic when it comes to like my own life and oh, this probably won't work out. Oh, it's probably going to rain tomorrow. But like, when it comes to basically I have a much higher opinion than most of humanity as a whole. I think we're pretty awesome. And it's easy to lose sight of that when you're watching the news and you're seeing like people doing bad stuff to each other. But I always try to remind folks that like the reason it's on the news is because it's newsworthy. It's unusual for people to be bad to each other. It is so overwhelmingly normal for people to be good to each other that that doesn't make the news. So if somebody slips on a street corner, breaks their leg, then like seven total strangers who don't know him or each other will like get him to a safe spot. They'll say like, hey, can we get you some water? We'll call the paramedics. Is there any family we can call? Anything else I can do? Can we make you a little more comfortable? Like, that's just default basic human behavior, and that won't make the news.
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Or like natural propensity towards goodness?
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We have an inherent desire, an instinct, literally an instinct to care about other humans and have empathy toward them. That's, like, built in. There's a reason it's found in every single culture, everywhere. It's not. It's not like every civilization came up with that on their own. That's a natural instinct.
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Yeah.
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And I think that's beautiful.
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I do, too. Talk to me about the structure of
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this book, because, of course, Ryland Grace
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is a sort of reluctant hero. He has amnesia. We are discovering who he is as a person almost alongside him through flashbacks. So I wondered, in terms of crafting the novel and that structure, did you ever consider a linear structure where we meet him first and then he's in space? Or did that image of him waking
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up in the spaceship always feel like the perfect starting point?
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C
Well, it did. So here's the main problem I ran into. First off, I hate flashbacks. I always tell authors never use flashbacks. You should never do that. Just tell your story in the order that it happens. But also the thing to remember is I'm a huge hypocrite, so I use tons of flashbacks in this story. So my problem was this. If you tell Project Hail Mary linearly, then you get all these interesting characters in the first third of the story, and then you will never see them again, and you won't meet Rocky until way later in the book. And so then the really interesting, meaty part of the book would not come until way later. So I decided the amnesia and the waking up on the ship and stuff like that serves as a framing device for the flashbacks. And I figured I had to have some come to Jesus moments on flashbacks. I was like, okay, well, why do I hate flashbacks so much? Because I think the only way I can tell this story is with flashbacks. That way, the characters from earlier are present throughout the whole book, Right? And I was thinking, what I don't like about flashbacks is it's like sometimes a flashback is like you're out playing with your friends, you're having a good time, and your mom calls you into the house to do the dishes. It's like you've got some guy who's, like, hanging off the edge of a cliff and he's about to die and stuff like that. And then we have a flashback to how he met his wife. I'm like, I don't care about his wife. I want to know if he's going to fall off that cliff and die. So the trick is, as long as the flashbacks are themselves interesting. And you're like, oh, good. Now here we get to. And I think one thing that readers really respond to or viewers, in the case of a movie is an unfolding mystery. Like, I want to know why. I want to know what's going on. And so I did the structure such that the flashbacks were chunks of memory explaining what's. You know, explaining memories of the past to help him explain what's going on in the present. And so that's why I structured it that way, because I had to, or it would be a really weird narrative, like, trajectory where all these characters are just there for the first act. You don't get to the really interesting parts of the story until way late in the book, blah, blah, blah. And then I was extremely consciously aware of why I hate flashbacks. And so I tried to make it so that I would make flashbacks that I, as a reader, would not hate.
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B
Okay, so the advice there is sometimes don't take your own advice.
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C
Oh, yeah. I mean, like I said, I always say don't do flashbacks. But I guess what it is, if you're digging a little deeper, is flashbacks are often a lazy method of injecting exposition. And it's like I want the viewers to know. Like, it's like I want to start with the most exciting part of the story, but I also need to convey boring information to the reader, too. So I'm going to start right away with the interesting stuff, and then I'll make them do their homework. And I don't want to do my homework.
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A
It's interesting hearing you talk about seeming to have had all of the outline
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of the narrative plotted out like you had the characters, you knew the setting.
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So do you kind of have all of that laid out in your head
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before you even put words on the page and start writing the actual novel?
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C
The major beats I have, so I'm a plotter, not a pantser, as they say, but just the major beats. Like, I don't have in great detail everything that's gonna. Like, this is a big turning point, like three or four major turning points in the story. And then I just pants my way from point to point. And then sometimes I'll veer wildly off course and say, like, okay, this is way more interesting. So I'm going to rework those big Beats. But for Project Hail Mary, I did know. I will say this. I knew what the final scene was going to be before I wrote the first words.
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Wow.
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C
Yeah.
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I knew.
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This is the ending that I wanted.
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Wow. I wanted to know what lessons you took with you from writing the Martian and Artemis and your various short stories.
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What were you taking with you from your experience that aided this process and
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made Project Hail Mary perhaps easier to write?
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Well, I think the biggest one is, again, I consider my biggest. The thing that I need to work on the most is character depth, complexity. I think I'm pretty good at coming up with interesting plots. I'm pretty strong on the science, and that's the.
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Definitely strong on science.
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C
Right. But that's the method I choose for storytelling. So, of course, I'm gonna go play to my own strengths. Right. But I do feel like I have a lot to learn about making good, compelling, interesting, deep, complicated characters. And so my journey, I guess, has been from Mark Watney, who had no personality, no character at all. Like, he's a likable guy. He's kind of funny and stuff like that. He doesn't undergo any change in the book. He's the same at the end as he is at the beginning. And at the end of the whole book, you don't know anything about him other than he didn't want to die. And he's kind of smart and funny. That's it. That's barely a character. Like, Mark Watney was a mechanism by which the plot happens. So then with Artemis, I said, okay, I'm gonna make a more nuanced and flawed character with Jazz. But then what I learned from that was a lot of people were turned off by Jazz because it's hard to root for somebody who is so much the agent of their own problems. I made her too flawed. And so I'm like, okay, flawed is good, but it has to be somebody that the reader empathizes with the whole way through the book. So the flaws have to be things that don't make you dislike the person. It's like a serial killer is flawed, but you're probably not gonna like him unless it's Dexter, you know? But a guy who's just, like, really, really scared and feeling overwhelmed and unqualified. That's.
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We can root for him.
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We can understand that. We can root for him.
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Now, listen, I have some questions for
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members of the Inklings Book Club. We have been obsessed with this book for many, many years, and so we're thrilled to see it.
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C
Good.
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Being at the heart of cultural comedy. Have you seen the film right now? I have seen the film. We'll get to that.
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Of course.
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Are you kidding me?
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And I knew what was going to happen.
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C
Yeah.
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Because I read the book.
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Good. That's what I ask everybody. I'm like, did you cry?
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Oh, yeah.
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Did you cry?
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Trust me.
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And I think the words that everyone was saying as they were leaving the cinema were instant classic.
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C
Instant classic.
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So I think we're, as readers, we're more than satisfied.
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C
Yeah, it's a very good adaptation.
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It's a great adaptation.
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A
Now, Leah from the book club wanted me to ask you about your interest in linguistics, because, of course, you've created words in this book, like astrophage, like the Petrova line, things like that. So how do you create those terms?
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And do you use word etymology to concoct something that actually could exist in the real world?
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Well, I mean, she's right. I really. You know what's funny is I love coming up with terms like astrophage or in Artemis zappo. You know, like, I spent a long time working up a. Zappo stands for zero attenuation fiber optic. But I spent a lot of time coming up with different ways to describe that material, such that it would end up with a cool sounding acronym. And to be fair, that's what people do in real life too, anyway. I mean. Yeah. Especially in the space industry. They'll always come up with, like, wacky name. Yeah. Well, they'll come up with scientific descriptors that, when acronymed, are cool words, you
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know, are fun to say.
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Yeah. Or fun to say. Or apropos of the. Of the mission, it's doing or just
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make you sound really cool when you say it. And important.
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And so astrophage sounds cool.
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It does sound cool.
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It has astro, which everybody loves that. That word.
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Word.
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C
And it's. And it's accurate, although not quite accurate. It's. I mean, strictly speaking, it would mean star eater. And they're not eating the stars, they just live there.
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Yeah.
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They're not eating the stars any more than algae is eating the ocean. It just lives there. But still, it's an awesome word. I mean, what would be the. If you switch to. Let's see, astrophage is. I think. Is that Latin roots?
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I guess.
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So if you switch to Greek or. I've got it. I've gone backwards. If you switch between Greek and Latin roots, that would be stellivores, which is
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kind of cool, but love that.
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Yeah. Stellivore.
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Yeah.
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You shouldn't Say that on podcasts. You should keep that one for yourself.
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C
But it's the same thing.
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A star eater, maybe another.
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Another life form somewhere far away, discovers astrophage as well. And that's what they call it.
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Or what is it? The. The old joke polyamory is wrong. It should be multi amory or polyphilia. You shouldn't mix Greek and Latin roots.
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You shouldn't be mixing these things.
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A
A lot of people are also intrigued by the science that you crafted and how much creative liberty you allow yourself
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and how much needs to be scientifically confirmed. Like, if an actual astronomer was reading this, they would also be on board. So where do you get the line?
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Yeah, so I need some MacGuffins once in a while. And in the case of Project Hail Mary, I'm proud to say you have to dig down to the quantum level before you find the MacGuffin.
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Okay.
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And that is that astrophage cell membranes can contain neutrinos, and that astrophage can create and control neutrinos. Neutrinos. There's absolutely no explanation for how that could happen. Neutrinos pass clean through the planet Earth. Like, they just. They do not interact with matter very much at all. You have 100 trillion neutrinos passing through you every second right now.
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Wow.
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And in the middle of the night, you also have 100 trillion neutrinos passing through you every second because the Earth doesn't block them.
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Right.
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They're coming from the sun, and the Earth doesn't block them.
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Okay, so astrophage is, like a bit of an anomaly here.
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C
Yeah, well, it's made up. Right. And so that's the MacGuffin. But everything else in the story is based on real science or slight caveat, science as we knew it at the time that I was writing the book, since writing the book. So, like 40 Eridani AB, which is the planet arid Rocky's homeworld. I based that on a real exoplanet.
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Okay.
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And the same with Adrian is a real exoplanet. Tau Ceti e. Since writing the book, both of those exoplanets have been proven to not exist.
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They were brilliant. Okay.
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C
They were believed to exist at the time, Rocky. I know, I'm sorry. They were believed to exist at the time, but since then, we've gotten better technology, and the exoplanet hunters will be like, oops, yeah, we jumped the gun on these. A bunch of these are not actually there.
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It exists to me, alas.
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Yeah.
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And so it's just like in The Martian, where he has to make water through all these convoluted means when it turns out, because at the time I wrote it, people believed that Mars was completely arid. There was maybe some water at the caps, and that's it. But then curiosity landed long after I wrote the book, scooped up some dirt and said, like, hey, there's a lot of water in here. And it turns out, like, for every cubic meter of Martian soil, there's like, 35 liters of water ice in it. So all Mark had to do was bring soil in and, like, heat it up. But every book is a product of its time, so I'm not gonna, like, spend my life going back and updating and correcting things, you know?
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Well, Richard wanted to know, have you
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ever had to cut a scientifically accurate idea? Because it was just slowing the pace of the story down.
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Like, are there times when you want
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to almost over explain? To say, actually, guys, the science here works. The science here makes sense. But in terms of pacing, it doesn't really make sense to do that.
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C
Yeah, pacing or storytelling. Yeah. There have been cases, like in the Martian, there was a few cases where I thought of like, ooh, this could happen. And then I'm like, that would kill. I cannot think of a way that he would survive that. So I'm going to have that not happen. Another one is sometimes it's just tangentially interesting stuff that I have to leave out because to a reader's point of view, it would come completely out of left field. So when I was riding the Martian, I had the date of everything because of the orbital trajectories for when, of how Hermes works. I've done all those accurately, as best I could. And so that means there was a specific launch window. And I could tell you every soul. I could tell you the real calendar date. I had it in a spreadsheet that, you know, and it turned out, just by sheer coincidence, that the day they make kind of first contact with Mark, when they're at JPL using Pathfinder to communicate and stuff like that happened to be February 14th. So it was Valentine's Day. And I was thinking of mentioning that in passing, because I just looked. I'm like, oh, it happens to be Valentine's Day. And somebody's like, I can't believe we're all at work on Valentine's Day. It's like, yeah, like, any of you nerds have girlfriends, you know, or something like that.
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B
But then I thought, like, you guys are free.
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C
Yeah, yeah, I know you're free. But then I was like, to a reader, that's just like, what the hell is that? That was just like some random.
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A
Yeah. Random law.
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C
Random thing that he just decided why it has no meaning to the scene. It has no purpose for being here. And I could go, but the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet actually. True.
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B
Yeah.
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C
Doesn't matter.
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B
Yeah. So you got this gimmick that he tried to do.
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You're like, it's real.
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C
Why is that there? Yeah. So I had to leave it out.
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B
Well, listen, we briefly mentioned Rocky.
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We have to.
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To talk in more detail about Roth, everyone's favorite character. Such a special character. Not just a favorite character in this book, but maybe of all time.
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C
You know, he is quite beloved.
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I wanted to ask you about crafting
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that first scene where this scary space monster, and I quote, meets a leaky space blob.
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A
Tell me about, you know, how that formulated in your head, how that calcified
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B
in your head, what it would look like when these two beings met.
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C
Well, that was the most fun part of writing the book, was I was like. I was having a. I was having a ball. Yeah. And I was just like. I had defined Ryland's personality, and although the reader didn't know it, I defined Rocky's personality so I could just press play and see what happens. And that. That was a lot of fun to write. They're both logical, scientifically minded people, and so. And they're both have the same objective to figure out how to talk to this alien. And so, yeah, it came together kind of very naturally. It just. It's one of those things where I don't often run into writers who are better at coming up with characters run into this a lot where they barely have to think about it. They've defined the characters so well. They. They can just say, like, well, this is what this character would say. This is what this character. And I can just run this forward and play it out and it's do this forever. Yeah, it's obvious to me. But I don't run into that a lot because I have issues making strong, complicated characters. So in this case, I had that, and it was really nice. I could just run it forward.
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And I think it's been so special
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for so many of us to witness because we are in a time where we're thinking about how people from different
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backgrounds can find common ground and they can communicate and they can understand each other and why we should seek to
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understand each other because it can be such a fulfilling experience. So I'm so grateful to get to see that depicted in the book and now on the screen too.
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C
I had an idea once for like a science fiction, so I didn't pursue it. But like aliens come by, you know, very, very advanced aliens come by and they're very benevolent and they're like, they're real cool aliens. And they, they've learned, they, they have seen many planets at our stage of development, you know, and they've learned that the best thing is just always they know this and we haven't figured it out yet, that it's always about communication. So they just like plop this device down on Earth and leave. And what it does is able to understand everyone else's language. So there's like no language barriers on Earth at all anymore.
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A
Yeah.
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C
And that like leads kind of to world peace pretty quickly. And it's like these aliens have figured this out by watching this on planet after planet. They're like, yeah, all we have to do is drop down this translation thing and be on our way and they'll be in good shape. And it's like they're almost like nature conservationists. They're like, we want to do minimal amount of damage here, but we've got to protect the local population, keep them from hurting themselves. So drop down this universal translator device and they'll be fine from then on.
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B
That will solve some issues.
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C
It was an interesting story idea, but there's no conflict. There's no, in fact, there's the opposite of conflict. So it's like, how would that be made into an interesting story? It's a neat concept, but that's one of those things that ends up in my scrapyard of ideas later on maybe. I'm like, if I need something like
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A
that, I'm like, well.
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B
Yates wanted to know what was the first element of eridion biology or culture that you came up with?
- [24:31]
C
Well, the first element of Iridian biology was that I came up with was that they would have to be kind of a self contained biosphere inside of their bodies. Because arid's atmosphere is all ammonia. There is no free oxygen. So they don't have an oxygen carbon dioxide exchange mechanism like our biosphere does where you and me exhale carbon dioxide. And that plant, if it's real, gives off.
- [24:55]
B
I don't think that plant is going to be doing a lot for us.
- [24:58]
C
Does nothing. But other plants are oceanic algae. Actually that one's very plastic. Yeah. Oceanic algae is where most of it comes from.
- [25:05]
B
Yeah.
- [25:06]
C
And is, you know, makes the oxygen. The atmosphere of arid is not part of that transaction because it's ammonia and there's no free oxygen. So the inside of the of their body has to be able to do both functions. So they have plant like cells inside their body that for producing oxygen and to make that cycle go back and forth. As long as they're bringing energy in via food, you can do that. They're basically a biosphere. So I would say that was the first thing that I defined about them.
- [25:33]
A
I think from speaking to you. It's so interesting and I think probably
- [25:37]
B
reassuring to people listening or watching, who are also aspiring writers, to know the
- [25:45]
A
depth of how much you should know about your characters in your world. And some of that may not enter the actual prose of the text.
- [25:51]
C
Most of it doesn't mean, but it's
- [25:53]
A
there in your brain.
- [25:54]
C
Anyone who's interested can google around and find a document I've posted online of Iridian biology. It goes into great detail of exactly how Iridian bodies work. And, and so if anybody wants to see it, it's there. But like almost none of that made it into the book. I mean just obviously the morphology and some of the aspects of how they work. But you know, Iridians have a natural sense of magnetism. They know which they, they can sense magnetic fields with, you know, the organs inside their bodies. And because their homeworld has a magnetic field about 25 times as stronger than Earth's magnetic field. So it's much easier to evolve a compass. So they have when they're at home, when they're on their own planet, they all know what compass direction they're facing at all times.
- [26:38]
A
It's interesting because you obviously have all
- [26:40]
B
of this expansion of the world. I wondered could we ever see an expansion of the world in novel form? Do you think you would ever write a secret sequel?
- [26:48]
C
Of course, of course. This is the first. Well, no, it's not the first. The Martian can't be sequeled. Artemis. I wanted to make a whole setting where lots of stories take place. And I still have stories, ideas for that. But yeah, this it set up that there's a panspermia event that seeded Earth and arid with life. Life evolved on planet Adrian. So any of the nearby stars are also suspects for having life, maybe intelligent life. I can certainly expand out from there and I've had some ideas, but I don't want to run with anything until I've got something really cool. And I don't have anything really cool yet.
- [27:25]
B
Okay.
- [27:26]
C
So my next book, the one I'm working on now, is another science fiction story. But it's standalone, it's not a sequel.
- [27:32]
B
Okay.
- [27:32]
A
I wanted to ask you, what is
- [27:34]
B
your Mount Rushmore of sci fi authors?
- [27:37]
C
Oh, well, three of them are very easy. Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert Heinlein.
- [27:43]
B
Okay.
- [27:43]
C
Those are my holy trinity.
- [27:44]
A
Well, that leaves a spot for you.
- [27:46]
C
That leaves no.
- [27:48]
A
So that's perfect.
- [27:49]
C
So I need a fourth, I would say. Although lesser known, I really like his stuff as Clifford Simak.
- [27:55]
B
Okay.
- [27:57]
C
I really liked one of his books called the Werewolf Principle. It affected my writing a lot. It's a really good book.
- [28:03]
B
Okay, that's good to know. Now we've got some extra racks as well. Well, we wait for the new novel. We've got somewhere to go as well. In the meantime, Hayley wanted me to ask you that.
- [28:13]
A
Project Hail Mary has appealed to sci fi lovers, but also people who are
- [28:19]
B
not that familiar with the genre.
- [28:21]
A
For a lot of people, myself included, this has been a real entry point to the genre of science fiction.
- [28:27]
B
And I think that the film will
- [28:29]
A
continue on that mission, bringing even more people into this world. So I wanted to ask you, you know, is that something that you do intentionally?
- [28:37]
B
Are you consciously making sure that what you write is accessible to people who
- [28:44]
A
maybe aren't used to reading this amount of science and. And evidence in their novels?
- [28:49]
B
Or is this just a happy coincidence that this story of friendship and communication has resonated so widely?
- [28:56]
C
I would say the latter. I mean, I don't go out of my way. I'm not sitting there at my computer thinking, okay, I need to make sure this is accessible to all audiences. Yeah, I just write a story that I would like to read, and I'm into the science. And my particular style of writing is to stay as accurate to science as as possible. When I'm expositioning the science, I try to only exposition enough for the reader to understand the plot. They don't need to pass a test later. They just need to understand why this matters or why he can do this or why he can't do that or whatever. But I think the reason it ends up resonating with people is because, well, in the case of Project Hairline Mary, it's a story about friendship. It's not a story about science. Science is all over the place in it. But it's a story about friendship. And the Martian is a story about survival. And Artemis is a story about a woman trying to pull herself up out of poverty, like, so. None of these things are explicitly built around science. And just to expand even further than you asked me to, I've never considered science fiction to be a genre.
- [29:54]
B
Okay.
- [29:54]
C
I consider it to be a setting.
- [29:56]
B
Ooh, I like that.
- [29:57]
C
Yeah. You can have a sci fi romance, you can have a sci fi action. You can have a sci fi drama, you can have a sci fi comedy. So saying science fiction isn't like saying, you know, drama. Saying science fiction is like saying Chicago. It's like, all of those things could take place in Chicago or they could all take place in space. So it's more of a setting than a genre.
- [30:20]
A
I really like that.
- [30:21]
C
Thanks.
- [30:21]
B
I think I'm carrying that going forward, so thank you.
- [30:24]
A
I wanted to ask you, did you write the screenplay and the novel at
- [30:29]
B
the same time or did one come. Did the screenplay come later?
- [30:34]
C
I did not write the screenplay.
- [30:35]
B
Okay.
- [30:35]
C
Drew Goddard wrote the screenplay. He also adapted the Martian.
- [30:38]
B
Right. Okay. So team effort.
- [30:40]
C
Very talented. Yeah. Screenwriting is an entirely different animal to prose. And I have tried my hand at it a few times. I've still got a lot to learn about it. I do not consider myself a Hollywood tier level screenwriter yet.
- [30:59]
B
Work in progress.
- [31:00]
C
A work in progress. Screenplays are very constrained. There's so little space and room to tell the story. It's very claustrophobic for me as a novelist. You have an infinite canvas. You're like, it's okay. People don't mind if it's 100 pages longer than my previous novel, nobody cares. But if a movie's four hours long, we're grateful.
- [31:15]
B
We're like, give us more. We want all of it.
- [31:17]
C
If a movie's four hours long, people care, you know, so you've got, like, limited space to tell a story. So it's an entirely different discipline.
- [31:24]
A
Okay. So when you have a consistent collaborator like that, obviously there's a lot of trust involved.
- [31:29]
C
Oh, yeah.
- [31:29]
A
And so at what stage in your writing process, when you've got this new
- [31:34]
B
idea, you know, you're sitting with something special, it's going to become a novel.
- [31:37]
A
At what point do you start to share that with a collaborator who can
- [31:41]
B
then start to adapt to a screenplay?
- [31:42]
C
Not until, like, I mean, I had completely finished the book before Drew ever read it. And I don't bother, like, so in the filmmaking business, it's like, okay, first we have like, you know, a studio has to buy the rights, and then enough interest has to come from either, you know, producers, directors, or talent to be, like, interested to make it worth making a screenplay for it. Then and only then do you get a screenwriter to make a screenplay for it. So, like, Drew didn't write the Screenplay until after, like, Ryan was already aboard. Chris and Phil were already set to direct. We already had Amy as the. One of our main producers and Aditya Sood. So we had all that set up before we even considered a screenplay. And then we wanted Drew because he did such a good job with the Martian, and we didn't have a number two on our list, so we said, we want Drew.
- [32:38]
B
Hey, Drew.
- [32:39]
C
Hey, Drew. Here's the manuscript, and he reads it and he's like, I love it. I'd love to work on this, but I'm swamped. And there's. I can't. I don't want to promise something I can't deliver, and I just do not have the time to work on this. I'm sorry. And we said, when will you have enough time? He's like, not for several months. And we're like, we'll wait.
- [32:57]
B
We'll wait on you. We're on your timeline.
- [32:59]
C
We held up the entire production to wait until Dru was available to write the screenplay because we wanted to do it right. And Drew does it right.
- [33:07]
B
Oh, he did it right. Yeah, you did it right. I mean, we are happy as readers and lovers of this book. We're so satisfied, and I cannot wait to see what you're up to next. Thank you for all of these insights, too. It's been so special for me to get to learn more about one of my favorite books ever.
- [33:23]
C
So thanks so much.
- [33:23]
A
Thank you very, very much for listening to this episode of the Inklings Book Club podcast. Thank you to Andy Weir for taking time out of his absolutely rammed schedule at the moment to meet with me and have this moment with me. It was unbelievably special. I just.
- [33:38]
B
I can't believe this happened.
- [33:39]
A
If you would like to be part of the Inklings Book Club, you can. You can join us over on Instagram at Inklings. Of course, go check out our previous episode as well with Ryan Gosling and Lord and Miller, and you can join the book club group chat over on the Fable Book Club app. Just search Fable on the App Store and then Inklings Book Club. Once you're in the app, come and join this wonderful community. Please do come and introduce yourself. We would love to have you. I have new episodes of the Inklings Book Club podcast every Tuesday and every Friday. So if you're interested, please do subscribe. Turn on the notification bell so you never miss an episode. And we will be back when you. Honestly, guys, we are meeting so many people I admire. It is unbelievable. I'm pinching myself every single day. But on Tuesday next week, I will be joined by Susie Dent.
- [34:27]
B
I love her so much. Okay, I'll see you in the next episode.
- [34:30]
A
All the best. Bye. Bye.