Andy Weir on Writing the Hit Book Behind the Movie ‘Project Hail Mary’

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Book Review — Andy Weir on Writing the Hit Book Behind the Movie ‘Project Hail Mary’

Podcast: The Book Review, The New York Times
Host: Gilbert Cruz
Guest: Andy Weir
Episode Date: March 20, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, host Gilbert Cruz sits down with bestselling science fiction author Andy Weir to discuss his writing process, character development, experiences with fan feedback, the highs and lows following his blockbuster debut "The Martian," and the journey behind his latest novel and film adaptation, "Project Hail Mary." The conversation explores creativity, resilience, science in storytelling, and Weir’s personal journey as a writer.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Opening and the Art of Keeping Readers Engaged

(00:31-01:51)

• Weir's Approach to Editing:
  • He reads with the mindset of a sleepy reader, aiming to write so there is never a "put the book down" paragraph:

    "I have to get rid of that paragraph, right? I want to keep you up all night." — Andy Weir (00:31)

• On Creating Mystery:
  • Opening novels with unknowns piques curiosity and rewards readers with reveals along the way.

    "If you start with a bunch of unknowns and make the reader curious and you slowly answer those questions, the reader... gets that satisfaction..." — Andy Weir (01:51)

On Humor, Exposition, and Character

(02:17-06:42)

• Making Science Accessible:
  • Humor is the tool to make explanations enjoyable; it's Weir's default voice.

    "Readers will forgive you any amount of exposition if you make them laugh while you're doing it." — Andy Weir (02:17)

• Characters as Reflections:
  • Mark Watney (The Martian) is an idealized version of himself; Jazz (Artemis) was "real Weir" with all his flaws.
  • Ryland Grace (Project Hail Mary) is his first character "from whole cloth," designed to be flawed but ultimately likable.
  • On Artemis:

    "I made the character a little too unlikable... I made her too immature... Maybe I should have just made her 15." — Andy Weir (07:33)

Second Novel Pressure & Learning from Criticism

(06:42-11:05)

• Second Book Syndrome:

  "You have your whole life to make your first album, then you have a year to make your second." — (paraphrased by Andy Weir, 07:02)

• On Navigating Criticism and Fan Feedback:
  • Pays more attention to reader reviews than professional critics—especially Amazon reviews—to make his work more popular and accessible.

    "There are two kinds of writers. The ones who admit they read all the reviews and the ones who don't admit that they read all the reviews. But I read them all..." — Andy Weir (08:52)

  • Finds patterns in critiques, discerns between “unrealistic character” vs. “unlikable character.”

Engineering Mindset and Writing

(11:05-12:43)

• Problem-Solving Mentality:
  • Weir’s coding/engineering background influences his plotting—he treats narrative issues like bugs in a program.

    "I kind of see [editorial notes] as like bug reports." — Andy Weir (12:52)

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Audience Q&A and Personal Background

Balancing Writing with a Day Job

(15:08-16:33)

• Advice for Aspiring Writers:
  • Time for writing came from a lack of social distractions.
  • Unsure how anyone with a family maintains a creative life alongside a full-time job.

Making Science Engaging

(16:33-18:23)

• Accessible Science:
  • Prioritizes just enough science for the plot—not exhaustive detail.
  • "About 5% of research ends up in the novel; the rest is just for reference."

Family, Upbringing, and Literary Influences

(18:23-23:21)

• Family Background:
  • Father: Physicist and sci-fi enthusiast; Mother: Electrical engineer by trade, passionate about literature.
  • Exposed to the classics of science fiction in youth; credits Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke ("my Holy Trinity") as formative influences.

    "Those boomer era sci-fi books had a real positive view of the future... I tend to write positive, feel-good stories." — Andy Weir (21:06)

  • Push back against dystopian sci-fi trends:

    "All the dystopian science fiction... is based off of the hidden assumption that where we are living right now, this moment is the best that humanity will ever be." — Andy Weir (22:34)

On Personal Isolation and Its Impact on Writing

(23:43-25:36)

• Loneliness as a Theme:
  • Weir had a lonely, restless childhood and regularly moved, influencing the theme of isolation in his novels.

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The Movie Adaptation & Creation of "Rocky"

(27:30-34:49)

• Involvement in the Film:
  • As a producer for Project Hail Mary, Weir had meaningful input:

    "When I look at Project Hail Mary, I think we did a really good job on this." — Andy Weir (27:38)

  • Approved Ryan Gosling’s casting as lead.
• The Alien "Rocky":
  • Weir lacks a visual imagination (Aphantasia); had no strict idea of what Rocky looked like.

    "When I saw the puppet... oh, okay, cool, so that's what Rocky looks like." — Andy Weir (29:56)

  • Built Rocky’s biology logically from planetary conditions, aiming for "truly alien," not a "guy in a suit."

    "The most important thing to me... was that it be truly alien. I didn't want it to be like a space opera alien..." — Andy Weir (31:46)

  • Left the door open for future stories in the Project Hail Mary universe but hasn’t found a suitable sequel concept yet.

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Books, Reading, & Literary Preferences

(34:49-39:42)

• Recent & Favorite Reads:
  • Recent favorite: Paradox Inc. by Forest Brazil.
  • Top three books to bring to Mars (from his "Holy Trinity"):
    • I, Robot (Asimov)
    • Tunnel in the Sky (Heinlein)
    • Rendezvous with Rama (Clarke)
• Hidden Gem Recommendation:
  • The Werewolf Principle by Clifford Simak

    "Wouldn’t it be neat to just always have like people with you? Wouldn’t it be nice to just never be alone?" — Andy Weir (38:33)

• Books He’s "Embarrassed" Not to Have Read:
  • Still hasn’t read Dune by Frank Herbert, despite the recent film adaptations.

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Spoiler Segment: The Ending of Project Hail Mary

(39:45-42:00)

• Why Ryland Grace Stays:
  • Weir knew the ending before writing; it reflects Ryland’s love for teaching and friendship with Rocky, plus the lack of ties left on Earth.

    "He doesn't really have anything to go back to, but he's got his best friend here and a job that he loves. Why would he leave?" — Andy Weir (41:26)

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Memorable Quotes

• On reading reviews:

  "There are two kinds of writers. The ones who admit they read all the reviews and the ones who don't admit that they read all the reviews." — Andy Weir (08:52)

• On science fiction’s shift:

  "Science fiction has become this gloomy, dour, like, totally miseryscape... But I just don't see it. Because when I look at the march of history... look backward and see how much uphill we've come." — Andy Weir (21:06-22:34)

• On his vision for aliens:

  "I just don't believe that an alien species would be comfortable in our environment or vice versa... If you swap the locations of a camel and a shark, they're both going to die." — Andy Weir (31:46)

• On the importance of likable protagonists:

  "If a reader kind of stops rooting for your main character, you've lost them. They're going to DNF your book or they're going to finish it and go like, okay, I finished it, but I didn't like it." — Andy Weir (06:23)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:31 – Andy Weir on editing and sleepless readers
• 01:51 – Creating mystery for readers
• 02:17 – Humor’s role in exposition
• 06:59 – "Second album syndrome" and Artemis lessons
• 08:52 – On reading and using fan feedback
• 11:43 – Engineering mindset and editing
• 15:35 – Advice for writers balancing day jobs
• 16:33 – Making science accessible and enjoyable
• 18:23 – Family influence and growing up with science
• 23:43 – Loneliness, childhood, and isolation as themes
• 27:38 – Film adaptation and producer’s role
• 29:41 – Visualizing Rocky and Aphantasia
• 31:46 – Building a "truly alien" species
• 34:22 – Possibility of sequels
• 35:28 – Books to take to Mars & recommendations
• 38:51 – Has Andy read Dune yet?
• 39:45 – Discussing Project Hail Mary's ending
• 42:00 – End of main content

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Tone & Style

• Conversational, candid, and humorous—matching Weir’s natural snark and Cruz’s friendly inquiries.
• Candidness about Weir’s own flaws, influences, and struggles shines through.

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This episode offers a comprehensive, insightful, and deeply personal look into Andy Weir’s creative process, influences, and his current perspective as both a celebrated author and an active participant in the screen adaptation of his work. Both aspiring writers and Weir's dedicated fans will find rich advice, warmth, and inspiration.

Transcript

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[Andy Weir]

doing my editing passes, I imagine my reader, you know, just doing a little bit of reading before they go to bed at night. They're getting tired. It's like 1am eventually they get to a paragraph where they go like, okay, well, you know this. I can, I can put the book and go to sleep down. What paragraph is that? What paragraph were you able to put the book down and go to sleep on? I have to get rid of that paragraph, right? I want to keep you up all night.

[Gilbert Cruz]

I'm Gilbert Cruz. This is the book review for the New York Times. And today we've got Andy Weir on the show. You might know Andy as author of the science fiction novel the Martian. It's a story about an astronaut who gets stuck on Mars and has to figure out how to get home. That book, which Andy initially self published, eventually became a bestseller and then was adapted into a blockbuster film starring Matt Damon. Several years later, Andy scored another hit with his book project Hail Mary, which has now also been adapted for the big screen, this time starring Ryan Gosling. Project Hail Mary starts with a middle school teacher named Ryland Grace. He wakes up on a spaceship. He is alone. He has no idea how he got there or what he's there to do. Snared When I talked with Andy, he said the reason that he opened the book this way is because he wanted to start with a mystery.

[Andy Weir]

And so one thing I found is that if you start with like a bunch of unknowns and make the reader curious and you slowly answer those questions, the reader is like, oh, oh. They get that, that satisfaction of having this thing answered, but then something else is asked and, and so on.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Do you find that when you're reading a book, that is when you are most pleased, when you just have to. Someone else is pulling you through.

[Andy Weir]

Absolutely. That's, I mean, the, the best thing you can hope for as a writer, honestly, is to just write something that you yourself would enjoy reading? And so I try to put myself in my reader's shoes. Like I say, what would I enjoy if I wasn't chronically obsessed with the minutia of quantum physics. You know, it's like, I would like that, but most readers wouldn't, you know, that sort of thing. But yeah, that's what I like to read. I like being pulled through. I don't like, you know, I don't like reading prolonged pieces of exposition. It's kind of like doing homework, you know, So I, that's why I put so much humor in. Readers will forgive you any amount of exposition if you make them laugh while you're doing it.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Did you realize that with your first book, did you realize that you needed to or you wanted to put humor into your writing?

[Andy Weir]

I guess the best way to put it is I realized it after the fact. It's just my kind of natural mode of conversation is snarky and I'm just cracking wise all the time. And so that's the voice. I mean, Mark Watney is basically just me, right? Well, he's me with all my good parts magnified and all my flaws deleted. Right. He's the idealized me. But yeah, and I noticed that that was working. So I kept doing it and then looking back on it in retrospect, I was like, oh, okay, there was a lot of exposition in there, but people didn't mind because I was making them laugh with the tone that it was given to them. Okay, lesson learned. That's good. Remember that.

[Gilbert Cruz]

So Mark Watney is, you know, a perfected Andy Weir. Ryland Grace strikes me as not the same. Talk to me a little bit about you for vis a vis Ryland.

[Andy Weir]

Ryland is the first time I tried to make a character out of whole cloth that wasn't just based on my own personality. Mark Watney, like I said, is just the idealized me. Jazz Bashara, who is the main character of Artemis. It was really when you think of a 26 year old Saudi woman, you think Andy Weir. But no, she really was me as well. She had the same kind of attitude and flaws that I had when I was her age when I was 26. Theoretically smart, yet still making bad life decisions. Most of the problems she faces are self inflicted and that's how I was. So I wanted to make at that time I said like, Mark Watney was a fun character, but he wasn't a deep character. Like all you know about him at the end of the book is he didn't want to die and he didn't undergo any change throughout the whole story. Like that's, he's, you know, it's an entirely plot driven novel and I'm like I want characters with more depth and complexity. Okay, so that's where Jazz came from, and I based her. Yeah. I tried to give her some flaws and some problems and stuff. Problem is, I think I went a little too far, and I made her kind of an unlikable protagonist. Turns out the idealized version of me is much more fun to hang out with than the real kind of version of me with all the real flaws. So then for book three, for Project Hail Mary, I've still got to keep trying to grow as an author here. I'm going to make a character that isn't based on me who to thunk it. And so I'm going to start off and say, like, okay, I want some core traits for this guy. I decided he's a little bit naive. He's so incredibly. He's like, pathologically conflict averse to the point that he's like, just. He fears conflict. He's a fearful person. And so I wanted to show that subtly. And then in a big reveal toward the end of the book, you learn more about that. And I also wanted him to undergo change during the course of the story to overcome some of these flaws. But this time I'm like, okay, I made Jazz pretty flawed, and it drove the readers away. What are the things you. If. If a reader kind of stops rooting for your main character, you've lost them. They're going to DNF your book or they're going to finish it and go like, okay, I finished it, but I didn't like it. So I had to make him flawed but likable. So I gave him. I tried to tone down his flaws a little bit. You know, his situation is not his fault. It's not of his own making. I think we all feel afraid sometimes. Try to make a character you could empathize with. And, like,

[Gilbert Cruz]

I'd love to talk about Artemis a little bit. You know, you had this big hit with the Martian, and then you have a thing you didn't have with the Martian, which was expectations. You're like, oh. I described it to someone as like, the second album syndrome.

[Andy Weir]

Second album, absolutely.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Second book.

[Andy Weir]

I forget which rock singer said it, but he said something like, you have your whole life to make your first album, then you have a year to make your second.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Absolutely, absolutely. Even hearing you talk about it, you seem to have a sense that readers were not as satisfied with Artemis as they were at the Martian or as they were with Project Hail Mary. What else did you take away from writing Artemis, and what was that experience like putting your second album out there into the world.

[Andy Weir]

Yeah. The main lessons I took away from Artemis were that I made the character a little too unlikable. I made her too immature. A lot of people commented saying, like, look, I mean, she's ostensibly 26, but she talks and acts like she's 15. So, like, maybe I should have just made her 15. The other thing, though, I thought some of it was a little unfair. I think a lot of people basically went into it expecting a negative experience because it was a female lead written by a man.

[Gilbert Cruz]

I mean, that book definitely came out at the height of the. How would we characterize it? The. Yeah, these questions about who can write whose story, you know, across gender, across nationality. I want to ask you about fans, though, because I feel like you.

[Andy Weir]

Oh, of course.

[Gilbert Cruz]

You are the subject of fan reaction and people leaving reviews on your second novel. People telling you, I like this. I didn't like this. You have all this feedback coming in. You can choose what to let into your life and whatnot. But what has it been like to be someone who now has to take the opinions of people they don't know and choose whether or not to take them seriously?

[Andy Weir]

Well, it's actually very important to me, the people I don't know. I mean, I actually, in a weird way, I pay more attention to the layman than I do to, you know, professional book reviewers, because book reviewers have their. Their things that they're looking for. But I want to make mass appeal. I want books that just everyone likes, not just fans of, like, literature. And so I pay kind of, in a way, more attention to, like, Amazon negative reviews than I do to, like, published book reviews. And so I read them all. There are two kinds of writers. The ones who admit they read all the reviews and the ones who don't admit that they read all the reviews. But I read them all because I want to get better. But the only problem is that Amazon reviews are not written by book critics. And so sometimes those folks have a hard time putting into words what it is that they didn't like. Or they will say one thing but actually mean another. And so that's like, I have to read between the lines and analyze. I'm like, okay, I see. I look for patterns. I see, like, okay, I'm seeing. A lot of people are talking about. So, for instance, if you. If you read the negative reviews of Artemis, you'll see a lot of reviews saying, like, jazz was not a realistic woman, because no woman would ever blah, blah, blah. No woman would ever blah, blah, Blah. Let me tell you, anything that starts with no woman, whatever is false is wrong. Like, there are 4 billion women on this planet, and they're all different. And so generally, when I see one of those, what it they're not, it's almost always by a woman. And they're, they're what? They're not. They're not really saying Jaz is an unrealistic woman. What they're saying is Jaz is a woman that I would not like. Like, Jaz is a woman that I, I, I, I. If I, if I knew her, I wouldn't want to hang out with her. And if I met her, we would not click, and she would not be a friend of mine. And so what I took away from most of those reviews wasn't so much that I kind of like, failed to make a realistic female character. It's that I failed to make a likable character. So that was my course correction in Project Hail Mary was okay. You can't have the protagonist be unlikable.

[Gilbert Cruz]

So much of what Ryland has to do in Project Hail Mary and what Mark has to do in the Martian, it is about problem solving. And while, you know, storytelling is often about conflict or tension in looking at your past, what you used to do before being a published writer, you know, you were, you were a programmer. You were an, you know, you can tell me about the different jobs that you have, but this, it almost struck me as sort of like a coder mentality. Like, I am going to solve this story problem, then move to the next one, the next one. And I'm wondering if there are parallels between what you used to do and what you're doing now with fiction writing.

[Andy Weir]

Oh, absolutely. Like, I mean, I was a computer programmer for 25 years, and so that approach to problem solving colors everything I do. Like, as an engineer, I was the same. I'd be like, I want to get better as an engineer. Here's this whole type of coding or this whole set of libraries that I don't understand. I want to go learn those so I can use them when needed. So it's the same thing I'm trying to solve. I'm trying to increase my, like, knowledge base on what I do. And also the actual kind of work environment of being an author. It's very different than being a coder, because as an engineer, I was one of a team, right? And then go on to being a writer where it's like, I'm all by myself. But once we get to the point where I'm working working with the editor where I, you know, okay, here's my manuscript. Then. I've been told that I'm pretty easy to work with as writers go, because I don't argue too much about the notes. I'm like, I kind of see them as like bug reports.

[Gilbert Cruz]

As an editor myself, I will say that is, that is just the most beautiful kind of writer to work with. Whatever you say, I will take these notes into consideration.

[Andy Weir]

I will, I will push back on things that if I really think I'm like, no, that one's really important to me. But I pick and choose my battles. And 99.9% of the time it also helps that my editor is usually right. He'll write these notes and I'm like, yeah, that's right.

[Gilbert Cruz]

When we come back, Andy Weir answers your questions about his book project Hail Mary

[Andy Weir]

Foreign.

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[Andy Weir]

Sometimes AT&T business Wireless Connecting changes everything.

[Gilbert Cruz]

We actually put out a call to New York Times readers and listeners of this show soliciting questions for you. We got so many questions. This is Matt from Norwell, Massachusetts. He says or asks many aspiring writers are balancing their creative ambitions with full time jobs and other responsibilities. Do you have any advice that you would give them about how to build a writing life under those constraints or under those conditions?

[Andy Weir]

Well, at the time that I wrote the Martian, I had a full time job, but I also had no social life, no friends, no girlfriend. So if you just do your best to be a complete loser and you'll have plenty of spare time for all the writing. Well, in my defense, I had just moved to Massachusetts. I had spent my whole life in California and I just moved to Massachusetts for an engineering job. And so I didn't have anybody nearby that I knew. And so I didn't really have anything to do. Um, so I had a lot of spare time. I have found now that I'm a, you know, full time professional author and now that I have like a wife and a kid and stuff like that, it's, it's, it's. I can't imagine, I have no idea how I would do it if I was working a day job and then attempting to write a novel in my spare time while also having a wife and kid. I just genuinely don't think I could.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Yeah, yeah, no, I know what you mean. You know, one thing, of course you've heard this a million times that readers love about your books is, is not just that you write about science, but the way that you write about science. It's incredibly detailed, but it also is accessible, which is not something I think that many people can do. Madeline from Phoenix, Arizona, want, wants to know, how do you do that? And how do you all also choose what signs to include in the book versus what not to include in? Because it would slow down, maybe the story in some way.

[Andy Weir]

Well, so I go for very scientifically accurate books. I mean, there's always some MacGuffin in there somewhere, but once you get past that, I try to stay true to real science, mainly because that makes it easy for me. When weird questions come up in the middle of the book, I'm like, wait, what if this and this and this happens? I'm like, well, I, I don't need to make up new physics to support my previously made up physics. I can just use the real physics to figure out what would happen. But in terms of expositioning complex scientific stuff, I'm not a professor, right? I don't have to make sure that the reader retains this information and is able to solve those problems on their own. I just need the reader to understand enough of the science to understand why it's a problem for the Character and why their solution is a solution. The research I do, I would say maybe 5% of it ends up in the novel. The rest, it's all just like in Excel spreadsheets and documents and files on my computer. So it's like if you had never heard of relativity, I would explain it and say, yeah, the faster you go, the slower time goes for you. But I wouldn't try to explain all the math.

[Gilbert Cruz]

I know that you grew up in a household with a dad who was a physicist.

[Andy Weir]

Yes.

[Gilbert Cruz]

And a mother who was an electrical engineer. Would you.

[Andy Weir]

So I was doomed to be a nerd. Yes.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Would you have been you without those influences in your life? What was that household like in terms of you just learning stuff or picking it up? You know, Pizz meal.

[Andy Weir]

I think I'd still be more or less me. So it's like I didn't have a love of science drummed into me or anything like that. Dad was always there to answer questions I had, but he didn't go like, hey, come here, I'm going to tell you about physics. It was like, I had questions, he had answers. Mom, while absolutely was a good electrical engineer, she did that for the paycheck. She has absolutely no passion at all for the sciences.

[Gilbert Cruz]

What was her passion?

[Andy Weir]

Literature.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Hey, there you go.

[Andy Weir]

Yeah, so there you go. Yeah, she did. She did electrical engineering for the money, like, to raise me because my parents got divorced. And so she was a single mom. And I mean, my dad paid his share and everything, but that was her profession, not her passion.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Did you grow up with one of them or.

[Andy Weir]

So they were married until I was 8, then I was with one, my mom, until I was 14, and then I was with my dad until I was 18.

[Gilbert Cruz]

You have talked about your dad being a big reader of science fiction. You have described him having a shelf, a big shelf of paperbacks, science fiction paperbacks. And I'm wondering, as you close your eyes and picture that shelf, what are you seeing on that shelf? And what do you remember about those books pulling off the shelf maybe, and reading at an early age?

[Andy Weir]

It was awesome. I mean, because like, I loved. I loved reading science fiction. And dad had this whole collection, all the. All the sci fi books that he had been reading since he was like 12 or something. So it's all these, like, back then in the 50s and 60s, they called them juveniles, which are science fiction with the intended audience of like, you know, tweens and teens. And so a lot of, like, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur Clark, Clifford Simak, Lesser Known, but still really, really good author. I really liked his stuff. And so it was just this infinite array of all these paperbacks and I would just kind of like, okay, I finished the last one. Put that back. Pick one. All right, let's see what highway to Eternity is like. All right, fine. Generally picking them based on the COVID or based on what gathered my attention on the title.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Do you feel like you learned anything from those sci fi masters? Obviously they influenced you in some way, but in terms of storytelling, is there anything that you took from them?

[Andy Weir]

It's weird. Is that the. They had, you know, those, those, those boomer era, like, sci fi books had a real positive view of the future. I mean, the people in the future had their problems, but the future wasn't bleak. It was exciting. It was like real interesting stuff going on. We're going out into space, we're exploring stars, we're encountering aliens. This is all real cool. So awesome. And that certainly colored my form of writing where I tend to write positive, like, you know, feel good stories. I think that wasn't just an aspect of those authors. My holy trinity are Heinlein, Asimov, and Clark. But it wasn't just those authors that influence it. I am an inherently optimistic person. Well, especially when it comes to humanity. I have a very high opinion of humanity. And so what a weird thing happened was in the intervening times since those guys were writing novels, science fiction has become this gloomy, dour, like, totally miseryscape of like, it's always the same thing. It's always like, oh, the future is horrible, technology is bad, every government tends toward fascism. Everything is awful. People stand in line for like, Soylent Green, you know, whatever. And I'm like, how did the view of the future get so dim? I don't know. Pessimism became trendy or something. But I just don't see it. Because when I look at the march of history, instead of trying to look forward and assuming we're going to go downhill from here, look backward and see how much uphill we've come since then. Let me put it another way. All the dystopian science fiction you see is based off of the hidden assumption that where we are living right now, this moment is the best that humanity will ever be. And then it's all downhill from here. So it was like 20,000 years of progress upward, and here we are now at our absolute apex, and it's all just crap from then on. Do you think that this is the peak of humanity right now?

[Gilbert Cruz]

I have no way of telling Well,

[Andy Weir]

I bet you people 100 years from now would rather be there than here.

[Gilbert Cruz]

I have a question about books, but also about you growing up. So we had Guillermo del Toro on the show a few weeks ago, the director of Frankenstein and so many other wonderful movies.

[Andy Weir]

Quite aware of who he is.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Okay, just making sure. I don't like to make sure. Just making sure.

[Andy Weir]

Yeah.

[Gilbert Cruz]

He talked about his love of books and movies being related to what he considered a somewhat lonely childhood. And I know you have talked about isolation appearing in the Martian and Project Hail Mary, and I'm wondering where that isolation came from.

[Andy Weir]

I had a pretty lonely childhood, yeah.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Was it you and the books?

[Andy Weir]

It was me in the books and then maybe one or two friends. You know, I was one of those kids where, you know, I always had friends, but I was never anybody's best friend. I, I don't know. Part of it was because we moved around a lot, so I would always be kind of plunking down into the middle of pre existing social groups. So, yeah, as a kid I often would just have nothing to do. I'd be bored a lot, watch a lot of tv and like my life, my childhood and my upbringing, my life was, was not really that happy a story. I wasn't abused. I wasn't, you know, assaulted in any way or nothing like, nothing horrific like that. But I just had a very, a pretty unhappy childhood. And if you made a movie out of my life, it wouldn't be a fun one to watch.

[Gilbert Cruz]

So

[Andy Weir]

I did often feel like I was on my own without any help. So, yeah, that isolation certainly is an aspect of my personality. Now had I, you know, maybe if I'd had more of a social life or lived in one place longer and been able to develop longer, deeper social bonds with people and be part of a, like a large dynamic, you know, group of folks, maybe I'd make better characters. Maybe I'd understand people better and make better, you know, characters with depth and complexity. So.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Yeah, but maybe you wouldn't be a writer.

[Andy Weir]

Yeah, maybe not. Maybe not. I've got friends now, though, that I've had for like 30 years. The friends that I made in college are still with me, you know.

[Gilbert Cruz]

You know what? College friends are the true friends, I believe.

[Andy Weir]

Yeah.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Up next, Andy talks about Project Hail Mary, the movie, and how he came up with his beloved character, Rocky.

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[Andy Weir]

AT&T business Wireless connecting changes everything.

[Gilbert Cruz]

So you've, you've been through this before. You have a movie coming out. How, how are, how have you gone through this experience differently this time?

[Andy Weir]

Well, so I've done it before, so I kind of know what to expect. And also this time around I'm a producer, so the actual process of making the movie I was much more like directly involved with. So I feel in a way much more ownership over the end result. Because the Martian, I was an excited observer and I look at the movie the Martian, I say like, they did a really good job with this. When I look at Project Hail Mary, I think we did a really good job on this. Right.

[Gilbert Cruz]

You know, now I have this copy of this book here. Ryan Gosling is on the COVID for many people, even people that have read the book, he is this character. Now as a producer, did you have feedback on. Yeah, I think this guy could work?

[Andy Weir]

Yeah. All right. I mean, well, yeah, so as a producer, I, I had to like, author. I had to be one of the people who approved Brian's casting. But that was obviously a no brainer of a decision. It was just a matter of I had to like officially say yes. Ryan was interested right from the start. He is also a producer on the Film now, you know, but he was interested. I mean, he was already attached to the project before the book came out on shelves.

[Gilbert Cruz]

I have a question here from Tabitha, who's from Sandy, Utah? And Tabitha wants to know, you know, do you think the movie sort of visually portrays Rocky, who becomes a main character in this book, the way that you envisioned him in your mind? She also says, this is my favorite book ever. I'm reading it a 54th time. And I will say respectfully to you, Andy, I think Tabitha should start another book after she.

[Andy Weir]

I, I, I think if you're at number 54, that's probably plenty. Maybe move on to another book. How about, how about, how about some Blake Crouch? That's what I always recommend when people ask me for recommendations.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Go read Recursion.

[Andy Weir]

Recursion is my personal favorite of his. Although most people, I think, like dark matter more.

[Gilbert Cruz]

There you go.

[Andy Weir]

Anyway, Rocky. Rocky, yes. So here's the thing. I am kind of on that Aphantasia scale. So I don't have a very visual imagination. That's what Aphantasia means.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Got it.

[Andy Weir]

And different people, they have learned. You know, some people, if you picture an apple, they see every little detail of an apple in their mind. Other people do not get an image at all. And they just have the idea of, like, I, I know what an apple is. I understand the concept of an apple. I can identify an apple, and I can tell you all about apples. But if I close my eyes and try to picture an apple, some people, some people, it literally, they would say, like, that doesn't make sense. What do you mean, picture in your mind that doesn't make sense? So those people have.

[Gilbert Cruz]

I don't think I'd ever heard of that before.

[Andy Weir]

Yeah, it's called Aphantasia. Anyway, and it's not any sort of disability. It's just different brains work different ways, and different brains maintain process and present information different ways. So, for instance, Rocky, I had done all the science work to define his morphology, figure out how his biology worked and everything like that, but I didn't have an image in my head of what he looked like physically. I mean, he has a thorax and five legs, but I couldn't have told you if those legs are thin or fat, if they're smooth or bumpy or anything. So when I saw the puppet, the puppet that they were going to use for Rocky, they showed that to me, and I'm like, oh, okay, cool. So that's what Rocky looks like. I mean, they would often ask me questions. The Art department would say, what does this look like? And I'm like, I don't know.

[Gilbert Cruz]

We had a lot of readers who wanted to know how you came up with Rocky in the first place. Not, you know, not necessarily how he looked or anything, but just the fact that, that you invented a new species and had to come up with the idea of their language, their, how they communicate that language, how they eat, how they sleep, how they, you know, get rid of wastes. All the things that we learn about by reading the book.

[Andy Weir]

Yeah, well, that was fun for me. I just had an open canvas to create an alien species I like. You know, it's speculative biology. There's, there's whole Reddit's dedicated to that. It's fun and for me, and I had decided it's not much of a spoiler. We learn toward the end of the book, the characters speculate, but as the author, I can tell you they're correct, that there was a panspermia event that emanated out from Tau Ceti that seeded life onto the various planets. It was like a primordial version of astrophage. Four and a half billion years ago existed on, on the planet Adrian and seeded out into the nearby stars, and life was able to take root. That's not why it did it. It was just, you know, mold. But that's how life ended up on, on some of the other planets. It also opens the door for me in the future to have more aliens in the nearby stars. So I, I started with that and then said, like, but everything else is fair game. I, I their planet, I, I picked a real exoplanet. So their planet is really close to the star. So how do I explain why there's liquid water on this planet? Well, it'll be really hot, but you can have really, really hot water if the air pressure is really high. Okay, if the air pressure is really high, it means they have a really thick atmosphere. They have a really thick atmosphere. It means light probably doesn't make it all the way down to the surface, which means there's no need to evolve vision and so on. And so just bit by bit, I built up this species. The most important thing to me, though, was that it be truly alien. I didn't want it to be like a space opera alien, like Star wars or Star Trek where it's just like a guy in a suit, you know, I didn't, and no, no disrespect to those shows. I love, I love those shows. And my favorite show is Doctor who, so, I mean, there's plenty of that. It's just that I, in my kind of, like, realistic attempt at sci fi, I just don't believe that an alien species would be comfortable in our environment or vice versa. I just have a real tough time believing that. I mean, we have species here on Earth that have incompatible environments. If you swap the locations of a camel and a shark, they're both going to die. Right. So why would you. Why would somebody from another planet, entirely different evolutionary line in an entirely different environment, why would they be comfortable? So I wanted it to be. That's why there has to be those, like, barriers between them. And that's like, I wanted it to be nothing like a human at all.

[Gilbert Cruz]

I have to ask, since you alluded to it, would you ever do a sequel in some way? Not to this story maybe, but incorporating the world?

[Andy Weir]

Absolutely. I have ideas for sequels for phm, but I just don't have a good enough one yet. I have lots of ideas, but my next book, the one I'm working on now, is not sequel to anything that I've written. It's a new standalone science fiction story.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Yeah, I was going to ask. Are you talking yet about what you're working on?

[Andy Weir]

Nope, just. Just. Just that. That I've told you. It's science fiction and it's standalone.

[Gilbert Cruz]

All right. Well, that was quite a tease.

[Andy Weir]

Not a huge surprise, though.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Whoa. That's a sci fi story.

[Andy Weir]

Yeah. Oh, my God.

[Gilbert Cruz]

We are approaching the end of our conversation here, and I'm going to turn to our weekly segment. So, the New York Times Book Review, for more than a decade, has asked authors new and old a recurring set of questions about their reading as part of a series that we call by the Book. You were actually interviewed as part of the by the book series in 2017, but now I have several new and extremely specific questions for you. Are you ready to answer some of these questions?

[Andy Weir]

I will do my level best.

[Gilbert Cruz]

What is the last great book that you read?

[Andy Weir]

I would say Paradox Inc. By Forest Brazil. It's cool. Time travel science fiction novel. I don't know if it's out yet. I read a galley copy, so I don't know if it's out yet. I don't know if it's out when this will air. I don't know the release schedule on it, but I enjoyed it a lot and I recommend it.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Which three books would you bring to Mars with you?

[Andy Weir]

Well, ignoring comedic answers like how to Survive on Mars and. If it's like I'm going to be stuck if those are the only three books I'm going to have access to for a long time. I'd probably pick books that are considered classics that I have never read, you know, so that I could read them for the first time. But if we're going to limit it to books that I have read, then I would probably say iRobot for sure by Asimov. Well, let's do one from each of my guys. I'll go for iRobot from Asimov for Heinlein I will go. The moon is a Harsh mistress. No, no, no, no. Tunnel in the sky. Tunnel in the sky. I like that one better. And then for Clark, Rendezvous with Rama. So those would be my three. I gotta have one of each of my Holy Trinity authors there. So those are my answers.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Andy Weir, what is your favorite book that you think no one else has heard of?

[Andy Weir]

Ah, so the Werewolf Principle by Clifford Simak. Have you heard of it?

[Gilbert Cruz]

Are you saying principal as in a tenant or principal as in I am the head of a school?

[Andy Weir]

The former. The principal. Principal. Principal. No, principal, whatever.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Tell me about the werewolf Principal.

[Andy Weir]

It is a story. It really appealed to me as a kid, I guess because I was lonely. But it's a story of like this like three different minds are in one body. And the body can change shape between their original forms. So there's a human and then there's this like tetrahedron thing. And then there's like this werewolf looking. I mean it's like a lupine looking thing. And those three, like whichever, whichever body, they could just change shape into. You know, any of those three bodies, whichever body they're in, is that mind has control of everything. But the other two minds are there talking, right? They're like, hey, you go here. So it's like a guy who can like go run along and do stuff and then change shape and then a different brain is in charge. But then he's one of the guys advising him. I just thought that was a really cool concept. And he finds out the details of why and how he is. How he is. But yeah, so that one I really enjoyed as a kid because I thought, you know, I was a pretty lonely kid and I thought, wouldn't it be neat to be like, just to always have like people with you? Wouldn't it be nice to just never be alone? I think that's a little sad, but that's kind of one of the reasons I enjoyed that book so much when I was a kid.

[Gilbert Cruz]

I think it would be nice to never be alone.

[Andy Weir]

Yeah.

[Gilbert Cruz]

In 2017, we asked you what books are you embarrassed not to have read yet? And you said Dune by Frank Herbert, a book that in the past few years has been made into just two giant blockbuster films. Have you read it yet?

[Andy Weir]

No.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Is this on purpose now, or are you just gonna see how long you can go without reading it?

[Andy Weir]

No. First off, still embarrassed? I still haven't read it. In my defense, my wife and I had a baby, and so that really takes up a lot of my time. Oh, yeah.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Okay, fine. Likely. Excuse me. Are you going to read it?

[Andy Weir]

I plan to, but, you know, it's another one of those things where I've seen so many adaptations of it. I love the story, but I also know every beat of the story.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Yeah. All right, let me ask this. If you are going to Mars and you could only bring three books with you, would one of them be Dune?

[Andy Weir]

Yeah.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Okay.

[Andy Weir]

Okay, I'll read Dune. Yeah. I don't have to take care. Do I have to take care of my kid on Mars?

[Gilbert Cruz]

Wow, you're really in dad mode. You're, like, super in it right now.

[Andy Weir]

I'm all about, I'm dad. That's my number one job. Right?

[Gilbert Cruz]

I mean, I'm gonna ask you a final question, and this is a spoiler question, right? So a lot of people have read this book. I think a lot of people are gonna see the movie. We're at the end of the interview. So listeners, if you just don't want to know what happens at the end and you haven't read the book yet, now's a good time to turn it off. Several readers had questions about this. They want to know about the end of the book. They want to know about the choice that you made at the end of Project Hail Mary. Ryland Grace has saved Earth ered, Rocky's home planet, from this astrophage parasite. And instead of returning home, which he can do, he decides to go back, save Rocky, who's in trouble, and then stay on the iridium planet, possibly living out the rest of his days teaching science to young Little Rock children. Why did you end it this way? And were there alternatives? Was there a world in which Rylan did go home?

[Andy Weir]

So I knew that that was going to be the end of the novel before I started writing the first page. So I knew. I knew that's how it was going to end. It was just. I didn't know all the steps that would get him there, but that's how it was going to end. And, no, I think it's a perfect ending for Ryland because He just really liked being a teacher. And in the end he gets to be a teacher and hang out with his best friend and he doesn't know what waits for him on Earth. He doesn't know what state Earth is in. He you know, it was able to solve its problem, we learned because the sun returned to luminance, and so they know that there's at least enough of an infrastructure on Earth to do space stuff. So he knows they're not all dead. But he'd also be returning to an Earth even if he left, like right away, he'd be returning to an Earth where something like 75 years had passed since he left. Everyone he knows back on Earth will have died either in the ensuing, you know, climate catastrophe or just of old age in the intervening time. He doesn't really have anything to go back to, but he's got his best friend here and a job that he loves. Why would he leave?

[Gilbert Cruz]

Andy Weir thank you so much for coming on the Book Review to talk about Project Hail Mary.

[Andy Weir]

Thanks for having me.

[Gilbert Cruz]

The Book Review is produced by Sarah diamond and Amy Pearl. It's edited by Larissa Anderson and mixed by Pedro Rosado. Original music by Dan Powell and Elisheba Itu. Special thanks to Dalia Haddad and Paula Schumann. We want to hear what you think about the show, so send us an email @thebookreviewytimes.com I'm Gilbert Cruz. Thanks for listening.

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