The Science (and Math) of Andy Weir's Sci-Fi Success

Goodreads: Before we dive right in and talk about your latest book, Project Hail Mary, it strikes me that you are a very prolific writer. Do you already have the idea for dozens of books in your head or in various stages of completion?

Andy Weir: More or less. I have my ideas file, and whenever I think about something, I throw that in there. But that doesn't mean that they're good ideas. The trick is, when I'm deciding on a new project, to determine which of these ideas are awesome and which of them are just stupid.
 
For instance, one of my ideas is a story where the main character appears to be a guy who is very lucky—all the time. But it turns out that he’s not lucky; it’s his cat that’s lucky. It’s all about the fact that his cat is really lucky, and because his cat likes him, then he is lucky. I would title that Felicitous Feline or Fortunate Feline.
 
That was in my ideas file. And we’re not going to do that.

GR: There is a certain demographic that would love that book. How do you make the call between the ideas that are good and those that are not? Is that where the idea for Project Hail Mary came from?

AW: It’s a subjective call, but I think Felicitous Feline, safe to say, is not a winner.
 
Most of my ideas come from me speculating about cool science stuff. For The Martian, I thought, “How could we put humans on Mars and get them back safely?” I wasn’t even thinking about a story. I was thinking, “How do we do this? How do we make sure people get there safely? And what happens if this breaks? What happens if that breaks?”
 
Then I realize that this is starting to sound like it might be an interesting story.
For Artemis, my thought process was, “What is humanity’s first city that is not on Earth going to be like? What's it going to be like, and why would anybody bother to build a city somewhere other than Earth?”
 
That’s often how I end up doing what I do. I think of something cool and scientific, and then, if it gets interesting enough, I think, “Oooh, I can make a story around this.”

GR: What was the line of inquiry for Project Hail Mary, then?

AW: For Project Hail Mary, it kind of worked that way, but it's also made up of spare parts from other story ideas.
 
After The Martian, I had this idea for this massive space epic—a traditional sci-fi pilot with aliens, faster-than-light travel, and telepathy and a war and, yeah, a ten-book series and everything.
 
I worked on it for about a year; it was going to be called Zhek. I got 70,000 words in, and—for reference, The Martian is 100,000 words—I realized that it sucked. It wasn’t interesting to read. The characters weren’t compelling, the story meandered.
 
From that, I wrote an entirely different book, Artemis.
 
But there are a few nuggets in Zhek that were solid. There was one interesting character who was this absolutely no-nonsense woman with a ruthless drive to get what she needs to get done and a tremendous amount of secret authority.
 
And she became Stratt in Project Hail Mary.
 
The other thing is, in Zhek there was this substance called black matter, which was a technology invented by aliens that would absorb all electromagnetic waves, all light, and turn it into mass and then turn it back into light. It was the perfect interstellar spaceship fuel.
 
I started speculating in that direction. This substance, it's just this magical, alien technology that is basically turning energy into copies of itself. Then I asked, “Where does it get that energy, and why does it need it?”
 
Both of those things, I came up with the answer in a shower thought one day. It gets the energy because it doesn't live on planets; it lives on the surface of stars. It needs the energy because it spoors out to other stars, like mold. It needs that energy to propel itself.
 
My next thought was that if humanity got ahold of some of that, it would be neat, but it would suck if we accidentally let any of that get into the sun—that would be a disaster.
 
I'm like, “Wait a minute, that would be a disaster! That's where books come from!”
 
Instead of humanity acquiring it accidentally, they discover it because it has already infected the sun. That all fit together well. And since it's also this perfect spaceship fuel, then I want the characters to use this.
 
I want the problem to be part of the solution. And it all just started coming together.


GR: What was your process? How did you do your research? How did you work out the science? And how long did it take you to get this story together?

AW: I say it took me about a year to write the first draft. My favorite part of writing is the research, and the math, and the figuring all that stuff out. Characters and plot and stuff that I am required to do for a book—that’s unpleasant.
 
How I do my research is Google. People assume I have a contact list full of NASA engineers and Nobel laureates who are happy to help me out, and I do, but Google is faster.

GR: Does Google ever get it wrong?

AW: Oh sure. But it's more a matter of “do I trust this site?”
 
Science information is very well represented on the internet, and it's generally not really a controversial topic, aside from the occasional anti-vaxxer or flat Earther or moon-landing denier. It's not like there are a lot of different opinions on how heat differential equations work.
 
It is what it is.

GR: Your main character, Ryland Grace. What the inspiration behind him and creating a lead?

AW: I developed him as a character in an attempt to develop myself as an author.
 
I am considered a very good writer—but not by me. I have never really considered myself that good a writer. I lack a lot of skills that, I feel, better authors have, and I want to acquire them.
 
One place where I consider myself very weak is in character depth and character growth. For instance, in The Martian, it's an entirely plot-driven story. You don't know anything about Mark Watney through the whole book. All you ever know about Mark Watney is he's kind of a smart-ass and he doesn't want to die.
 
That's the extent of his character—you know nothing else about him. You don't know anything about him, and he undergoes no change throughout the entire story. He doesn't become a better person. He doesn't learn a lesson. Nothing. He's exactly the same at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. There's no character element other than a likable everyman in a bad situation.
 
I feel like I got away with something in The Martian. I don't know why the entire world loved 360 pages of algebra questions. But they did. They probably won’t again.  
 
When I was working on Artemis, I made a very different character lead in Jazz Bashara.
 
Now, Mark Watney is the idealized version of me. He has all of the traits that I have that I like about myself magnified, and none of the traits that I have that I don't like about myself.
 
I'm pretty smart; he's really smart. I'm kind of snarky; he's funny as hell. I can be resourceful at times; he's incredibly resourceful, and he has none of my fears and neuroses.
 
Jazz Bashara is more like the real me. She has the same flaws I had when I was her age. She is basically immature for her age, not really living up to her potential, always looking for an easy way out rather than doing the work to get things done the right way, and being her own worst enemy, causing a lot of her own problems.
 
I wanted to make a character who was complicated and deep and flawed in Jazz. She, throughout the book, undergoes growth and becomes a better person by the end. But people didn't really like her that much. My personal analysis on it is that they just had a hard time rooting for Jazz.
 
What I learned is that Mark’s the idealized me, Jazz is the bad aspects of me, and people like the idealized me more than they like the flaws that I have.
 
Ryland Grace was my first attempt to make a protagonist not to be based on me. He's a unique character I'm creating from whole cloth, and so I'm not limited by my own personality or experiences.
 
That's my attempt at growth as a writer. I wanted to make a character who was not based on myself, who was created to be a good match with the story that's taking place. I'm just always desperately trying to get better at what I do.

GR: That's very humble of you. I want to talk about Rocky. He’s got a very special shape. Without giving too much away, how did you arrive at that and did you consider other physicalities when you were making your alien?

AW: The thing that has driven me absolutely batty crazy angry is that science fiction always has aliens perfectly comfortable in Earth's atmosphere, temperature, pressure, radiation level, etcetera.
 
I decided I was going to go out of my way to make things as incompatible as possible.
 
These aliens have a really thick atmosphere—29 times our atmospheric pressure. Venus has 90 times our atmospheric pressure, so it’s well within things we’ve seen. Then I decided that atmosphere was entirely ammonia with no free oxygen.
 
Functionally, this planet would be kind of like living in an ocean. Like the deeper you go, the darker it gets. By the time you get down to the surface where the intelligent life live, it's pitch dark—day or night, pitch dark. Then they would not have evolved sight.
 
I got to have a lot of fun with that. Each little thing, I started by defining things about the planet, and figuring out more things about the planet, and then ending with needing a life form that evolved to live in that environment.
 
Additionally, all of the planets in Project Hail Mary actually exist. Adrian and Erid are both real exoplanets. Planet Adrian is actually Tau Ceti E, and Erid is—the star is 40 Eridani—and the planet designation is “B,” I think.
 
We don't know a lot about these planets except their mass and how long it takes them to orbit their star. I picked this planet, this exoplanet, in orbit around 40 Eridani. Then I asked, “What do we know about that in the real world?”
 
It has an orbit around Eridani of about 46 days. It's very close to its star, and it goes around fast as a result. And it is very large—like, eight times the mass of Earth. It could be gaseous or rocky, but I get to arbitrarily decide that it’s going to be rocky.
 
Next, I decided the planet has about the same density as Earth and that it’s got a metal core and is made of rock. Then I figured out how big it would be and calculated that the surface gravity would be about two Gs.
 
Based on that, I figured that the aliens that live there would be strong because they move around in two Gs. I decided Erid is spinning so fast that it can be that close to its star and still have an atmosphere.
 
At that point, what I've learned is that the aliens who live there live in two Gs and their day is about six hours long. They're small and they're very dense and they're veeerrry strong.


GR: You were talking about character development. What was your process for making this alien lovable? Rocky is such a good alien.

AW: People ah-dore Rocky.

First off, it’s very quickly established that he's a good person. He's in the same boat as Ryland, and he's also sad and lonely because his crew died. You feel bad for him. You can really empathize with him.
 
Rocky also is as intelligent as an adult human, but due to the language barrier, he comes off as childlike. I think people like Rocky in the same way that they might like an adorable kid.
 
Once again, this was an unintentionally beloved character, just like Mark Watney. I did not realize how much people were going to love Rocky until I started getting early reader feedback.

GR: A very smart, adorable kid…

AW: Or a dog. The deep, dark secret is that this book is a buddy road comedy, like Bob Hope and Bing Crosby movies of the old days.

GR: That struck me as well. The book is about so many different things, but really, primarily, it's a story about friendship.

AW: It is absolutely about two people who were extremely unlikely to ever meet not only forming a bond of cooperation, but friendship to the point that each of them is prepared to sacrifice their life for the other.

GR: I was a little surprised by the conclusion of the book. Did you know that you were going to end it that way from the start or did it surprise even you when you landed on it?

AW: I have seen this on (lowers voice) Goodreads reviews that a lot of people are like, “Eeeeeh, I don't know about the ending.” But about halfway through the book, I decided that was how it was going to end, even earlier than that.

GR: What about the title? It is the name of the ship and pretty straightforward in the meaning of the expression. Were there others in consideration?

AW: No, I always had in mind for it to be some sort of variant on the phrase “Hail Mary,” because in American football, that’s the last-ditch pass attempt to save the game. Within the concept of the book, it's called Project Hail Mary because it's the pass where scientists are desperately throwing a spaceship at Tau Ceti to try to save the world.
 
It’s caused a lot of headaches with the translators. Nobody outside the U.S. knows this phrase. Even English-speaking countries like the U.K. don't have that expression. In most of the language translations, they're changing the title. In one of them it’s just called The Astronaut or something like that.

GR: In science fiction, what writer or stories give you inspiration?

AW: I am a generation off. For me, my holy trinity are Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke. That's my crew.
 
I grew up reading my father's science fiction collection, who was a teen and tween in the late 1950s, early 1960s. He was getting the science fiction books with teenagers as the target demographic. I read those books when I was a tween and a teen in the 1980s.
 
Also, lesser known but still very beloved by me is Clifford Simak’s The Werewolf Principle.
 
The Werewolf Principle is complicated to describe, but basically a bunch of different alien life forms all end up sharing a single body. The result is all their minds are all together, and whichever one is in charge, whoever’s body they're exhibiting at the moment, is the one who's controlling the body.
 
If it is the human’s body, then the human is controlling all the motions, but he can hear the other minds talking to him. And when they turn into one of the aliens—they turn into a wolf or something like that—the human feels like he's just out there in a fog. He can see everything and sense everything the wolf is sensing, but he's just part of the committee that's advising the wolf.
 
Something about that really appealed to me—this idea of never being alone. When I was kind of a lonely teenage kid and didn’t have many friends, the idea of literally never being alone really appealed to me.

GR: And then, what books are you reading now?

AW: Right now, uhm, nothing… [Laughs.].
 
But books I have read recently-ish that I would recommend to anybody include Recursion by Blake Crouch and The Last Human. Zack Jordan is the author.
 
Recursion has time travel, and that's my absolute favorite plot of any kind. Blake did a fantastic job of it. It's just a really good time travel novel.
 
As for The Last Human, it was a good, old-fashioned, pulpy sci-fi. It reminded me of the science fiction of that golden era—the '50s and '60s—but without all the blatant sexism.

GR: Then before I let you go, what is your favorite thing about this book?

AW: There's a saying I have, which is, “Give a man a book, you entertain him for a night. Teach a man to write, you give him crippling self-doubt for life.”
 
This is the first time that I've written something where I'm pretty confident about it right out of the gate.
 
I write stories intended to make you feel good. I'm pulling on your heartstrings, blatantly and unapologetically, and I feel like it really came together. What I like the most is how it is a book about friendship.