When Andy Weir was writing his new novel, “Project Hail Mary,” he stumbled into a thorny physics problem.
The book’s plot hinges on a space mold that devours the sun’s energy, threatening all life on Earth, and that propels itself by bashing neutrinos together. He needed to figure out how much energy would be produced by two of those subatomic particles colliding.
“I was having a really difficult time finding information on that, and the reason is because people don’t fully know. I mean, we’re getting to the edge of human knowledge on that one,” Weir said in an interview last month from his home in Saratoga, Calif. “Neutrinos are the smallest and most difficult to deal with subatomic particles that we have ever actually managed to prove exist.”
Most sci-fi writers would err on the side of fiction rather than science. But Weir has never been satisfied with fictional solutions to scientific quandaries. He eventually figured out the number he needed for a single sentence — 25.984 microns — and, in the process, learned a lot about neutrinos.
“You have something like 100 trillion neutrinos passing through you, personally, every second,” he said excitedly. “Just being emitted by the sun.”
This is how conversations with Weir, 48, tend to go. A question about a plot point will provoke a mind-warping answer, a barrage of arcane facts interspersed with self-effacing jokes and casual profanity.
Weir has made a name for himself among hard-core sci-fi fans for his dizzyingly detailed explanations of the quantum physics, chemistry, engineering, aerodynamics and rocket science underpinning the plots in his novels. When he was writing his blockbuster debut, “The Martian,” he built software to calculate the constant thrust trajectories for a spaceship’s ion engine, studied NASA satellite images to map out his astronaut character’s 3,200-plus-kilometer course across Mars, and gave a detailed formula for how to make water out of oxygen and hydrazine.
For his second novel, “Artemis,” a thriller about a heist that takes place on the moon, Weir figured out how lunar settlers could make oxygen and aluminum by smelting a mineral called anorthite, and calculated the cost of shipping various goods to the moon ($4,653 per kilogram).
“He literally does the math for the idea first and then builds the drama around it,” said Aditya Sood, a producer who worked on the 2015 film adaptation of “The Martian.”
For a sci-fi writer who prizes facts over fiction, Weir is taking a leap further into the speculative with his new novel, which Ballantine publishes on Tuesday. Set in another solar system, “Project Hail Mary” opens as the narrator, Ryland Grace, wakes up in what looks like a hospital room, with the remains of his two crewmates. He figures out he’s on a spaceship, and as his memory returns, Grace realizes the magnitude of his mission: Earth and its inhabitants are facing extinction as the alien microorganism devours the sun’s photons, and to save humanity, he has to find a cure in another solar system.
Even with such a far-fetched scenario, Weir was determined to make the math and particle physics in the novel accurate, down to the quantum level. Still, he worries that he might turn some people off with a story that features space travel, aliens and a ridiculously high-stakes mission. “I don’t want to alienate my readers with something too fantastical,” he said.
Judging by the early accolades, “Project Hail Mary” seems to be resonating. A film adaptation from the producers and screenwriter who made “The Martian” is underway, with Ryan Gosling signed on to play Grace. A starred review in Kirkus called the novel “nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.” Sci-fi and fantasy writers like Ernest Cline, Brandon Sanderson and George R.R. Martin have given Weir exuberant blurbs.
“Where Andy is unique is he writes some of the hardest hard science fiction, there’s so much science in his stuff, but he does it in service of the story,” Martin, the author of the best-selling “The Song of Ice and Fire” fantasy series that spawned the HBO series “Game of Thrones,” said in an interview. “No one does it as well as he does.”
A self-described “lifelong space nerd,” Weir grew up in the Bay Area, where his father worked as a particle physicist. After his parents divorced when he was 8, Weir and his mother, who worked as an electrical engineer, moved frequently, and he entertained himself with computers. He studied computer science at the University of California, San Diego, but ran out of tuition money before completing his degree. Looking for a steady income, he went into programming, and worked at the video game company Blizzard Entertainment and at AOL.
When he got the idea for “The Martian” in 2009, Weir was living alone in Boston, working for a mobile game company. He started to think about what it would take for a person to survive, completely alone, on a hostile planet. (It involved lots of biochemistry, duct tape, swearing and farming with human waste.)
“One of the main reasons that isolation is such a recurring theme in my books is that I spent a lot of my life alone and not wanting to be,” he said. “I was lonely, and so that ends up being a factor in my stories.”
Weir started posting free chapters of “The Martian” on his website. At the request of readers, he uploaded the full text to Amazon, charging 99 cents. Within a few months, he had sold 35,000 copies.
When a literary agent offered to help him get a book deal, Weir was skeptical, but he agreed to send the manuscript to an editor at Crown. Not long after, he sold the book and the movie rights within a single week.
After its release in 2014, “The Martian” sold some five million copies in North America. The movie adaptation, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Matt Damon, grossed more than $630 million worldwide and received seven Academy Award nominations, including one for best picture.
Weir, who is scared of flying, fought his phobia to attend the movie premiere in Toronto, a star-studded event that drew Hollywood celebrities as well as the astronaut Chris Hadfield and Jim Green, NASA’s chief scientist.
“He’s really a cut-up,” Green said of Weir.
After “The Martian” and unsure of what to do next, Weir started a multivolume space opera called “Zhek,” which explored the idea that a substance called blackmatter could absorb electromagnetic radiation and be used to create an energy-dense fuel to power interstellar travel. He wrote about 75,000 words before he got stuck.
“I realized, oh, there’s a problem here, this story sucks,” he said. Weir sent an apologetic email to his editor, abandoned the draft and started writing “Artemis.”
The year he spent writing “Zhek” wasn’t a total loss — he salvaged parts of it for “Project Hail Mary,” including a ruthless bureaucrat who is willing to sacrifice a few humans to save humanity, and his idea for a mysterious substance that absorbs energy. Later, Weir came up with the novel’s premise: a character who wakes up alone in a spaceship and has to solve the mystery of how he got there.
Some early readers of the novel have found the story to be eerily resonant: a rampaging pestilence, forced isolation, a global effort among scientists to develop new lifesaving technology.
“People said, ‘Oh, this is clearly a book that is an analogy for Covid,’” Weir said.
He didn’t mean to write a pandemic parable — he finished a draft of the book months before the coronavirus became rampant in the United States — but he agrees that the parallels are a little unsettling. “It’s a coincidence, but yeah, isolation sucks,” he said.
Weir isn’t as lonely now as he was when he wrote “The Martian.” After it was published, he met his wife, Ashley, in a restaurant when he was in Los Angeles to pitch a television series. He’s become a quasi celebrity among the astronauts and astrophysicists he idolizes, and is plugged into a network of NASA scientists and particle physicists who answer his emails and phone calls and invite him to give lectures. He’s part of the production team that’s developing the “Project Hail Mary” movie and is working on another secret screen project at Universal Pictures with Sood, a producer on “The Martian” and “Hail Mary.”
Weir was cagey about describing his next book — after the disaster of “Zhek,” he worries that saying too much could backfire — but whatever he writes will be bound by the known laws of physics.
“The real world is a far richer and more complex tapestry than any writer could invent,” Weir said. “By sticking to real science and real physics, I have plots presented to me that I would never think of.”
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Source: Movies - nytimes.com
