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

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Well, what I'm 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 1 a.m., eventually they get to a paragraph where they go, "Okay, well, you know, this, I can, I can put the book and go to sleep, yeah."

“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. 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, 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 is 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, is no idea how he got there or what he's there to do. 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. And so one thing I found is that if you start with a bunch of unknowns and make the reader curious and you slowly answer those questions, the readers like, "Oh, they get that satisfaction of having this thing answered, but then something else is asked and so on."

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?

“Absolutely, that's 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 readers' 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. That's kind of like doing homework, you know, so 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. Did you realize that? With your first book, did you realize that you needed to or you wanted to put humor into your writing?

I guess the best way to put it is I realize it after the fact, like, it's just my kind of natural mode of conversation is snarky and don't just crack and rise all the time.

And so that's the voice. I mean, Mark Rodney is basically just me, right? He's, 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? So Mark Watney is, you know, a perfected Andy Weir.”

Rylan Grace strikes speed. It's not the same. Talk to me a little bit about you, vis-a-vis Rylan. Rylan 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 Bishara, who is the main character of Artemis, 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, 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, it's, you know, they, 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.

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 Projectile Mary, I 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, who do think 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 diverse 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.

But, and I also wanted him to undergo change, sharing 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? 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.

“Now, his situation is not his fault. It's not his own making. I think we all feel afraid sometimes trying to make a character you can empathize with and like.”

I'd love to talk about Artemis a little bit. You know, you had this big hit with the, the Martian, and then you have a thing you didn't have with the Martian, which was expectations.

I was like, oh, I described it to someone as like the, you know, the second album, signature album, same thing, absolutely.

I forget which rock rock singer said it, but he said something like, you have your whole life to make your first album, and you have a year to make your second. Absolutely, absolutely. You know, even hearing you talk about it, you'd seem to have a sense that readers were not satisfied with Artemis as they were. The Martian, or as they were with Project Hill Mary, what, what, what, what else did you take away from from writing Artemis and what was that experience like putting your second album out there into the world?

Yeah, the main lessons I took away from Artemis were that I made the character a little too unlikable. I made her to immature. A lot of people commented saying, like, look, I mean, she's ostensibly 26, but she talks in 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.”

I mean, that book definitely came out at the height of the, uh, how would we characterize it? The, um, yeah, these questions about who can write who's story, you know, across gender, across nationality.

I want to ask you about fans, though, because I feel like you, of course, 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 what not. 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?

“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 what they read all the reviews. But I read them all because I want to get better. But the only, the only problem is that the, you know, like 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 read the negative reviews of Artemis, you'll see a lot of reviews saying like,

Like there are 4 billion women on this planet and they're all different.

And so generally when I see one of those, what they're not, it's almost always by a woman and they're, they're what they're not, they're not really saying jazz is an unrealistic woman. What they're saying is jazz is a woman that I would not like like jazz is a woman that 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 projectile Mary was, okay, you can't have a, you can't have the protagonist be unlikable. So much of what Ryland has to do in projectile 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 attention.

And 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, you can tell me about the different jobs that you have.

But this, it almost struck me a sort of like a coder mentality like I am going to solve this story problem, they moved to 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. 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 would, 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 that I can, 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 with the editor, right, 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. 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 as a consideration.

“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 I 99.9% of the time. It also helps that my editor is like usually right. You know, he'll write these notes and I'm like, yeah, that's it. That's right. When we come back, Andy Weir answers your questions about his book, Project Hill Mary. In theory, I knew that this kind of thing can happen in any family.

Anyone's first cousin could be Bloody Murder. This is UC4735 and today is.

Upstanding citizens are always turning out to be secret criminals.

With Alan Gesson. And I wouldn't even call my cousin Alan and upstanding citizens. You know, my clients are a cartel level guys, they're all bad asses, they're they they. But it's one thing to know. There's a more permanent way to do it.

Yeah, more and more different. Permanent. And another thing to understand. Alan. Murder. Me. It ended up being so much worse than I thought I knew.

The price is definitely reasonable. Okay, what the hell was Alan thinking? Like, let's just say that I'm willing to be stopped. Yeah, yeah, no, I get it. From serial productions and the New York Times, I'm Em Gesson and this is the idiot.

Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. We actually put out a call to New York Times readers and listeners of this show. Celesting 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?”

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.

I spent my whole life in California and I just moved to Massachusetts for an engineering job. So, I didn't have anybody nearby that I knew and so I didn't really have anything to do. So, I had a lot of spare time. I have found that I'm a full-time professional author and now that I have a wife and a kid and stuff like that, 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. Yeah, yeah, no, I know what you mean. You know, one thing, of course, you've heard this a million times at readers. Love about your books 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 also choose what science to include in the book versus what not to include in because it would slow down, maybe the story in some way. Well, so, you know, I go for very scientifically accurate books.

I mean, there's always some leguffin 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 we would questions come up in the middle of the book. I'm like, wait, what if this and this happens, I'm like, well, 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. But the research I do, I would say maybe 5% of it ends up in the novel. The rest, that'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. I know that you grew up in a household with a dad who was a physicist and a mother who was an electrical engineer. Would you? So I was doomed to be entered.

“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, peace meal?”

I think I think I'd still be more or less me. So it's like, I didn't have a lot of science drumdindamy 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.

You know, I was like, I had questions he had answers. Mom, well, absolutely, you know, was a good electrical engineer. She did that for the paycheck. She's absolutely no passionate all for the sciences. What was your passion? Literature. Yeah, 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. Did you, um, did you grow up with one of them or so? Uh, they were married until I was eight, then I was with my mom until I was 14. And then I was with my dad and tell I was 18. You have talked about your dad being a big reader of science fiction. You have described him having a shelf, a big shelf of of of paperbacks, science figure paperbacks.

And I'm wondering, as you close your eyes and picture that shelf, what, what do you seeing on that shelf?

“And what do you remember about those books pulling off the shelf maybe in reading it in early age?”

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, they, back then in the 50s and 60s, they called them juveniles, um, which are science fiction with the intended audience of like, you know, twins and teens. And so a lot of like, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Azimov, Arthur Clarke, Clifford Simacliss or known, but still really, really good author. I really like this stuff.

And so it's just as 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. That's either generally picking them based on the cover or based on what gathered by attention on the title.

It's weird is that 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 in a space for exploring stories, we're encountering aliens. This is all real cool. It's awesome. And I, that certainly colored my norm of writing, where I tend to write positive, like, you know, the old good stories.

“I think that wasn't just an aspect of those authors. My holy Trinity or Heinlein Azimov and Clarke.”

But it wasn't just those authors that influenced 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,

tower, like, totally misery escape 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, in the soil and green, you know, whatever. And, 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 trapped from then on.

I do think that this is the peak of humanity right now. I don't know if telling. Well, I bet you people 100 years from now would rather be there than here. I have a question about books, but also about you growing up. So we had Guillermo d'Otora on the show a few weeks ago, the director Frankenstein and so many other wonderful movies.

Quite aware of who he is. Just making sure I don't like to make some share. 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 Hill Mary. And I'm wondering where that isolation came from.

I had a pretty lonely childhood. So are you in the box? I was me in the box and then maybe one or two friends, you know.

I was one of those kids where I always had friends, but I was never anybody's best friend.

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.

My life, my childhood and my upbringing, my life was not really that happiest 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 pretty unhappy childhood. And if you made a movie out of my life, it wouldn't be a fun one to watch.

So 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 large dynamic, you know, group of folks. Maybe I'd make better characters.

Maybe I don't understand people better and make better characters with depth and complexity. Yeah, but maybe wouldn't be a writer. Yeah, maybe not. Maybe not. I've got friends now, though, that I've had for like 30 years.

So the friends that I made in college are still with me, you know.

“You know, I college friends are the true friends, I believe.”

Yeah. Up next, Andy talks about Project Hail Mary, the movie, and how he came up with his beloved character, Rocky. So you've been through this before, you have a movie coming out.

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. 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 looked at Project Hail Mary, I think we did a really good job on this. Right. You know, now I have the scopy of this book here. Yeah. Ryan Gosling is on the cover for many people, even people that I've read the book.

He is this character now.

“As a producer, did you have feedback on, yeah, I think this guy could work?”

Yeah, all right.

Well, yeah, so as a producer, I had to, like, author, I'd 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, you know, but he was interested right away.

I mean, he was already attached to the project before the book came out on shelves. 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 the 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. I think if you're at number 54, that's probably plenty. Maybe move on to another book. How about, how about some Blake crouch?

“That's what I always recommend, but people ask me for recommendation.”

Read and Recursion. Recursion is my personal favorite of his, although most people, I think, like, start matter more. There you go. Anyway, Rocky.

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

Got it. 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 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, I don't think I've ever heard of that before. Yeah, it's called A Fantasia. 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 in 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, I 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, you're a department would say, what does this look like? And I'm like, I don't know. We had a lot of readers who wanted to know how you came up with Rocky in the first place.

So, you know, not necessarily how he looked or anything, but just the fact that you invented a new species and had to come up with the idea of their language. There, how they communicate that language, how they eat, how they sleep, how they, you know, get rid of waste, all the things that we learn about by reading the book. Yeah, well, that was fun for me. I just had an open canvas to create nailian species. I like, you know, it's speculative biology. There's, there's whole reddit's dedicated to that.

I mean, it's fun. And, and for me, and I had decided, it's not much of a spoiler. We learned toward the end of the book, the characters speculate, but as the author, I can tell you their correct, that there was a panespermia event that emanated out from a Talcetti that seeded life onto the various planets.

It was like a primordial version of astrophage, or a half billion years ago, existed on the planet Adrian, and seeded it out into the nearby stars and life was able to take root.

That's not why it did. It was just, you know, mold, but that's how life ended up on some of the other planets.

So, I started with that, and then said, like, but everything else is fair game. I, they're planet. I picked a real exoplanet, so their planet is really close to the stars. 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'd 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 it 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.”

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

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 that's my next book. The one I'm working on now is not a sequel to anything that I've written. It's a new standalone science fiction story. Yeah, I was going to ask, are you talking yet about what you're working on? No, just just that that I've told you. It's science fiction and it's standalone. That's quite a tease. We got not a huge surprise, though. Wow, that's a sci-fi story.

Yeah, oh my god. 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 from more than a decade has asked authors new and old, a recurring set of questions about their reading. It's part of a series that we call by the book. You are 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?”

I will do my level best. What is the last great book that you read? I would say paradox ink by forest Brazil. It's a 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 in this layer. I don't know the reuse schedule, but I enjoyed it a lot. No, I recommend it.

Which three books would you bring to Mars with you? Well, ignoring comedic answers like how to survive on Mars. 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 I robot. Sure, by Azimov. Well, let's do one for me to my guys. I'll go for I robot for Azimov. For Hingline, I will go the moon as a herchmistress. No, no, no, no, no, no. Turn on this guy. Turn on this guy. I like that one better.

And then for Clark, rendezvous with Rama. Those would be my three. I've got to have one of each of my holy Trinity authors there, so that's those are my answers.

“Andy, we are. What is your favorite book that you think no one else has heard of?”

Ah. So the werewolf principle by Clifford Simack. Have you heard of it? Are you saying principle as an attendant or principle as an, I am the head of a school? Ah, the the former, the principal, principal, principal, no principal, principal, whatever. Tell me about the werewolf principle. It is a story. It really appealed to me as a kid. I guess because I was well,

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 where wolf looking. I mean, it's like a lupine looking thing and those three like whichever, whichever body they could just change shape into

But the other two minds are there talking, right? There I say you should go here. So it's like a guy who can like 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.

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 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.”

I think it would be nice to never be alone. Yeah. In 2017, we asked you, what books are you embarrassed not to have read yet? And you said, "Done" by Frank Herbert, a book that the past few years has been made into two giant blockbuster films. Have you read it yet? No. Are you, is this on purpose now? Are you just going to see how long you could go without reading it?

No. First up, still embarrassed, 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, okay, five likely excuses.

Are you going to read it? I plan to. 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.

“Alright, let me ask this, if you are going to Mars, and you can only bring three books with you, would one of them be due?”

Yeah. Okay. Okay. I'll read due. I don't have to take your drive to take care of my kid on Mars. Well, you're really in dead mode. You're like super in it right now.

I'm all about, I'm dead. That's my number one job, right? I mean, I'm going to ask you a final question. And this is a, a spoiler question, right? So a lot of people have read this book. I think a lot of people are going to 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 Hill Mary. Rylan Grace has saved earth. Erid Rockies home planet from this astrophage parasites. And instead of returning home, which you can do, he decides to go back, save Rocky who's in trouble and then stay on 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 was there where there alternatives did you? Was there a world in which Rylan did go home?

So I knew that that was going to be the end of the novel before I started writing the first page.

“So I knew that's how it was going to end. It was just, I didn't know all the steps that would get them there, but that's how it was going to end.”

And no, I think it's a perfect ending for Rylan 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. You know, it was able to solve its problem we learned because the sun returned to luminance. And so they know that there's a 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? Andy Weir, thank you so much for coming on the book review to talk about Project Hail Mary. Thanks for having me.

Thank you is produced by Sarah Diamond and Amy Pearl. It's edited by Larissa Anderson and mixed by Pedro Azato, original music by Dan Powell and Alicia Baititu, special thanks to Dali Hadad and Paula Schuman. We want to hear what you think about the show. So send us an email at the book review at NYTimes.com. I'm Gilbert Cruz. Thanks for listening.