Andy Weir: evaluation

Transcript context

…How would you describe the Andy Weir production function, so that we have insight into your comparative advantage that helped you become successful? I don’t know. I’m sure luck played a large part of it. I think part of it is that I happened upon a combination of things that worked well together, without doing the proper experimentation to find it in advance. So I said, “OK, I’m going to make a smart-ass main character, and I’m going to make a scientifically accurate story. ” Well, it turns out those two dovetailed together very, very well, because being a funny smart-ass enabled me to dump enormous amounts of exposition on the reader, that ordinarily would have been painful to slog through. And so I didn’t realize how well those two things were going to go together. And I also didn’t realize how much people would end up rooting for this poor guy who’s stranded on Mars. I was doing it as sort of a self-insertion, what would I do if I were on Mars, and other people read it as, like, “the world must help him.” And so some of it, unfortunately, is just I stumbled into a formula that worked. And I also stumbled into a niche that I didn’t realize existed, which is the so-called hard sci-fi, the scientifically accurate science fiction. I like reading that. And you go back a bit, you get to . . . Like, I liked reading Niven growing up, and he would actually do all the math. I mean, he was a little iffy on light speed travel and he really didn’t like to have it in his books, but you do something like the Ringworld, all of that works. It all . . . Like, there’s no like physics violations or anything in Ringworld, except for the faster-than-light travel that you take to get there. And so I really enjoyed that as a kid and so that’s kind of what I wrote as an adult, and nobody else is really doing that. And I kind of wish they would. On the one hand, it’s nice to have that niche to myself and all the readers who are interested in that are just mine. But on the other hand, I wish there was another writer doing that so that I could read it. [laughs] Your college experience: you dropped out, I believe, in your fourth year.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.