WEIR’S LATEST SCIENCE PROJECT

Andy Weir is proud to be a champion for science at a time when the internet has allowed the world’s “village idiots” to find a huge audience on “villageidiots.com”.

The author of the international bestseller The Martian, which became an Oscar-nominated movie starring Matt Damon, is preparing for the release of his new book, Project Hail Mary. Whereas The Martian was about one man trying to escape a planet with only science to help him, Hail Mary has one man on a mission to save the world.

“The isolated scientist ... yes, it’s an unbelievably narrow niche I’m carving out for myself,” Weir laughs.

“Except this time he’s not trying to save his own life, he’s trying to save everyone else’s. It’s a proper sci-fi premise, although in the second act it takes a sudden turn...”

While The Martian was close-ish to today’s reality, Hail Mary is definitely more science fiction. Without giving too much away, the hero discovers that it’s not just our civilisation that is at stake.

It is uncanny how much Weir is like Mark Watney, the wisecracking hero of The Martian.

But while he has the humour and much of the science knowledge, Weir admits he’s not ready to be sent on any desperate missions to save humanity.

“I’d go pretty badly — I’m not brave,” he says. “I’m not as smart as the characters I write and definitely not as level-headed!”

While he put much of his good qualities into Watney and some of his “flaws” into Jazz, the heroine of his second book Artemis, he created something different in Ryland Grace, the hero of Project Hail Mary.

“Watney is an astronaut who beat out who knows how many others to go on the mission. Grace was sent because he has a physical trait that made him more likely to survive,” he says, being careful not to give away too many spoilers. It also raises some interesting philosophical questions and forces

Grace to make impossible choices.

“He’s kind of a boy scout in that he’s morally simplistic. While he’s intelligent and a little bit sarcastic, he’s kind of naive in certain ways,” he says. As this is his third published book, he says he definitely felt less pressure. “I had more confidence because I knew there was a lot of cool stuff in there,” he says. “It’s very rare for a writer to feel confident.

“You know what they say: Give a man a book and you entertain him for a night, teach him to write and give him crippling self-doubt for life.” While Weir is happy to champion science and agrees that it is more important now than ever, he can also see how conspiracy theories and other opposition arises, particularly to subjects such as climate change.

“It’s an interesting aspect of the human psyche that no amount of logical, rational argument will convince someone when their livelihood depends on it not being true,” he says.

“When people can no longer make their living and are not allowed to work any more, they will get irrational.”

Of course, the internet has helped the world’s crackpots and cranks find an audience. “What used to be the village idiot can now go to villageidiots.com and talk to others like him, instead of eventually coming to realise that what he’s saying is not believable,” he says. Although Weir does have a word of caution for those who argue that science has to be right. “Science has been politicised in the past and in the present and will be so again in the future,” he says. “If you want to present scientific arguments why the Earth really is round that’s one thing. But to say you have to believe it because 99.9 per cent of scientists agree is a bad argument.

“They could be all wrong — and there are any number of Nazi documents about differences in ethnicity that are very wrong.”

In The Martian, China comes to the rescue by providing a rocket to NASA. While America — and in fact most of the Western world — is suspicious of China, Weir says China would come to the rescue in real life.

“I think China would love that — they would love nothing more than to rescue the US from a problem. They would adore that scenario as it would be the ultimate bragging rights,” he says. “For similar reasons, I can see the US saying ‘no, we don’t need your help’.”

Project Hail Mary has already been optioned for the film rights, with Ryan Reynolds signed on to play Ryland Grace. Weir admits his life has become somewhat surreal — but he would have been happy to stay as a computer programmer. “I really enjoyed that profession,” he says. “I could explain what I did but it would put you to sleep. “Martian was on the bestseller list and I still didn’t leave. I liked being a cog in a machine and I would have been a happy little cubicle dweller.”

Interestingly, he says Project Hail Mary grew out of a book he started but abandoned.

After Martian he worked on a story he was calling Zhek for a year and had written 70,000 words before pulling the plug.

“It was just not coming together,” he says. “I thought it was going to be a multi-book series and people would be dressing up as its characters at conventions.

“I thought it was going to be like Game Of Thrones, or that people would read it and say The Martian was like The Hobbit and this was my Lord Of The Rings.”

Meanwhile, he’s excited to see the reaction to Project Hail Mary and its take on science. So if it convinces just one reader to take up science, would it be a success?

“No,” he laughs. “I’d want at least a few thousand.”