REVENGE OF THE NERD
Why we’re geeking out over ‘The Martian’
Andy Weir started writing a book about an astronaut stranded on Mars. He hadn’t had any success with publishers in the past, so he started posting chapters to his website. That was 2011. People really liked it — so much so that Crown Publishing came calling. The book became a best-seller. Now 20th Century Fox has released the movie, starring Matt Damon and a cast so full of stars that it’s like the monolith at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
And before you stop me to say that Keir Dullea doesn’t actually say, “My God, it’s full of stars!” in the movie, that it’s from Arthur C Clarke’s novelisation, I know.
Sorry. Writing about The Martian seems to be bringing out the geekiness in your humble correspondent. That’s because Weir, from online serial to book to screen, has brought a little-appreciated genre into the mainstream: the nerd thriller. This hypertechnical genre, deeply developed by novelists like Neal Stephenson, does something that classic thrillers do not: It puts the nerd (male and female) in the centre of the action. The intellectual swashbuckler is the hero, not the plucky, comic-relief sidekick. Imagine that instead of Tom Cruise, Simon Pegg is the star of Mis
sion: Impossible.
This is adventure for those of us who believe, deep in our hearts, that the heroes
of Star Trek (the original series, naturally) are Spock and Scotty, the science officer and the engineer. They don’t know why Kirk gets the gals, but they know they will end up saving the day, over and over again. With clever solutions, not fisticuffs.
Little wonder, then, that the Martian novel and now the movie come with the imprimatur of all that is nerdly. Randall Munroe,
creator of XKCD, a funny, technically deep comic beloved of the tribe, devoted a strip to the phenomenon.
The Martian is closer to classically optimistic science fiction than the dystopian works that have crowded the genre of late. Its heart, humour and rousing story of perseverance and global collaboration promise to broaden the film’s appeal well beyond nerds.
When astronaut Mark Watney, left on Mars with nothing but his considerable storehouse of snarky one-liners and powerful brain to save him, says “I am going to have to science the s*** out of this” — a line recently endorsed
by astrophysicist and nerd icon Neil deGrasse Tyson — it won’t just be the geeks cheering. The story, which braids Watney’s efforts to survive with the struggles of the world’s space agencies and his departed crewmates to bring him home, can have meaning even to those who haven’t taught themselves how to use a slide rule for the archaic challenge.
In an interview from his home in Northern California, Weir, a former software engineer, said he wrote his book with one overarching thought in mind: It should be as scientifically accurate as possible. How much energy would a rover need to cover the enormous distances that Watney must drive? How many potatoes would he have to grow to provide the calories he will need? As he did the maths, he found that the answers he got created new problems for his astronaut to surmount. All in an environment that, in terms of survival, constitutes a very tough neighbourhood. The soil, he determined, would need hundreds of litres of water to be sufficiently moist to grow crops. Water that Watney, with training in botany and mechanical engineering, would have to come up with somehow. (He ends up passing leftover hydrazine, the rocket fuel, over a catalyst, and, well, it’s complicated.)
Weir, 43, said his feel for the sensibility of astronauts and exploration came from “a life of being a space dork” who read everything he could get his hands on about such topics. The fact that this dedication has paid off in such a big way, Weir said, is “really awesome”.
After 20th Century Fox optioned the film, Drew Goddard, the director who built a fierce following with the horror comedy The Cabin in the Woods, took on the project and adapted the book but had to drop out because of conflicts with other productions. The director Ridley Scott, who transformed science fiction cinema with Blade Runner and Alien, stepped in. And with him came Matt Damon, as well as Jessica Chastain, Kristen Wiig, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jeff Daniels and Donald Glover, among others.
Damon said that unlike Weir, he is not a space dork. But when he read the script — cold, he said, with no idea what it was about — he found himself drawn to his character’s steady competence amid chaos. But when Goddard left the project, Damon said, “I thought it was just going to go away.” Later, however, Scott called. “That just made my life very easy in terms of decision-making — it was a no-brainer.”
He recalled telling Scott, “we don’t need an Oscar-bait kind of scene of some guy wailing and pulling his hair out. I don’t want to see
that, and I don’t want to do that.” The enormity of his plight, the existential dread, will flow from the vast loneliness of the landscape, they agreed. With brief exceptions, that is how he plays the character.
Weir admits freely that his stranded astronaut has little angst or inner life. Watney simply pushes forward, putting crises into a mental lockbox and figuring out how to survive.
“It could have been a deep psychological thing,” he said, but “that’s not the kind of book I like to read, and it’s not the kind of book I wanted to write.” James Bond, he notes, is not weepy; “I wanted it to be more MacGyver on Mars.” The most visible emotional moment for Watney, at a time of great stress and seeming failure, was inserted at the request of an editor.
Weir said he is a fan of the dry and somewhat morbid sense of humour that many astronauts share; he cited the quip from the legendary John Young, who walked on the moon and also flew the space shuttle, about procedures that shuttle crews were trained to follow in case of one particularly serious launch mishap: He called them “keeping busy while you wait to die”.
A number of astronauts say that Weir got them right, from the joking interplay between team members to Watney’s aplomb. Garrett Reisman, who flew to space three times and now works at Elon Musk’s SpaceX, said that astronaut selection and training focus on what is known as being “operational”, a quality of staying focused and sorting quickly through priorities. “When all hell is breaking loose,” he said, “what do I have to do right now that will keep me alive?”
Those at Nasa who are hoping to get people to Mars someday also say Weir has captured something important about what makes humans want to explore.
Jim Green, the director of the planetary science division of Nasa, said that Weir didn’t get everything right — most notably, the dust storm that strands Mark Watney on Mars would, on the surface of the actual planet, not have much force. The air is just too thin. No matter, he said: “I check my science brain at the door when I watch a movie.” Besides, he said, “The Martian is reasonably realistic.”
More important, he said, is that the movie could excite and inspire the public about a human mission to Mars at a time when the space programme has essentially figured out how to get it done. “It makes it real,” he said.
Weir was raised in Northern California; his father worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and his mother, who earned a degree in electrical engineering, has worked in that field, among others. Until his success with his fiction, Weir had been a software engineer at AOL, the game giant Blizzard and many other companies, changing jobs every few years as tech nomads do. Now that job-hopping is unnecessary. He’s working on his next book, a more traditional sci-fi novel with a working title of Zhek.
Meanwhile, this author who took us to Mars is working to overcome a phobia: He is afraid of flying. “I’m getting better,” he said. He is seeing a therapist, he added, and has taken some flights — to Comic-Con in San Diego, to the Johnson Space Centre in Houston at the invitation of Nasa. “I could not say no to that,” he said. He still can’t quite believe that he now talks with astronauts, or that his movie was mentioned in XKCD, he said: “That’s hitting the big time.”