The premise is simple: Astronaut Mark Watney, left behind on Mars by crewmates who believe he is dead, is very much alive. He must use all his cunning and the few meager resources at his disposal to survive on another planet, and maybe get back to Earth.
The follow-through is anything but simple. Author Andy Weir's runaway success of sci-fi novel, The Martian, is full of technical details and elaborate chemistry—tempered by jokes about Three's Company—as Watney explains how he solves crisis after crisis to keep himself alive. Matt Damon, playing Mark Watney in the upcoming film adaptation, out October 2, says it best in the recently released movie trailer: "I'm gonna have to science the shit out of this."
Here, Weir explains what certainly would have killed our hero, what O.J. Simpson and Mark Watney have in common, and why space mutinies are more common than you might think.
*BEWARE. SPOILERS WITHIN*
Of all the sci-fi scenarios to write, why'd you pick a man alone on Mars?
The inspiration was—and I am this dorky—I was sitting around planning a manned Mars mission. Not for a book or a story or anything. Just speculating: How could we get people to Mars? How could we get them safely to the surface and then back off the planet and back to Earth? So I came up with a mission plan for that, and how to do everything with modern technology.
Then I thought, okay, I need to account for failure scenarios. What happens if this breaks? What happens if that breaks? Any mission plan needs to account for failures. We need to make sure the crew survives, because losing crew is the worst possible scenario.
As I kept going on more and more of these failure cases, I started thinking, hey, this makes an interesting story. So I created an unfortunate protagonist and subjected him to all of them.
Mark Watney comes up with solution after ingenious solution to keep himself alive on Mars, and pretty quickly. How did you come up with all of them?
I wouldn't start with the solution—I would start with the problem. And I would always make it the most likely problem that he would have.
I tried to make it feel like a cascade failure. It wasn't that he just kept getting unlucky over and over again. Everything stemmed from the initial failure: He's stuck on Mars. And then his equipment is breaking down because it wasn't designed to last that long. Now, he tore this thing apart to fix this other thing, and now the thing he tore apart is causing a problem. Ideally, each problem is caused by the solution to the previous problem.
As for the solutions: Most of the time I could solve them with stuff I'd already said he had. And so that was cool, I always felt good when I'd come up with an elegant solution.
Sometimes I would conclude: If this problem happened, he'd die. I've been working on this for two weeks and I haven't found any way for his to get around it. So then I would do one of two things.
The first thing I would do is think of the minimum he would need to have in order to solve this problem. If I found something like that, something that was plausible to have on a mission, then I would go back and retroactively drop mentions of it into previous chapters. From the reader's point of view, it was like, "oh, yeah, he had that thing all along. It's not even odd that he would have that."
But if I couldn't come up with that, or if it was something that was really implausible to have, then I would just back it up say, okay, that problem doesn't happen.
Wait, so how many problems did you think of that would have just killed him?
A few!
Can you tell me what they were?
Sure. One thing was, he has the RTG (radioisotope thermoelectric generator). It's basically the lump of highly radioactive material that gives off heat. The reason he has that is that I was trying to work out how to do a long-range trip with the rovers. I did all the math and there was just no way for him to get any decent distance out of it. I've got to find a way for him to suddenly become a lot more power-efficient with the rovers.
Well, if there's a 100-watt heater in the rover, and he's able to turn that off, then all of the sudden he's able to get much more range. But then I did some math on heat loss and realized, oh no, he would absolutely freeze to death. You would freeze. to. death. It would get down to -100 C inside that rover eventually, and that's no good. So I need him to have a heat source.
Then I work it backwards: If they had an RTG, why wouldn't they use them in the start? Well, they're kind of dangerous, and they don't like to have big piles of radiation near the astronauts, and so on. So I worked it into the story.
One plot idea I had was that once he's driving along, there'd be a breach in the containment of the RTG. Now, suddenly, it's emitting radiation. It cracks. But I kept running all the numbers and there's just no way he survives. Even a small radiation leak would be almost immediately fatal. Now, I could say he gets lucky and he happens to be wearing his EVA suit at the time, which has radiation shielding. So then he could just physically hurl the RTG away in time. But then he's without the RTG and he freezes.
I just got rid of that concept. Which is good! Because I later learned that with RTGs—it's not just a lump of radioactive material, it's a bunch of little pellets encased in lead. It would be very, very hard to get irradiated. You'd have to break it open, get the pellets, and cut them in half.
If The Martian happened in our world, do you think NASA really would launch a billion-dollar, spare-no-expense mission to save him?
I don't know. That's a tough call. But people tend to band together when someone's in trouble. I'm too young to have personally experienced Apollo 13, but I've seen the documentaries and the movie. It sure seems like the whole world was pulling for those guys.
In the book, the way I explained why they were willing to spend that much money. First, the emotional desire to save him. Secondly, they were willing to spend $500 billion on the Ares program, and that was just to get five different groups on astronauts onto Mars for 31 days each. Now we've got a guy who, we're getting 500 days of Mars exploration. This is actually better—more cost-efficient—than the Ares program.
The people of Earth are glued to special news programs like The Watney Report that follow every development in the rescue. But he's stuck on Mars for hundreds of days, and there's not always much for NASA to tell the public. Wouldn't people get bored with this slow-motion drama?
There were multiple half-hour TV shows on multiple networks covering the O.J. Simpson trial. And they were daily shows. That went on for like a year.
Let's talk about the Ares 3 astronauts, who find out Watney is still alive and go back for him—using a plan that NASA vetoed. The trailer for the movie plays this up as mutiny! Would astronauts really disobey orders to go back for a crewmate left behind?
Yes, definitely. The esprit de corps on a spacecraft—those guys will die for each other. Just think of a combat squad in war. These people are connected at a deeper level than a lot of families are.
Secondly, there have already been space mutinies. There was a SkyLab crew that decided their schedules were too tough and they were getting worn out, so they just told NASA, no, we're not going to do the stuff you're telling us to do. Screw you. That happened in the real world just because they were cranky and overworked. [Imagine] if it were something like, we're going to go save the life of our comrade.
When did you find out The Martian would become a movie?
Fox approached us for the rights around the time the print deal was made, March of 2013. Throughout 2013, Drew Goddard worked on the screenplay. Drew was going to write and direct it, but after he wrote it, he got offered the chair for the new Spider-Man movie. Then Matt Damon came on board to be the lead of The Martian, and Ridley Scott said he'd be the director. From that point on, things really snowballed. When you've got Ridley Scott and Matt Damon, suddenly a whole lot of other big-name performers are interested in being involved. So we really got an incredible cast.
The Martian features a lot of text written in diary form, with long stretches of Mark explaining to the reader how he "scienced the shit out of" various life-threatening crises. Were you worried about how that would translate?
Yeah, I was initially. Signing the film right away means they can do whatever they want now, and all you can do is pray. [Laughs.] But Drew—he didn't have to, but he chose to involve me in the process. He sent me versions of the screenplay to get feedback. As I saw the screenplay taking shape, I was really happy.
You started writing the serial that became The Martian in 2009, and since then NASA's long-term plans for sending humans to Mars have been in flux, to say the least. Was that on your mind as you wrote the book—whether humans really will go to the Red Planet in the coming years or decades?
I made the book a reasonable distance into the future, and I was deliberately vague on the exact dates so people couldn't call me in 20 years and say, "Ha ha, it didn't happen!"
One thing that's interesting is that there have been significant new findings about Mars since I wrote the book. There's this whole section in the book about him generating water from hydrazine. Well, it turns out there's water all over the damn place on Mars. He could have just scooped up soil, brought it in, and then heated it up to make the water come out. I didn't know that, because nobody knew that!
[Speaking of things I didn't know]: One of the satellites in orbit around Mars now has the HiRISE camera, which is basically a spy satellite. The people who control it, they were fans of The Martian, because they went and did the scan of the exact spot. I specify in the book the latitude and longitude, down to fractions of a degree, exactly where the hab was (below). They took a picture of the surface with those super high-res cameras, and then they posted the picture and said, "Well, as you can see, the terrain is nothing like it's described in the book." [Laughs.] Come on!
Being left with nothing but disco and sitcoms like Three's Company to pass the time, Mark develops a special kind of sardonic loathing for them. Why you hatin' on the 70s, Andy?
It was just a joke! But there was a tangible reason for it. With so much of the story being on Mars, surrounded by high technology, I wanted some way to tether the reader back to the real world and say, this isn't some super-distant future. Back on Earth, things are pretty much the way they are right now. I had these pop culture references to remind them the setting is now-ish.
As for me, I actually like disco. My friends give me a lot of crap for it, too.
Mark Watney's mission is a NASA mission. In reality, there are also privately funded missions that claim they're going… with varying believability. Even Elon Musk of SpaceX wants to go to Mars. So will the first manned Mars mission be NASA-funded?
I think the first manned mission will be government-funded, but not just by our government.I think there'd be a lot of countries involved [like the International Space Station]. The price of getting to Mars is just way to high for any private individuals to do before the government does it.
I know that Musk wants to go to Mars, and I have no doubt that SpaceX can develop the technology to go to Mars. I suspect they will do it for NASA, under contract.
You mentioned other organizations. You didn't even say the words "Mars One," but for the record, I don't take them seriously at all.
I don't think you're alone there.
No, I'm not. I am a huge fan of SpaceX. I'm a fanboy. I think their approach is really the future of space exploration. I think driving down the cost to low-earth orbit is the key to making a real, profitable space industry. That's when all the real technology will start getting developed. They are absolutely our best vector for exploring space.
I always want to be very, very clear when people ask me about private missions to Mars that SpaceX and Mars One are not even in the same bin. They shouldn't be talked about as if they're similar entities at all.
If you were stranded on Mars, would you make it?
Probably not. I don't deal with super-stressful situations very well. I'm not the right stuff.
