[MUSIC PLAYING]
SPEAKER: Hi, everyone.
Welcome to Talks at Google
here in the Kirkland campus.
Thank you all for
coming out today.
Today, we've got a
really exciting author
here to talk to you.
We have Andy Weir, author
of "The Martian," here
to talk about his
new book, "Artemis."
[APPLAUSE]
ANDY WEIR: Thank you.
Wow.
This is my first trip to
the Pacific Northwest.
I've literally never been
up here before in my life.
I live in northern California.
I live in Sunnyvale, so not
too far from the Googleplex.
But yeah, so
basically, I'll talk
about my extremely unlikely
and bizarre trip to success.
Basically, I always
wanted to be a writer
ever since I was a little kid.
I think the first
thing I ever wrote
was a Henry Higgins fan fiction,
the Beverly Cleary books,
children's books.
I think I was eight.
It lacked depth, but
I had fun with it.
And growing up, I had my dad's
inexhaustible science fiction
collection to work with.
He had a bookshelf that's about
six feet tall, three feet wide,
and a foot deep, and
it was jam-packed
full of old sci-fi books that
he'd collected over his life.
So strangely, I grew up reading
kind of baby boomer era sci-fi,
despite being Gen X. I'm 45.
But I was reading
books that came out
in the '50s, '60s, and
'70s, which is interesting,
because I'd be like
halfway through a book,
and then there'd be those
glossy ad for Kent cigarettes.
That's what books are like.
My dad also had this
cool map of the moon,
but it only showed
the near side.
I'm like, well, why doesn't it
show the far side of the moon?
He's like, check the date.
And the date on the map
that was printed was 1959.
So that was at the
time they printed
that map, that's literally
all they knew about the moon.
Like, weird, huh?
So for me, when I was growing
up, my holy trinity of authors
was Asimov,
Heinlein, and Clarke.
Those are the guys that--
so I ended up weirdly
being one generation off.
And a lot of that stuff
doesn't stand up too well
to modern morals, especially
with the role of women in space
travel and stuff like that.
But a lot of it does, the
hard sci-fi aspects of it
like the actually
paying attention
to the details of
orbital mechanics
or the complexities of living
in space or the effects
on the human body of long
term Zero-G habitation.
Like they did a lot of
really good work on that.
So those were
inspirations for me.
Anyway, when I was
15 years old, I
got hired to work for Sandia
National Labs in Livermore,
which is where I
was growing up--
Livermore, California.
It's about 30 miles
east of San Francisco,
if you don't mind swimming
directly across the Bay.
And that makes me sound like I
was some sort of genius child
that, oh, a national
lab is hiring him at 15.
No, it was like a
community program,
where they hired local
teenagers to clean
test tubes, that sort of thing.
But the lab I ended up
in, they're like, well,
we don't really need
a gopher, but what
we do need is some method of
analyzing large data sets.
Basically, what they
needed was Microsoft Excel,
but it didn't exist yet.
So they said, all right,
well, we have our data sets
in these files.
There's a computer.
Here's a book on how
to program computers.
Work that out, and
then come back to us,
and we'll tell you some
software we want you to write.
Thus began a 25-year career
as a software engineer for me.
When it came time
to go to college,
I'd always wanted
to be a writer.
And so I considered going
into being a lit major,
but I also decided
that I really,
really like eating
regular meals.
[LAUGHTER]
So I went into CSE, computer
science and engineering,
for those of you here
at Google who don't
know what that stands for.
And that was fine.
I went to college
for four years,
and then like many in
my generation, promptly
ran out of money.
And I didn't finish
college, because my options
at that time-- now at this
point, it's about 1994.
My options at this point
were either finish college,
and go deeply into debt, or go
into the now developer-hungry
tech industry, and get paid.
Back then in '94, I mean
the tech industry was just
starting to blossom.
And it was like, they figured
if you were clever enough
to open the door, you were
clever enough to work for them.
I mean it was really easy
to get a job back then.
And so I'm like, OK.
So I entered the workforce.
And let's see.
I worked for a bunch of places.
In 1995, I worked for Blizzard.
I was one of the
programmers on Warcraft 2.
That's a long time ago.
Very, very, very long time ago.
And if you're curious,
working at Blizzard
was a miserable experience.
It was back before kind of
some of the unwritten rules
of the engineering
industry came into play.
That was back
when, oh, if you're
a software engineer, if
you're awake, you're at work.
Like basically, I
remember when I was there,
I had to tell people
weeks and weeks and weeks
in advance that I was going to
take a Saturday and a Sunday
off to go hang out
with my friends.
And even then, they
called me about 20 times
during that weekend
with questions.
And I was not a senior engineer.
I was entry level.
I was like low man
on the totem pole.
So it's not like I
was super important,
and they couldn't do
things without me.
That was just the
atmosphere of engineering
at the time was very
different than it is now.
So anyway, I ended up staying
in the engineering industry.
And then in 1999, I was
working for America Online.
Yes.
And I got laid off along with
800 of my closest friends
when they merged with Netscape,
which kind of shows you--
gives you a time
reference there.
The Macarena was popular.
And so I ended up with
a fair amount of money
in stock options, because I
hadn't been paying attention
to them, because
I'm an engineer.
We don't pay attention anything.
And I'm like, oh,
I've got enough money,
where I can actually
live for a few years
without going back
into the workforce.
So I'm going to take
a sabbatical, which
is a fancy word for staying
unemployed for a long time.
And I'm going to write a book.
I'm going to break into
the publishing industry.
It's what I've
always wanted to do.
So I took three years off.
I wrote a book.
That book is not "The Martian."
You've never heard of it.
It didn't get published.
Standard tale of woe that
every author will tell you.
I couldn't get an
agent, couldn't
get any publishers interested,
just couldn't get any traction.
And that was actually
the second book I wrote.
The first book I wrote
was when I was in college,
and that was really bad.
That one I don't let anyone see.
I think I wrote it in
WordPerfect, Perfect
and there are no
surviving copies.
Well, there's one.
My mother has it, and she
won't tell me where it is.
So there is, I suppose,
some evidence remaining.
But other than that, the second
book was actually decent,
but I still had a lot
to learn about writing.
And so it's painful to read.
The plot flow is pretty good.
If I rewrote it from
scratch, it might be good.
But anyway, like I said,
standard tale of woe.
After three years of not being
able to get an agent, not
being able to get a
publisher interested,
just not being able to
get any traction at all,
I went back into
the tech industry.
And this was not some sad
Charlie Brown music, hang
your head, shuffle forward.
I like programming.
I like being a
software engineer.
It's a job I enjoy.
It's one I always
found rewarding.
I'm pretty good at it.
And so I was like, OK,
this is not a bad thing.
I took that time off.
I followed my dream.
I never have to wonder
what might have been.
Now I've done it.
Now I can move on with life
and get back into programming,
which I enjoy.
So then around
this time, though,
is this newfangled
internet thing
was starting to get popular.
And I realized, oh, I can
just write as a hobby,
and I can post things online,
and people can read it.
Why not?
So I started doing that.
I made a website, and I
posted short stories and web
comics and serial fiction.
And I did that
for like 10 years,
and very slowly built
up a mailing list
of about 3,000 people.
Now, that sounds like a lot,
but 10 years is also a lot.
So this isn't some
fantastic performance here.
And it was my hobby.
Around 2009, I started
one of three serials
that I had going on on my
site at the same time I
started writing "The Martian."
And it was just another serial.
The idea of "The
Martian" came about,
because I was sitting
around one day thinking,
how could we do a
manned mission to Mars?
I'm going to work out
the details of that,
not for a fiction
story, not for anything.
Just how would we do it?
How do we get the
astronauts there?
How do we keep them
alive when they're there?
How do we get them back?
What do we do, if
this thing breaks?
What do we do if
that thing breaks?
What if these two
things both break?
How do we build redundancy
into the mission, such
that the people don't just die
at the first sign of trouble?
And I'm like, well, what
if all these things break?
What if all these
things go wrong?
And the kind of increasingly
desperate things
that the crew would have
to do to stay alive,
I was like, this might
make an interesting story.
So I created an
unfortunate protagonist
and subjected him
to all of them.
For I am a small,
petty little god.
So anyway, I started
writing that as a serial,
and it was doing really well.
I'd get a lot of feedback from
my readers and science and math
corrections from my
readers, because my readers
are all dorks like me.
And there's nothing a dork
likes doing better than double
checking the math in
a fictional story.
Dear Sir, I noticed on page 14--
yeah.
But that was great,
because it was
like unintentional
crowdsourced fact-checking,
and it was fantastic.
It helped me make "The
Martian" accurate.
And while I was writing it,
accuracy was really important
to me, because I'm
a science dork,
and I love scientific accuracy.
But actually, it's not
a requirement for me.
What is a requirement for me to
enjoy a science fiction or even
fantasy story is consistency.
If you set up the
rules of a universe,
I want you to follow the
rules of the universe
that you set up.
You've got a spaceship
that can go Warp 9.
No problem.
You can go way
faster than light?
No problem.
Those are the rules of
the universe you set up.
But then later on,
there's an episode
of "Star Trek,"
classic Trek, where
they got to go from Mercury to
Earth, and it takes a while.
I'm like, no.
Mercury's eight light
minutes away from Earth.
If you can go Warp 9, it's
not going to take a while.
Dear Sirs.
[LAUGHTER]
So for me, it's all
about consistency,
and I've found that the
easiest way to be consistent
is just to follow all the laws
of physics in the first place,
because physics is very
good at being consistent,
rather aggressively so.
So I did a bunch
of research, and I
made sure all the science
was accurate or as accurate
as I could make it.
I did make a few concessions.
For starters, it is
now rather famous.
The sandstorm at
the beginning that
causes all the problems
in "The Martian"
could not actually happen.
On Mars, they do get sandstorms
of 150 kilometers an hour,
but the density of the
atmosphere is less than 1%
of Earth's.
So if you were standing
out in a sandstorm on Mars,
it would feel like a
very gentle breeze.
It would have a difficult
time knocking over
just a folded piece of paper,
let alone a 27-ton spacecraft.
And I knew that when
I was writing it
that that was bullshit.
I knew it.
But I'm like, I had another
idea for a beginning.
I considered, oh, they're
going to do an MAV engine test,
and then something goes wrong,
and then they have to launch,
and it's kind of like
space camp, where
they have a thermal curtain
failure or something like that.
I don't know.
But I could have come
up with some equipment
failure that caused the problem,
rather than a natural event.
But it's a survival story.
It's a person
versus nature story,
and I wanted nature to
get the first punch in.
So I just said, eh, I'm going
to be inaccurate on this.
Most people don't
know this anyway.
It's not really going
to affect anything.
So yeah, and then later,
the book got really popular,
got made into a movie,
and now everybody knows
that that's really unrealistic.
So I kind of shot myself in
the foot there, but that's OK.
I'll take it.
Let's see.
Other things in the
book are inaccurate,
because they became
inaccurate after I wrote them.
So I wrote "The Martian."
It was already in the
production pipeline,
and only when it was actually
at the printers at Random House
were they--
did JPL land Curiosity on Mars.
And in "The Martian," he's like,
oh, at the time I wrote it,
it was believed that Mars
was almost completely arid,
that there would be
no water available,
except maybe a little
bit at the poles.
And so in the story, Mark
has to do chemical reduction
of hydrazine to
liberate the hydrogen,
then collect carbon dioxide
from the Martian atmosphere,
separate out the
carbon, and he's
got the hydrogen and the oxygen,
and he carefully put them
together and accidentally
blows himself up a little bit.
But then we have water.
Yay.
He grows crops.
So then Curiosity landed
on Mars and took one scoop
and went, hey, there's a
shitload of water in this soil.
Turns out for every cubic
meter of Martian regolith,
there's about 35
liters of water in it.
So if you filled your
refrigerator with Martian soil,
and then pulled all
the water out of it,
you'd have 35 two-liter
bottles full of water.
So all you had to do
is heat up some dirt.
But that's not my
fault, because that
was the prevailing knowledge
at the time I wrote the book.
However, I will
say that Curiosity
is running around in
Gale Crater right now
at the base of
Mount Sharp, which
is on the other
side of the planet
from Acidalia Planitia, which
is where Mark Watney was.
And so I can just say
that just as Earth
has various different tropical
and climatological zones,
I can claim that
Mars does as well.
So I can say that Acidalia
Planitia is a desert.
No one can prove me wrong
until they send a probe.
They also almost
landed Curiosity right
in Mawrth Vallis.
When they narrowed down
Curiosity's landing site
to one of four spots,
one of the four finalists
was Mawrth Vallis.
They eventually chose Gale
Crater, where it is now.
But Mawrth Vallis was
one of the things.
And I'm like, oh, god, please
don't land it in Mawrth Vallis,
because Mark goes right
through Mawrth Vallis.
I would have to explain why
he went around Curiosity
and continued on
his isolated quest.
Fortunately, they didn't.
Anyway, going back
to where I was,
I was writing "The Martian"
as a serial, and it came out.
I post a new chapter maybe
once every six to eight weeks,
and I'd get a lot of
feedback from my readers.
And I could tell that was the
serial they liked the most.
And being the
external validation
junkie that I am, that
encouraged me to write more
of "The Martian" more quickly.
Eventually, I finished it,
and I posted the last chapter
and said, hey, everybody, I
hope you enjoyed "The Martian."
I'm just going to continue
working on my other serials
or whatever.
And then I started to
get email from folks
that say like, hey, Andy,
I loved "The Martian,"
but I hate your
website, which is fair.
If you've ever
been to my website,
I made it all by myself.
And it's just like a white
background with blue hyperlinks
that are left
justified, literally.
That's it.
And it's like you
click a chapter,
and it's like, here
is wall of text.
Enjoy.
There's nothing.
It's like no decor, no nothing.
It's really an
unpleasant experience.
And so they said,
so I don't really
like reading it on a webpage.
Can you make an
e-reader version?
Can you just do that?
And so I'm like, sure, so I
figured out how to do that.
And I made an EPUB
and a MOBI version.
And I posted them on my website,
and I'm like, there you go,
folks.
You can read it in
the website, or you
can download an
e-reader version,
and knock yourself out.
OK.
So then I got other
email from people saying,
hey, Andy, I love "The
Martian," hate your site.
I'm not very
technically savvy, and I
don't know how to download
a thing from the internet
and put it on my e-reader.
Can you just post it to Amazon?
Can you just put it up
so that I can get it
through Kindle's stuff?
And then I can do that.
I'm like, OK.
So I figured out how to do that.
Isn't that hard.
Put it up on Kindle
Direct Publishing,
but they do make you charge.
You can't give
things away for free.
Amazon actually loses money
on every Kindle they sell.
They make their money off of the
book sales, the e-book sales,
so they don't want people
giving away content for free.
You're not allowed to.
So I set the price to a minimum
99-- the minimum of 99 cents,
which earned to me a cool $0.30
a copy I'll have you know.
And then I posted it to Kindle.
And then nothing happens
for about 48 hours.
Amazon would have a human-- has
a human scan through what you
post real quickly just to make
sure it's not a bunch of goat
porn or something.
Well, don't judge.
But then when they're done,
then when they're done,
just making sure it's
correctly categorized,
if it does have goat porn.
Then they'll post it
up there for sale.
And so then I'm
like, OK, everybody,
now you can read "The Martian"
for free on my website,
or you can download the
e-reader and side load it
onto your Kindle, or
you can pay Amazon
a buck to put it on
your Kindle for you.
And people paid the buck.
It's just like, I
guess, first off,
99 cents is not a lot of money.
And second off,
it's just people are
much more willing to
part with 99 cents
than they are to
figure out how to side
load things onto a Kindle.
So it started selling well,
got around good word of mouth.
People started giving
it really good reviews,
and it started climbing
up into the best
sellers of science
fiction, and then
the best sellers on all Kindle.
And then that started to get
the attention of the big shots
in New York in the
publishing industry,
and I got an email from a guy
named David Fugate, who said,
hey, do you have an agent?
And I'm like, no, I don't.
I was never able to find one.
He's like, I'm an agent.
You want one?
I'm like, sure.
And then I got contacted by
Penguin Random House saying
like, hey, we're
interested in maybe doing
a print edition of your book.
And I'm like, talk to my agent.
So everything went
backwards for me.
I mean usually an author
has to work his ass off
to get those things, and then
I have them coming and knocking
at my door.
And those two
started negotiating.
My agent and Random
House started
negotiating the deal
for the print edition,
because I can see from the
publisher's point of view,
it's like, well, this
is a proven seller.
We're not taking a
risk on a new author.
We see that this
is going to sell.
So it was a safe bet for them.
Then 20th Century
Fox came and said,
we'd like the film rights.
And I'm like, cool,
talk to my agent.
And my agent said, talk
to my colleague, who
is a film agent specialist.
So now I've got people.
[LAUGHTER]
And they're all working on
this, and so my literary agent
is talking to Random
House about my book deal.
My film agent is talking to
Fox about the movie deal,
and I am sitting in
my cubicle at work
fixing bugs, because
that's what I still
do for a living at this point.
I'm in my cubicle
fixing bugs, running off
to take a call
about my movie deal,
then back to fixing bugs--
very surreal experience.
And those two deals came
together four days apart.
Yes.
Everyone told me, don't get
excited about the movie deal.
The movie studios come and
option pretty much any book
that they think is
going to do well.
They're probably never
going to make a movie.
Don't worry about it.
So anyway, the book--
we went through an editing
process that was fairly simple.
It wasn't that complicated.
Got through all the edits.
The editor was really cool.
It was a neat process,
although kind of
frustrating at the time.
But most of the editing
notes are like, OK,
you can't just have
a conversation--
you can't just have a scene
be nothing but a conversation.
You've got to tell
me where they are.
You've got to tell me, are
they in a meeting room?
Are they walking down a hall?
What?
Give me some context.
So just kind of rookie
writing errors here and there.
But got it cleaned up a bit,
and then it went off to print.
And then I had to wait
a year, which is just--
oh, the publishing industry.
It just moves like
snail snot in September.
It's just painfully slow, but
then it eventually came out.
During this time,
the film industry
is like, yeah, "The
Martian," whatever.
We have a film option, if
we care, which we don't.
So anyway, the book came
out, and it sold really well.
It climbed up the New York
Times bestseller list.
It started doing really, really
well and getting a lot of press
and a lot of attention.
That made the film
industry's start
to pay more attention as well.
They got the lovely and
talented Drew Goddard in,
who's a veteran Hollywood
writer and director.
He directed "Cabin
in the Woods."
He wrote chunks
of "Cloverfield."
He was one of the staff writers
on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."
He's like kind of in
Joss Whedon's orbit,
partially, ends up working
on a lot of stuff that--
for those of you, who saw "Dr.
Horrible's Sing-Along Blog,"
he was one of the evil
League of Evil members.
He was fake Thomas
Jefferson, so yeah.
That, I told him,
was what I considered
his true seminal
role, and he agreed.
But yeah, so he wrote he
wrote a fantastic screenplay
for "The Martian," and he
was set to direct it, too.
He was going to
direct, and everything
is subject to getting
greenlighted by the studio.
But you're basically--
the way things work
is they kind of work on
the movie half-assedly
until the studio says,
OK, we're doing this.
Here's a big pile of money.
Actually, make it happen.
So he wrote the screenplay.
He was going to
direct it, and then
they were also shipping
the screenplay out
to big name actors to be the
lead, because the studio said,
look, this is such
a one-man show,
like "The Martian" is so
heavily focused on one character
that we need a big
name to be that guy.
There's no way we can do this
unless we have a big name
actor in that spot.
So they sent him out
to these A-list actors,
and Matt Damon said,
yeah, that sounds cool.
I'll play that role.
And the studio's
like, OK, fantastic.
And then Drew Goddard left the
project, because he had to go--
because he had been offered
the director's chair
for the next "Spider
Man" movie by Sony.
So now we went from having
a director and no star
to having a star
and no director.
And so the studio said,
all right, well, we're
looking for a director.
And Ridley Scott said, I'll
direct, and they're like, OK.
So then they had Ridley Scott
and Matt Damon attached,
and that's when they really
started to take it seriously.
All these other major names
started taking an interest
in the project.
We got an unbelievable,
fantastic cast.
And at some point in
there, there's never
like a point where
they're just like,
this movie is greenlighted.
It's just you keep
edging toward it.
There's no point
where you realize
that you pop the champagne.
There's just a point
where you realize,
oh, yeah, they apparently made
this decision a few weeks ago
that we're doing this,
because eventually, one day,
they're like, oh, they're
building sets now.
I'm like, OK, that's good.
That's good.
And it's like, OK.
But when it's really
kind of officially
in progress is when
they start shooting,
because once they
start shooting,
all the contracts activate.
So once they shoot
that first scene,
they're on the hook to pay
the actors for all their--
through the whole
project and stuff.
And at that point, they're
pretty much committed.
And so finally, I was just
waiting on the phone for them
to tell me that they shot that
first scene, and they did.
And I was like, yeah, yeah.
They shot the
whole film in Bud--
well, they shot all the studio
work in Budapest, Hungary
at this huge, huge soundstage
called Korda Studios.
It's in Budapest, and it's
like one of the biggest
soundstages in the world.
A lot of the shots that
you probably thought
were done outdoors were indoors.
So the whole HAB, the
exterior of the HAB
and the surrounding area
was all inside of a studio.
It was really incredible.
And Ridley is such a fan of
practical effects that a lot
of that stuff that you
think is CGI isn't.
So the astronauts walking
through the sandstorm
and stumbling around
and stuff like that--
they were stumbling
around, because they
had these huge freaking fans
pointed at them blowing sand
in their faces.
And the only reason
they could breathe
was because they
were in spacesuits,
which was kind of cool.
And everyone in the cast and
crew had these breather masks
and goggles on,
and all the cameras
had to have all these
baggies all over them to keep
them protected from the sand.
That's how Ridley rolls.
So anyway, yeah, you
kind of know the rest.
The movie came out.
It was a huge success.
Oh, they shot the
location work in a desert
called Wadi Rum in
Jordan, northern Jordan.
And so those exteriors--
those mostly are not CGI.
Those are just-- that's what
Wadi Rum, Jordan looks like.
It's awesome.
They did CGI the sky to
make it red like Mars
is supposed to be, and get
rid of the clouds and stuff.
And they add a few like
kind of craggy mountains
in the background.
But for the most
part, it was just
straight up shooting
in Wadi Rum.
I did not go to the set.
They invited me to go.
I'm afraid of flying, and I
didn't want to go to Budapest.
So how'd I get here?
I flew.
My buddy Valium.
Valium's my friend.
I pop Valium like Pez now to
do these freaking book tours.
I've been all over the country.
I'm one of the most
well-traveled aviophobes
you'll ever meet.
But yeah, so I did get to meet
all the famous people, though,
at the premiere.
I got to go to the premiere,
and so I got to meet Matt Damon.
I got to meet Ridley
Scott, Jessica Chastain.
It was really cool.
And you kind of--
you fantasize
about these things,
but you never really think
they're going to come true.
It just seems like--
now it just seems
like a dream, like it
was some weird thing
I daydreamed about,
and then just kind
of-- then it passed.
The movie finished.
It left theaters.
"The Martian" went back
down to like nominal sales
in the great hockey
stick that is book sales,
and then everything kind
of returned to normalcy.
And it was like, did
that even happen?
And according to
my bank account,
yeah, it really happened.
So then, of course,
the publisher
is like, all right, great.
Good job.
What's next?
I'm like, hm?
And they're like, yeah.
So write another book.
I'm like, oh, yeah, no,
definitely not a case
for me to get really
nervous and suffer
through a year of
imposter syndrome.
And yeah, there's a saying
in the writing world, which
is, "Give a man a book, and
you entertain him for a night.
Teach a man to write,
and you give him
crippling self-doubt for life."
And so I spent a year
working on another book,
and this one was called "Zhek."
It wasn't "Artemis".
This was called "Zhek," Z-H-E-K.
And I got 70,000 words into it
over the course of a year.
For reference, "The Martian"
is 105,000 words long, so about
like 3/4 of a book, 2/3.
And at about the 70,000-word
mark, I was like, oh,
this sucks.
I mean I was like, I can't--
it's fighting me.
It wasn't fun to read.
It wasn't fun to think about.
The plots weren't
coming together right.
The characters were
not interesting,
and it broke my cardinal rule,
which is, if you're writing,
you should always write
a book that you yourself
would enjoy reading.
And I'm like, I would've
put this book down 50 pages
ago and never
picked it up again.
And I could not figure
out how to fix it.
So I went to the
publisher, and I'd
been kind of in
the back of my mind
thinking up "Artemis",
how the city would work.
I didn't have characters or
story or plot, but I was like,
what will humanity--
and the same way
with "The Martian."
It started out with me
daydreaming about how
to do a manned mission to Mars.
Well, "Artemis," I was like,
how does humanity build
its first city on the moon?
And I thought about
all the details
of how to get there,
how you build your city.
You'd need nuclear
reactors, because you
need to smelt anorthite.
Anorthite is a mineral that's
extremely common on the moon,
and it gives you aluminum and
oxygen when you break it apart.
So it gives you aluminum to
build your moon city and oxygen
to fill it.
It's like the moon is
just saying, come on.
Colonize me.
You know you want to.
And so I was working
on all that stuff when
I should have been
working on "Zhek,"
and it was way more
interesting to me.
And I called the publisher,
and I'd been feeding them
chapters of "Zhek."
And I called them
up, and I said, look,
I want to hit the
big red reset button.
I want to put "Zhek"
on a back burner,
and I want to work on a
completely different story.
And I want you to add a year
to the deadline, if that's OK.
And they said, yeah, sure,
way more quickly than I feel
was comfortable.
They wholeheartedly
agreed that "Zhek"
should be put on a back
burner and that I should work
on literally anything else.
So I feel like it was
really a good decision.
And so that's what I did.
I put "Zhek" on a
back burner, then
turned off the back burner,
and then I worked on "Artemis".
So for "Artemis", like
I said, I started--
I defined the entire
city in advance.
I worked out-- first thing I had
to do was work out its economy.
I'm like, OK, why build
a city on the moon?
What are you doing?
Why the hell would
anybody move to the moon?
Cities don't get built
just because it's awesome.
Cities get built for
economic reasons.
So what is the
economy of "Artemis?"
Why does it exist?
And you go through the standard
science fiction tropes,
and they don't really fit.
You're like, oh, well, because
we needed to mine the moon.
It's like, well,
then send robots.
Nobody cares if your robot dies.
People do care if
Uncle Hank dies.
So send robots.
Or well, the Earth
is overpopulated.
Then colonize the ocean.
Any part of this
planet is easier
to colonize than any part of
the moon, I guarantee you.
It's like, oh, there's
political oppression.
Well, if you can
get to the moon,
if you can afford to
build a city on the moon,
you're not the oppressed.
[LAUGHTER]
And so on, all these ideas like,
oh, the environment of Earth--
oh, fuck you.
It is so much easy--
whatever our problems
may be on Earth,
however bad the
environment gets,
it's always going to be
easier to fix the environment
than it is to colonize
another planet.
If nothing else, you
could colonize Earth.
I mean you could
literally-- whatever
you're going to make on the
moon, make it on Earth, right?
So I decided the only
plausible explanation
for Artemis's economy
would be tourism,
because tourism is,
by definition, humans
being somewhere.
So I said, how do you get a
tourist economy on the moon?
Well, the only explanation
is that the price
to low-Earth orbit
has been driven down
by competition in the
commercial space industry.
And so I did this whole
economic analysis.
There's a 3,000-word essay I
wrote that "Business Insider"
has.
You can find it on their
website, if you like--
about what I think the
price to low-Earth orbit
could get driven down to
if the commercial space
industry got as efficient as
the commercial airline industry.
And I define
"efficient" as being
they spend the same percentage
of their revenue on fuel
as the commercial
airline industry.
And I also assume
that technically,
that a profit-hungry
industry would
solve all the technical
and engineering challenges
of making the reusable
rockets, making
full use of the specific impulse
of a hydrogen oxygen fuel,
and all the other
fun stuff that's
going on in the space
industry right now,
all the other
unsolved questions.
And I came up with it actually
doesn't cost that much.
It would end up-- if it followed
the model of the airline
industry, it would end up
costing you about 7,000 bucks
to put a human into low-Earth
orbit and about 35 bucks
per kilogram, which
is about 1/100
of what it costs
right now, by the way.
So huge room for improvement.
Of course, this is
amateur hour economics.
But I'm not-- an
entire country isn't
going to go into a decade-long
recession if I'm wrong.
I'm just trying to make the
basis of a fiction story.
But with that, you
have an opportunity
for the middle class to
afford vacations to the moon.
It's a lot.
It's not casual.
Grand total I worked out
that in 2015 dollars, which
is when I did the math, you
could take a lunar vacation.
You could go there, spend two
weeks there, then come back,
and it would cost you about
$70,000 in 2015 dollars.
Now, that's a lot of money.
But a lot of people would get a
second mortgage on their house
if it meant they could go to
the moon for two weeks, I think.
And so that's the
economy of Artemis.
And it wasn't until I
worked out the entire city--
I'm like, OK,
that's the economy.
To build it, you need
to smelt anorthite,
which is a mineral that's found
all over the place in the lunar
highlands.
Smelting anorthite takes
a ludicrously huge amount
of energy.
So you have to have
nuclear reactors.
Give up on doing this
with solar power.
You would need to ship
so many solar panels
to the moon to power
an aluminum smelting
facility that it
would be cheaper
to ship the city to the moon.
And OK, so now I know I'm
going to need nuclear reactors.
And I'm going to want to
protect the people inside
from radiation and
hole punctures,
so Artemis's holes
are six centimeters
of aluminum followed by
a meter of crushed lunar
regolith followed by another
six centimeters of aluminum.
And that's mainly
to protect Artemis
from the people who live
inside, because some idiot
with a rivet gun
can pop your hole.
Well, he can only
pop one of them.
Anyway, so only
once I'd designed
the entire city did
I start thinking
about plots and stories.
And I went through a
whole bunch of revisions
before I finally landed on
the one that I have there.
So now, it's just released.
And I just found out it's going
to be, I think, number six
on the New York Times bestseller
list this upcoming week.
This is when you clap.
[APPLAUSE]
OK, so that's kind of the
end of my prepared bit.
I'll take questions
until about 1:45 or so.
AUDIENCE: So you described
the whole process of a week
at a time, a week
at a time, and then
realizing that it was happening.
At what point did you say,
OK, now I can quit my day job?
ANDY WEIR: Yeah, well,
that's a good question.
So at the time, I was
working for a company called
MobileIron, and we did--
I mean I could tell
you what we do,
but it would put you to sleep.
But basically, B2B mobile
phone security stuff.
But I really liked my job, so I
actually hung on to my day job
a lot longer than I needed to.
"The Martian" was already out
in bookstores on the New York
Times best seller
list before I finally
quit my day job to go full time
on writing, because I liked it.
I liked being a programmer.
And that's one of
the biggest things
I miss about being an engineer
is being part of a team.
I miss an office atmosphere.
I'm an extroverted guy.
I like to come into
work in the morning
and say, hey, how you doing?
Hey, let's get some coffee.
Hey, how's your dog?
He was sick.
Is he better?
You know, just that part of
life and that social experience
of being part of a team, and
we're all working together
on a project, that's gone now.
I'm just by myself in my office.
I mean it's not--
I'm not in a little
basement with
a flickering fluorescent light.
I live with my girlfriend
and stuff like that.
But it's still I miss having
that kind of work life
social group.
And it's gone now.
And so I didn't
want to let that go,
and so I hung onto the
job way beyond where
I needed it to make money.
I was just hanging on.
But I did finally leave about
two months after the book came
out, because I needed to
work full time on-- well,
at the time, "Zhek," because I
had signed a deal with Random
House.
So that was my job now.
AUDIENCE: About a year ago,
Sam Ramji joined Google.
ANDY WEIR: Hey.
Yes, Sam Ramji.
AUDIENCE: As a VP, which
makes him my boss's boss,
and he sent me with a question.
ANDY WEIR: Your grand boss.
AUDIENCE: Yes, exactly right.
He sent me with a question.
He wants to know if
you polished his dice.
ANDY WEIR: Oh, yes.
Absolutely.
So Sam Ramji and I--
Sam Ramji is one of
my closest friends.
He's one of my college buddies,
and we've been together,
we've been buddies ever since.
He was our GM when we
played D&D. And so one time
he went away for like a
couple weeks, and he had--
we were really into
this D&D campaign.
He's a fantastic GM.
He's the best GM I've ever had.
And we were really
into this campaign,
and we didn't want
to stop playing.
But he was going to
like the Netherlands
for a couple of weeks.
This is when we were in college.
And so he basically,
he had his friend,
Aaron, be the GM for us.
And so we all played
with Aaron as the GM.
And Aaron was a terrible GM.
He was just this
confrontational,
like actively wanting to kill
the players kind of thing.
And so he was just terrible.
We had a terrible time with him.
And so when he came
back, when Sam came back,
we were making all
these jokes like,
hey, we polished
your dice for you.
We can get you all
nice and set up.
So that's what
he's talking about.
AUDIENCE: So he actually--
he also said that you had 90%
of his embarrassing stories.
And reviews are
coming up, and I was
curious if you'd like
to share any of those.
[LAUGHTER]
ANDY WEIR: Oh, boy.
Yeah, I could really do some
damage to him right now.
And I think I shouldn't.
Just at some point,
tell him Schrodinger,
you must be kidding.
He'll know.
AUDIENCE: So you said that you
evaluated [INAUDIBLE] "Zhek"
and decided it's not
good, but usually it's
really hard for people to look
critically at their own work.
And so what was the process?
How can you be able to make
this decision by yourself?
ANDY WEIR: Well, it turns out
I'm very good at self-doubt.
Arrogance and overconfidence--
I don't think anyone
will accuse me of those traits.
So if anything,
I'm usually way too
critical on my work and kind
of like frozen in analysis
paralysis without being able
to kind of move forward.
It's hard.
I guess it's just you put
yourself in a mindset of OK,
clear your mind, and pretend
I have never read this.
Just make believe that this
is brand new material to me.
And I read it, and that's how
I try to analyze the book.
And one of the
tricks I do is when
I'm reading my own
work, as I say,
like, I want to imagine that
it's 2:00 in the morning.
And I'm laying in bed, reading
a bit before I go to sleep,
and I'm like, at what point
do I put the book down
for the night?
Like at what point do I go, OK,
I'm tired, I've got to sleep?
This is getting a
little slow now,
so I'm going to put it down.
If that's the point where I put
it down, why is it in the book?
I want to keep you
bastards up all night.
So if there's like a
long bit of exposition,
I'm like, no, no, no, no, no.
No nappy for you.
So I may use parts of "Zhek"
at some point in the future.
I may harvest-- there are
certain plot elements that
were actually really clever, I
feel, that are really usable.
And there was one
character, just one,
but one character in
there that's really cool.
And I would love to use
her in another story.
So I probably will.
Side story-- last night I was
at an event in Bellingham.
Oh, sorry-- Bellingham.
And for some reason, when
talking to the audience,
the metaphor for "Zhek" being
my baby, and it's like, oh,
you had to give up on your
baby, and that's been so hard
and everything like that.
I'm like, we're
really going to want
to give up on the
baby metaphor here,
because the next thing
I have to tell you is I
might use "Zhek" for parts.
[LAUGHTER]
Also, I aborted "Zhek"
about 3/4 of the way.
Anyway, there you go.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
ANDY WEIR: Sure thing.
AUDIENCE: Did they do
anything in the movie
that you found
particularly annoying or?
ANDY WEIR: Did they do
anything in the film,
"The Martian," that I found
particularly annoying?
Somebody clapped at that?
I don't know.
The only thing I didn't
like was that they left out
the Aquaman joke.
That's not in the movie.
My beloved Aquaman joke--
there's a joke in the book,
where Venkat Kapoor-- he's
named Venkat in the book,
not Vincent--
he looks up at the
stars and goes,
oh, he's stranded up there.
What must he be thinking?
What must be going
through his mind?
And then in the book, the
log entry, Watney says like,
how come Aquaman
can control whales?
They're mammals.
It makes no sense.
And I thought that was funny.
But in the movie, they
had that exact scene,
but they change what he says.
He says, I'm going
to die up here,
if I have to listen
to anymore disco.
And I'm like, ah, come on.
You had it.
You had it.
It was right there.
Just do the damn Aquaman joke.
So that's really the only
thing that irritated me.
The omission.
AUDIENCE: So your newest book
is about Earth's first colony
being up on the moon.
It seems like there's a
lot of popular fascination
lately with Mars kind of being
the first [INAUDIBLE] colony.
So why do you think
that's the case?
ANDY WEIR: I thought-- well, I
started off with just saying,
I want to write a story
about humanity's first city
that's not on Earth.
I hadn't specifically
chosen the moon yet.
But I considered some options.
Option number one,
low-Earth orbit.
Option number two, the moon.
Option number three, Mars.
Those are really the
only viable options.
I mean I suppose solar
orbit is one possibility,
but it doesn't seem likely.
So I looked at
those possibilities.
Well, the closest and easiest
to do is low-Earth orbit,
but there are no natural
resources at all.
So literally, every
gram of that city
would have to be lifted off
of Earth and put into space
and put into low-Earth
orbit and station kept.
The orbit would decay
over time, and that
means your entire city
could plummet to its doom
if you didn't
properly maintain it.
A city sitting on the ground
on a planet or planetary object
doesn't have that problem.
But the main issue
on that is mass.
Getting all the mass of a
city up into low-Earth orbit
is unreasonably expensive.
So you're going to want to
build on the moon or Mars,
because then you can
use local materials.
You can smelt it.
The vast, vast, vast majority
of the mass of Artemis
is just stuff they
got from the moon--
aluminum that they
harvested from the moon.
The inside is full of oxygen
that they got from the moon.
They use rock to do masonry
and stuff on the inside,
for the decorations
on the inside.
They can make glass.
Anorthite is aluminum,
silicon, calcium, and oxygen.
You break those apart, you've
got aluminum to build the base,
oxygen to breathe-- a lot
of oxygen, by the way,
so much that the city cannot
possibly breathe it as fast
as you're smelting it.
And so you mix some of that
oxygen with the silicon.
Now you've got glass.
And so you have to do it
on either the moon or Mars.
So now between those
two candidates,
I want you to imagine you're
standing on a football field,
and you're at one
goal line, and you're
looking at the other goal line.
I want you to imagine Mars
is at the other goal line.
If that's the
scale, then the moon
is four inches in front of you.
So it's ludicrously closer.
The idea of colonizing Mars
before we colonize the moon
would be like if the ancient
Britons colonized North America
before they colonized Wales.
It does not make sense.
That was a "South
Park" reference.
What are you--
frickin' millennials.
All right.
AUDIENCE: So kind of a corollary
to a previous question,
I'm curious what
your interaction was
with the screenwriters and
the development of the movie
version of "The Martian" like?
ANDY WEIR: Well, my only
real job on the film
was to cash the check.
I didn't have any authority
or any say over anything.
I was just an excited guy
peeking in through the window,
while there were--
but Drew did call me
almost every day with
technical questions,
because he's a
great writer, but he
had a lot of questions about the
math and science and physics.
And he wanted it all to
be true and accurate.
So he called me
with a lot of that
and the occasional creative
question, but mostly technical
questions.
And then, while they
were shooting it,
occasionally, Ridley
would call or email
with other technical
questions, like, oh, we
want to have a scene where
we're showing Mark do this out
on the surface of Mars.
Does that work?
Could you do that?
Is that realistic?
Ridley Scott definitely does
not need my creative advice.
But so I was
included in that way.
So I guess you could
say they utilized me
as a resource for
fact-checking, kind of.
But yeah, for the most
part, I was just, hi, guys.
What you doing over there?
Sure thing.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
I was just wondering, as a
fan of hard science fiction,
when you were trying to
get the book published,
are there pressures
to sort of try
and make it more accessible
to a more general audience?
Or do they just sort
of give you free rein
and say, write what you
want, and we'll publish it?
ANDY WEIR: Are we talking
about "Artemis" now?
AUDIENCE: Both.
ANDY WEIR: Well, in "The
Martian," they came to me.
You know, they're
like, we like it as is.
So they didn't have
any pressure to change
it to make it more accessible.
For "Artemis," they
also, no pressure,
I guess "The Martian" proved
to them that a hard sci-fi
novel could sell.
One thing I will
say is that I had
hoped, after "The Martian"
did so well, I'm like awesome.
Now, other authors are going
to start writing hard sci-fi,
and I will get to
read hard sci-fi.
And they didn't.
Where are my frickin' copycats?
I've got nothing.
So I still don't
get to read any.
I'm the one person
in the world who
doesn't get to read this
stuff, which is-- it's nice.
I'm in an economic
niche all by myself,
and I make a big pile of money.
But I want other hard
sci-fi books to get written.
Yeah.
Is that it for the
questions, looks like?
OK.
Well, I only ran
five minutes over.
That's pretty good.
So thank you, everybody.
[APPLAUSE]
