4 min readIn Project Hail Mary, Dr. Ryland Grace is a humble schoolteacher who one day awakens to find he’s been launched into space as humanity’s last hope for survival. Given the meteoric rise to fame of Project Hail Mary’s author, Andy Weir, some of the storyline’s themes might not be as entirely otherworldly as they seem.
Weir worked as a programmer for software companies while self-publishing comics and short stories on his personal website, Galactanet. He put his first full novel there for free and, following reader encouragement, also made it available on Amazon Kindle for the princely sum of 99 cents a copy. That novel, The Martian, would become a New York Times best-seller and be adapted into the 2015 Oscar-nominated film of the same name starring Matt Damon.
Weir has since published two more novels, 2017’s Artemis and 2021’s Project Hail Mary. The latter is now a major motion picture from Amazon MGM Studios starring Ryan Gosling as Dr. Ryland Grace. Ahead of the film’s release, Weir spoke with Popular Mechanics about what makes this story’s protagonist stand out, how he ensures his books are scientifically accurate, and his favorite sci-fi element in Project Hail Mary.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
From the astrophage to the spin drives, there’s a ton of really cool sci-fi tech in Project Hail Mary, but in your opinion, what is the coolest?
Well, unfortunately, the coolest stuff in Project Hail Mary isn’t tech. It’s biology, right? It’s astrophage. Hands down. If that’s one of the things I can pick, I pick astrophage. If I can have some of that in the real world, and I could be fairly sure that I didn’t accidentally get any on the sun, I mean, it would change the entire world.
As an author, how do you balance wanting to get things technically accurate but also dramatically satisfying?
I always err on the side of technical accuracy. I always try to be as scientifically accurate as possible. And since I go out there and I tell people, “Hey, I wrote a hard science fiction book, and all the science in here is as accurate as I can make it,” I’m inviting that criticism, right? So, I don’t get to complain when someone says, “Oh, really? Well, let me just check your math.” I don’t get to be mad about that.
And certainly, there are mistakes. Most of them are minor, and I’m comfortable with that. And people have every right to call me out, especially when I come out there saying, like, “Oh, my stuff is scientifically accurate” with Project Hail Mary, specifically.
Academy Award nominees Sandra Hüller and Ryan Gosling appear as Eva Stratt and Dr. Ryland Grace in Project Hail Mary.
Ryan Gosling’s character, Dr. Ryland Grace, is a more unusual protagonist than you see in these kinds of stories, with some really bold choices about his journey as a hero. What inspired you to go in that direction with him as a protagonist?
So, Ryland is the first time I ever made a protagonist that wasn’t just based on my own personality. Like Mark Watney [from The Martian] is just me, with all of my good qualities magnified and all of my bad qualities deleted. Jazz Bashara from Artemis is, although she is a 26-year-old Saudi woman who grew up in the moon, believe it or not, she is also just me. She has kind of all the bad qualities that I had when I was her age, when I was 26: theoretically smart, yet still making really bad life decisions.
But really, I said like, “Okay, I’m always trying to grow as a writer, and I want to get better at character depth and complexity. This time I’m going to make a character that isn’t me, it’s somebody else. I’m going to base him around some other things.” And I decided to build in a little bit of naiveté, some kind of an optimism, to the point that it can backfire.
And then also, he’s fearful, he’s scared of things, he’s got anxiety and he’s so conflict-averse that he would rather leave a scenario than fight for it. And, so I put that together and those are not aspects that I have.
I mean, of course everybody’s got some anxiety and stuff like that, but I tried to make a character that wasn’t me. And so Ryland is who I came up with.
With Project Hail Mary, you’re bringing in all kinds of elements, like biology and even linguistics. Is there anything you had to learn for the sake of this particular novel that was maybe outside of your typical knowledge base?
Well, I’m always bad at chemistry, so anytime you see chemistry in any of my books, it means I really had to work very, very hard to figure it out. Or I had to contact friends of mine who are good at chemistry to tell me how to do it. So anytime you see that, there is definitely a learning curve.
The physics of a relativistic rocket took a bit to wrap my head around. Like, I get relativity, but a continually accelerating reference frame, that gets into general relativity and that gets much more complicated. So I had to learn a bit about that. And a lot of biology stuff, because I’m not particularly strong on molecular biology or cell biology, so I needed to learn a lot about that too.
Project Hail Mary opens in theaters on March 20.
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Michale Natale is a News Editor for the Hearst Enthusiast Group. As a writer and researcher, he has produced written and audio-visual content for more than fifteen years, spanning historical periods from the dawn of early man to the Golden Age of Hollywood. His stories for the Enthusiast Group have involved coordinating with organizations like the National Parks Service and the Secret Service, and travelling to notable historical sites and archaeological digs, from excavations of America’ earliest colonies to the former homes of Edgar Allan Poe.