June 16
Joyce Carol Oates
On this date in 1938, Joyce Carol Oates was born in Lockport, New York. She grew up in an economically disadvantaged Catholic household and was the first in her extended family to graduate from high school. She was valedictorian of her graduating class at Syracuse University and earned her master’s in 1961 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, when she married Raymond Smith. She published her first book in 1962 and has since written 58 novels as well as a number of plays and novellas and many volumes of short stories, poetry and nonfiction. Several of her novels have been made into movies.
Oates, one of the most recognized contemporary authors, has won numerous awards, including the O’Henry Prize for Continued Achievement in the Short Story and the National Book Award. She has been a finalist five times for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, most recently in 2015. She was the American Humanist Association’s 2007 Humanist of the Year. In her acceptance speech, Oates said: “It has always been something of a mystery to me that intelligent, educated men and women, as well as the uneducated, can ‘have faith’ in an invisible and nonexistent God. Why, instead, is humanism not the preeminent belief of humankind? Why don’t humans place their faith in reason and in the strategies of skepticism and doubt, and refuse to concede to traditional customs, religious convictions and superstitions?”
Oates taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014, then taught creative writing at UC-Berkeley, retiring in 2018. After her husband Raymond died in 2008, she married Charles Gross, who died in 2019.
PHOTO: Oates at the 2014 Texas Book Festival in Austin; photo by Larry D. Moore under CC BY-SA 4.0
“I’m not a person who feels very friendly toward organized religion. I think people have been brainwashed through the centuries. The churches, particularly the Catholic Church, are patriarchal organizations that have been invested with power for the sake of the people in power, who happen to be men. It breeds corruption. I found going to church every Sunday and on holy days an exercise in extreme boredom.”
— Oates, interview, Playboy magazine (November 1993)
Annie Laurie Gaylor
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Andy Weir
On this date in 1972, science fiction novelist Andrew Taylor Weir was born in Davis, Calif. His father was a physicist at Sandia National Laboratories, and his mother was an electrical engineer. They divorced when he was 8. An only child, he grew up in Milpitas with a penchant for print and later credited his mother’s love of literature for inspiring his bookish bent. His “holy trinity” of classic authors: Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke.
While in high school, he worked part-time writing computer code at Sandia before enrolling at UC-Santa Barbara to study computer science. He left without graduating after four years, then worked as a programmer and software engineer for two decades while writing fiction in his off hours and publishing it on his website Galactnet, which garnered an enthusiastic following.
Weir once described himself as “a lifelong space nerd and a devoted hobbyist of such subjects as relativistic physics, orbital mechanics and the history of manned spaceflight.” His short story (short as in 997 words) “The Egg” brought him a significant amount of attention in 2009. It’s a purported conversation between the narrator and a man who dies in an accident and ends up reincarnated over and over as every human who has ever lived.
“The Martian” (2011) was Weir’s debut novel and was first published in serialized form on his blog. The story follows an American astronaut, Mark Watney, as he becomes stranded alone on Mars in 2035. It was adapted into a film in 2015 starring Matt Damon and Jessica Chastain and was nominated for seven Academy Awards. It was highly acclaimed as a novel and film.
His novels “Artemis” (2017, about a heist on the moon) and “Project Hail Mary” (2021) followed. The alleged mother of Jesus plays no part in the latter. “Hail Mary” refers to the description in football of a long, last-second pass to overcome defeat. In the book’s case, it’s the protagonist’s quest while 12 light-years away to reverse a solar “black matter” dimming event that could eliminate life on Earth.
The film adaptation, starring Ryan Gosling, is scheduled for release in March 2026. Sandra Hüller, who received an Oscar nomination for her performance in “Anatomy of a Fall” in 2023, plays a former European Space Agency administrator in charge of the mission sending Gosling deep into space.
He and his wife Ashley, whom he met while he was in Los Angeles to pitch a TV series, have a son born in 2021. On social issues he says he is “very liberal” but on fiscal matters he’s conservative. “I work hard to keep my political views out of my stories. Nobody wants to be preached at.”
“I think humanity is inherently good. For every one bad actor, there are 1,000 good actors,” Weir believes. “And we have an inherent desire to, when you see a new tool, figure out how you can use that tool to help people.” (National Academy of Engineering, March 29, 2024)
PHOTO: Weir at a panel discussion about NASA’s journey to Mars and the film “The Martian” at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2015 in Pasadena, Calif.
“I am agnostic. I know that’s a cop-out, but I don’t have a better answer. And no, I don’t believe ‘The Egg’ is reality. It’s just a story.”
— Weir, comment on a Reddit thread in 2012 when he was 40.
Compiled by Bill Dunn
© Freedom From Religion Foundation. All rights reserved.
