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.
