October/November 2015 69 But then the book and movie people started sending him checks, “and I thought ‘Well, if it’s a scam, they’re not very good at it.’” Today, Weir, who has been writing science fiction as a hobby since he was a teenager, says he doesn’t have many dreams left to come true. “Well,” he reconsiders, “I’m not dating Anna Kendrick yet. I could work on that.” NO INSTANT SUCCESS Dreams aside, Weir was not exactly an overnight success. Even before starting “The Martian,” Weir started attracting a following on his blog site with works like “The Egg,” a short story that inspired a number of You- Tube videos. “People say, ‘This guy came out of nowhere.’ But I actually spent 10 years building up an audience,” says Weir. “I had accumulated about 3,000 readers, and they were the kernel that started the snowball on “The Martian.” I don’t think there’s really a shortcut. You need a large enough group of people to start the word-of-mouth stuff. That was absolutely critical.” Weir introduced his readers to “The Martian” by publishing a chapter at a time as a serial on his blog. At the request of fans, he decided to publish it as a Kindle book for 99 cents. That’s when it really started to take off. The book quickly made it to the Kindle best-sellers list, where it attracted the attention of Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, and later, 20th Century Fox. Weir, who describes the book as ‘Apollo 13’ on steroids,” says he got the idea while just sitting around one day, imagining how a manned mission to Mars would work. “It wasn’t for a book or anything. I was just wondering how we’d do it with today’s technology. Then I said ‘OK, what if this broke? How do we make sure the crew doesn’t die? And then what if these things break? Well, I suppose they could repurpose this.’ And with all these failure scenarios, I thought, ‘Hmmm. This might make a pretty interesting story.’ So I created an unfortunate protagonist and subjected him to all of them,” Weir explains. SMART AND RESTLESS Weir arrived on Planet Earth in 1972, the son of a particle physicist (dad) and an electrical engineer (mom). His parents divorced when he was 8 years old. It was obvious early on that Weir was no average kid. “He was a handful. He was the kid who wanted to cross the street. He wanted to know what was on the other side,” Tuer recalls. “He was always curious, always intelligent. Very verbal, energetic and interested in everything,” she adds. “And quite early he started being really funny.” Tuer remembers Weir being surprisingly good at just about everything. She’d take him to the ice rink for the first time, and he’d put on his little pair of skates and scoot across the ice with no fear. She says he also has a beautiful singing voice, plays keyboard and composes music. “He’s interested in a lot of things, not just the nerdy science stuff,” she says. Weir was usually at the top of his class, and in junior high, he was selected for his school’s gifted and talented program, but he was also the guy who always talked in class and got restless pretty easily. It was then that he found longtime friend Casey Grimm, who was of a similar ilk. “We were both creative sorts, and Author Andy Weir’s new status earned him an invitation to Mars Week at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas where he toured Mission Control. NASA/JAMES BLAIR AND LAUREN HARNETT WEIR DIDN’T KNOW WHEN HE CREATED THE PROTAGONIST FOR HIS DEBUT NOVEL, “THE MARTIAN,” HE WAS WRITING THE BASIS FOR MATT DAMON’S NEXT STARRING ROLE. ×
South Bay Accent - Oct/Nov 2015
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