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South Bay Accent - Oct/Nov 2015

October/November 2015 71 we were immensely bored with everything high school had to offer,” explains Grimm. (The two have been friends for 30 years. Aspects of their lives are even chronicled in Weir’s online comic strip, “Casey and Andy.”) Weir got his first job at age 15, working at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore. It was part of a community relations program where he went to school for half of the day and work at Sandia for the rest. He loved it. “I learned all the important stuff about how to socially interact with people in the office, so by the time I got out into the workforce, I was more skilled at that than many of my co-workers,” he says. In fact, Weir based many of his NASA scenes and dialogues on the workplace dynamics at Sandia. After high school, Weir studied computer science at UC San Diego but did not graduate. He was later a programmer for several software companies, such as AOL and Blizzard Entertainment, where he worked on Warcraft 2. He also worked at Palm in Sunnyvale, where he met friend and fellow engineer Wade Brown, who admired Weir’s work ethic and dedication to learning new things. “Andy is very focused, even when not writing,” Brown says. “In his spare time, he’s done things like writing a random orbital dynamics program. His hobby is learning, and I guess his writing helps him apply that learning.” Grimm agrees, and adds that, in some cases, Weir’s superior technological abilities have given him a certain power in his work situations. “For instance, I don’t particularly like meetings, but Andy has specifically negotiated employment contracts where he can only be invited to one meeting a week,” Grimm explains. “I wish I could pull that off.” READING AND WRITING Weir came from a family of readers. His dad had a large bookshelf crammed full of science fiction books that Andy devoured, spurring his early interest in writing. “I like daydreaming, and I thought ‘I can write stories.’ So I started writing crappy short fiction,” Weir recalls. “I always wanted to be a writer, but I also wanted to eat regular meals and live somewhere other than under an overpass. That’s why I became a computer programmer.” When writing “The Martian,” Weir got feedback from both his parents. He passed many of the technical aerospace details by his physicist father and would rely on his mother as a general sounding board, calling her up and reading her new parts of the story. “That’s probably about the only thing I contributed,” Tuer says. “That and the potty mouth. That’s definitely me.” That “potty mouth,” whether Tuer’s, Weir’s or both, is an integral part of Watney’s character and is present from the first line of the book (“I’m pretty much f---ed) to the end. It also provides some of the novel’s most entertaining log entries and exchanges with NASA. “I was surprised when I first read the book that there was so much swearing in it,” Tuer says. “I think in real life, you hear people swear more than you see it written down, so it’s more shocking when you see it written down.” To add to all his talents, Tuer says that Weir has always been “a really good guy.” Evidence of that is the fact that Weir is taking Tuer as his plus one to the premiere of “The Martian” in Toronto. But there is one problem with that: Weir is terrified of flying. That’s probably the biggest difference between him and Watney. (continued on pg.104) Weir got friendly with a dextrious humanoid robot, dubbed Robonaut 2, designed at NASA Johnson Space Center. NASA/JAMES BLAIR AND LAUREN HARNETT WEIR INTRODUCED HIS READERS TO “THE MARTIAN” BY PUBLISHING A CHAPTER AT A TIME AS A SERIAL ON HIS BLOG.


South Bay Accent - Oct/Nov 2015
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