Bookmark: An Interview with the Author of The Martian

Last month Nautilus magazine posted an interview with Andy Weir, author of The Martian.  If you have not heard about this book, here is a short blurb to entice you:

Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on Mars.

Now, he's sure he'll be the first person to die there.

After a dust storm nearly kills him and forces his crew to evacuate while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded and completely alone with no way to even signal Earth that he’s alive—and even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone long before a rescue could arrive.

Chances are, though, he won't have time to starve to death. The damaged machinery, unforgiving environment, or plain-old "human error" are much more likely to kill him first.

But Mark isn't ready to give up yet. Drawing on his ingenuity, his engineering skills—and a relentless, dogged refusal to quit—he steadfastly confronts one seemingly insurmountable obstacle after the next. Will his resourcefulness be enough to overcome the impossible odds against him?

In the interview, Mr. Weir describes the process of going from a self-published author to a best selling author, the underlying science in his story, the role of water and methane on Mars, his preference to be an author rather than an astronaut, and his ideas for his next book. 

Mr. Weir also talks about how recent discoveries on Mars could have changed his plot and will potentially change the plot of mankind's future missions to Mars:

At the time that I wrote my book, Curiosity hadn’t landed yet and they hadn’t discovered how much water there was. It was since the book was released that we discovered there’s actually tons and tons of water on Mars. It’s all as ice crystals suffused in the sand, but if you take a cubic meter of dirt from Mars, or at least from the area Curiosity is in, you get something like 35 liters of water. It’s this huge amount, far more water than anybody expected, which is really exciting because the only missing thing to making your own rocket fuel on Mars was hydrogen. The original plan was to bring the hydrogen with you, and for every kilogram of hydrogen you bring you can make 13 kilograms of rocket fuel. But now you don’t even need to do that. Now you just need rovers and machinery to harvest water out of the soil, and you can literally send a device to Mars that can make its rocket fuel with nothing. Which is really exciting!

Science and science fiction have been married for many years, with one stimulating the other.  Mr. Weir is the latest in a long line of authors who continually push our minds and hopefully our endeavors.