10 Sci-Fi Books and Movies That Inspired Andy Weir and ‘Project Hail Mary’

Nicholas Meyer’s beloved sequel/corrective to Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

GQ: Not to spoil, but I watched this after Hail Mary, and there is a climactic scene that makes it hard not to connect the two films.

Weir: Yeah, I guess so. I didn’t do that consciously, but this was a movie that had such a big impact on my life. I think most people would agree that it’s the best Star Trek movie. I’m sure it had an effect on my concept of narrative style.

Red Planet (1949)

Robert A. Heinlein’s novel about students at a boarding school on Mars.

Weir: You can credit Heinlein for getting me really, really interested in Mars. The Mars as depicted in that book is not remotely like real Mars, but the rules that he set up were really interesting. And in fact, at one point, the main character is inside of a plant and he doesn’t have enough oxygen to survive, so he turns on his headlamps so that there would be light pointing at the inside of the plant, which causes the plant to synthesize oxygen while doing photosynthesis, which is how he survives the night. So maybe that put a kernel of an idea in my head about how you would survive on Mars in a natural environment. Maybe.

Rendezvous With Rama (1973)

Arthur C. Clarke’s novel about what happens when a massive spaceship suddenly enters our solar system.

Weir: A very exciting first contact story. One of the main reasons I liked it is it’s a great unfolding mystery. What is this thing? What is it doing? They barely have enough infrastructure to send this random collection of yahoos to it. They just happen to be the guys who were physically in the right orbit at the right moment. So that was pretty cool. But in the end, I think my favorite thing about it was—and this is a spoiler for anyone who hasn’t read this 60-year-old book—in the end, the alien ship did not give a crap about us at all. They weren’t here to talk to us. They just hop from star to star, and recharge by getting near a star and collecting energy. So the Ramas probably didn’t even know about life on Earth. They could not care less about us. And I think that’s so neat. I’d never seen a story where the aliens just didn’t even care about humans before.

GQ: They kind of sound like space algae.

Yeah, kind of. Maybe that might have been part of it. It’s like space algae. Astrophage wasn’t here for Earth. It was here for the sun.

Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005)

Bonus-round pick. Because all of Weir’s selections were sci-fi, I asked him if there were any particular films or novels that gave him a sense of how to write the interiority of his characters, and I thought his response was interesting.

Weir: I don’t consider my characters to be that good. In fact, I consider that to be one of my biggest weaknesses as a writer—character depth and complexity. That’s something I really wish I could learn to do better. I really want to be better at writing fleshed-out characters.