Andy Weir

Like I love it.

It's so fun.

For the aliens in Project Hail Mary, side note, spoiler.

I mean, if you're listening to this, you know, and like you haven't read Project Hail Mary and you somehow didn't know that there are intelligent aliens in it, then I don't know what to tell you.

So working out how Iridian biology was, that was really fun for me because I started off by saying like, okay, I need to pick a star.

Okay.

A real star.

Okay.

So 40 Eridani.

All right.

It's a solar analog.

Later in the book, we learn out that there was probably a panspermia event, so it makes sense that it'll have a star similar to ours.

Then I wanted to pick a real exoplanet.

So the first planet in the 40 Eridani system is actually, it's a real planet, and its name is like 40 Eridani, capital A, lowercase b, because astronomers suck at naming things, right?

So, but we know some things about this planet.

We know it's about eight times the mass of Earth.

We know how long it takes to orbit the star.

We know how far it is from the star.

And stuff like that.

I'm like, okay, this is a planet that's like eight times the mass of Earth.