Andy Weir

There's something interesting there to fantasize about.

Like, what if I had this MacGuffin device or what if I had this power?

And it's like, if I find myself thinking about the idea a lot, then that probably means it would be interesting to a reader.

People often don't believe this, but Project Hail Mary was... I mean, I put a lot of work into making this happen, but it's a single cohesive story where each thing leads into the next and all of the things that are going on in it all make sense in context with each other.

But they were originally...

a bunch of unrelated story ideas that I had, like a pastiche of like, like I had one idea about, you know, wouldn't it be cool if we had a fuel that used light as propellant?

That would be like the most efficient specific impulse.

You could, you could like a few kilograms of this fuel and you could like travel the solar system.

And then I was like, and then unrelated to that, like months later, I was like coming up with an idea about what if a guy woke up aboard a spaceship and

and didn't know it.

And then like, how would you figure it out?

And so on.

And then because I live and breathe and like science fiction, I've always wanted to do a first contact story.

And so all of these things just like were unrelated ideas that I glued together and then sanded down the seams.

And it looks like a single cohesive story.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I wouldn't put her in the category of like Elon Musk because I think Musk does a lot of cool stuff.

But she is like Elon Musk likes to go in 50 directions at once.

And Strat is singularly obsessively focused on this one objective.