Month: November 2014

Andy Wier the author of The Martian, his first novel, does not need an introduction from me. His work is enough to distinct him. Still, the 42 year, living in Northen California, a software engineer, a life long space nerd, and a ‘Whovian’. Enough of me. Let’s see what Andy has to say.

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Hi Andy, and thank you for agreeing this interview. Congratulations on the success of The Martian, an amazing read. Tell me a little about yourself and your background?

I’m 42 years old and I live in Northern California. I’m a lifelong fan of manned and unmanned spaceflight and a science nerd. I’ve been a computer programmer for 25 years, and I only recently quit that profession to go full-time on writing.

You got a job at 15, while most of us were still struggling through the days of puberty. How?

I grew up in Livermore, CA, and there are two major government laboratories at the far end of town. They employed (at the time) about 25% of the whole city. Sandia Labs did a community outreach program where they hired local kids to be lab assistants. So I was hired basically as a test-tube cleaner, menial labor kind of thing. The lab I worked for needed some data analyzed on a computer, so they handed me a book on how to program computers and told me to learn how. That began my software engineering career.

The Martian was originally self-published. Does the print version differs from the first edition?

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