"Thanks! I wrote The Egg in an evening but it took years to write The Martian. Sometimes I'm a little sad that The Martian wasn't anywhere near as popular, but I guess it's a niche readership. Hard sci-fi isn't for everyone."
I think it says much that hard sci-fi isn’t popular to modern science and or the economy or government. Ie modern society lacks some sort of gee whiz goal on the horizon to push interest. Electric cars are cool, for instance, but they’re here and they’re not practical for apartment renters and distance drivers. Space discoveries are cool, but they take a long time to pull off and the results aren’t very compelling - with the exception of anything ET life related.
I feel like modern science may somehow be restricting or restricted from ground breaking, compelling discoveries.
Like, imagine if the world had a big-budget moonshot research project? Mining and colonizing asteroids, a space elevator, novel thruster technology, colonizing the seas even.
And yet it still serves as a common talking point for inspiration. People did go into the sciences in the past and day dream of all sorts of things because of the Apollo missions. The political realities of the Cold War helped fund the project...sort of like how the fight against terrorism helps fund projects to this day.
This seems like such an odd response to me. The Martian is as far as you can get from hard sci-fi?
It seems like Andy writes exactly for movies. Heavy on scene and technicality details, but very, very scant on quality dialogue and character development.
That's great!