Wired.com presents the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. And here is your host, David Barr-Kirtley.

Hello and welcome to episode 169 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is Andy Weir, author of the best-selling science fiction novel The Martian,

about an astronaut stranded on Mars who must use his knowledge of science to survive long enough to be rescued.

The story began as a free serial on Andy's website,

and when he uploaded the book to Amazon.com, the Martian quickly shot up the charts, where it attracted the interest of an editor from Crown.

The Martian is now available in bookstores everywhere, and a big budget movie adaptation hits

theaters October 2nd.

And now here's our interview with Andy Weir.

All right, so we're here with Andy Weir.

Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Okay, so first off, just tell us about how you got interested in reading science fiction.

Well, I think I was doomed to be a nerd because my father is a particle physicist and my mother was an electrical engineer. And so I was pretty much on that course from day one. My dad

had an infinite supply of old 1950s and 60s sci-fi novels, which she had read growing up, and so I had access to them.

And that's what I would read.

So it's kind of interesting in that I, the sci-fi that I read when I was growing up was like kind of one generation off of what you'd expect for my age.

It's like I grew up reading Baby Boomer Sci-Fi.

And so my holy trinity of authors, the ones that I really look up to and

aspire to be like, are Asimov, Park, and Heinlein.

Well, speaking of Heinlein, I was kind of wondering if you had ever read his novel

Tunnel in the sky. Oh yes, oh yes that's one of my it is one of my very favorite

...