Andy Weir and Eng-fi
I tend to read non-fiction rather than fiction, but some of the novels I have consumed over the last few years are those by Andy Weir, whose 2011 debut novel The Martian was adapted into the 2015 film of the same name directed by Ridley Scott and starring Matt Damon. So far he’s published three print novels: The Martian (2011, 2014); Artemis (2017), and Project Hail Mary (2021)
Weir’s stories are often categorised as science fiction, and as a first approximation that’s not inaccurate. However, I think science fiction doesn’t quite do justice to what’s distinct about Weir’s novels, or at least substantial parts of them. Instead, I think the genre of Weir’s novels are better understood as engineering fiction, or Eng-Fi.
What are the key features of Eng-Fi? I think they include the follows:
- A strong focus on a protagonist operating in a universe governed by physical laws that closely approximate our own. 1
- A protagonist with a deep, broad and applied knowledge of how technologies and tools work, grounded in an understanding of the physical laws and scientific processes such technologies are known to utilise in order to work.
- The narrative confabulation of situations in which the protagonist is required to solve a series of engineering challenges to avoid serious and adverse outcomes, with suboptimal time constraints and resources.2
- Bodging, failure, and iteration: The interim solution to one engineering challenge has some flaws, which then leads to a problem, requiring another engineering solution.
- Workings out: Very detailed and extensive discussions about how the protagonist went about trying to solve engineering challenges, including the many times they failed. So, the narrative equivalent of focusing at least as much on the methods and supplementary appendix sections of a scientific paper, as well as any scientific lab books and notes, as the final published results.
Though grounded largely in physical reality, Weir’s novels often appear strangely utopian when it comes to social and psychological realities. This includes:
- Valourisation of scientists and engineers: People who can ‘do stuff’ and ‘make stuff’, and understand the methods and techniques required to solve complex problems, are valued and valourised by society as a whole.
- Politically effective technocracies: There are enough technically and scientifically capable people in positions of political power to be able to understand that something is a problem in need of a solution, and to devote sufficient resource and expertise to it being solved.
- Problem-solving and discovery as a universal human aspiration: The idea that people should try to understand the physical world well enough to solve complex problems, rather than just (say) write poetry about the human condition, is taken as a given.
- Space-faring: Willingness to devote substantial public and private resource to space flight and colonisation, without (say) political pushback arguing that such resources should be better spent on either welfare or warfare, is also just taken as a given.
- Common humanity: In situations of mutual peril and opportunity, the human race will come together to meet their collective challenges.
So, Weir’s Eng-Fi seems to combine physical realism with psycho-sociological utopianism. This might sound like a criticism, but in terms of compelling story-telling, it’s not! Not all of Weir’s novels are pure Eng-Fi. I’d categorise them as follows:
- The Martian:3 90% Eng-Fi; 10% Sci-Fi
- Artemis: 35% Eng-Fi; 15% Sci-Fi; 25% Noir4; 25% Heist5
- Project Hail Mary: 55% Eng-Fi; 45% Sci-Fi
And of the three, it’s the two with more Eng-Fi I’ve found the more compelling, both because of their attempted commitment to physical realism, but also because of their arguably less realistic portrayal of politics, psychology and sociology. In Weir’s stories, when push comes to shove, it’s the engineers and scientists, not the politicians and generals, who are called on to save the day. As compared with the dystopian sci-fi that predominates, in which humanity is both the catalyst - usually through its influence on the climate - and also accelerant - usually through its pettyminded tribal politicking - of its own demise, there’s something beautifully, poignantly hopeful about the collective sensemaking expressed in Weir’s stories.
In praise of neurodiversity
On Weir’s wikipedia page, it’s stated that Weir’s parents worked as a physicist and an electrical engineer, and that Weir himself worked as a computer programmer. To the extent none of this is surprising, it’s because we implicitly understand that there’s something in common between these kinds of occupation, that they’re all about tractable rule-bound problem solving, that persons with similar psychological and neurological profiles are drawn disproportionately to work in such fields, and perhaps also that there may be a genetic component to such a predisposition.
Perhaps it’s also not a stretch to assume that those factors which predispose people towards engineering, physics and programming also predispose them towards science fiction? Steve Silberman’s book Neurotribes, subtitled The legacy of Autism and how to think smarter about people who think differently, includes 47 references to ‘science fiction’, with an interest in science fiction being noted as relatively common amongst those more likely to be diagnosed with some form of autism or exhibit characteristics associated with this ‘disorder’.
As both title and subtitle of Silberman’s book makes clear, there are reasons both for considering the temperament and way of thinking, long associated and pathologised (and more recently disassociated but arguably still pathologised) by the likes of Hans Asperger and his followers, to have some kind of genetic component; and also to be thought of as something other than a neurological or developmental deficit or disorder, not so much as something ‘missing’ from those ‘with autism’ (or more recently ‘on the spectrum’) that’s present in everone else, but more as a distinct and valuable way of thinking that fits some environments and situations better than others.
Evolutionary Origin Story
The evolutionary origin story that makes sense to me - though it’s almost certainly too simple to count as ‘true’ - is the follows: Soon after the development of advanced communication in the human animal came the development of advanced mis-communication, and soon after the development of advanced mis-communication came the development of even more advanced counter-mis-communication. More simply: first we learned to tell the truth, then we learned to lie, then we learned to detect whether someone is being truthful, then we learned to make lies sound truthful, then we learned to better detect lies even when they are made to sound truthful… and so on, and so on.
And by ‘and so on’, I really mean ‘and so on’ to the power of a lot. For millions of years humans, as social creatures, have been stuck in a cognitive arms race with ourselves. Our brains grew: larger, more energy hungry, and more physically unweildy. As infants, we are more vulnerable and underdeveloped than other mammals, with heads so large they can barely fit through birth canals (leading to much increased risk of complication during childbirth), and so heavy we can barely lift them for the first few weeks of life. But we also grew ever better able to communicate with others, and to miscommunicate with others, and to tell truth from lies.
But the end result, other than our massive brains - and in particular our massive pre-frontal cortexes - has been a stalemate. Because both lying and lie-detection co-evolved, buoyed by and attempting to outmaneauver each other, in the end we’re about as good at both, with the end result being that people - normally developed, neurotypical, well socialised people - tend to be about as good at lying as lie-detection, and so overall not especially good at using social cues to tell when someone’s telling the truth. 6
So, the legacy of complex human social co-evolution: massive brains, and an obsessive pre-occupation with other people, and trying to figure out if they mean what they say, or are saying what they mean.
What does it really mean to think differently?
The origin story of neurodiversity then, or at least those aspects that lead to a love of Sci-Fi and Eng-Fi, comes from then asking: What would happen if, for just small proportion of people, just some of the evolved human capacity for advanced, complex reasoning were diverted away from the stalemate of social reasoning, and towards the pursuit of understanding more about the broader natural and physical world?
The short answer may well be, in its more extreme form, autism. But the longer and more interesting answer may be something like a neurological profile and disposition that both, at the individual level, leads to acute challenges and difficulties negotiating with complex social relationships and realities; but also, over the longer term, and at a societal level, is instrumental for causing those advancements that fundamentally change the material circumstances in which everyone lives.
But for this kind of neurodiversity, I suspect we’d still sitting around a fire, dressed in loincloths, lying to each other, in ever more sophisticated ways, about where the berries and wilderbeast are. But for this kind of neurodiversity, if someone in their twenties died, we’d still be looking for which sky or earth gods to appease, rather than to discover tetanus and antibiotics. Those with this kind of neurotype might struggle more than most to live in the world, but they’re also instrumental in making the world in which they struggle to live.
In a world without this kind of neurodiversity, I also suspect there’d be a lot less Eng-Fi, with their plucky problem-solvers and reasonable statesmen and politicans, as well as fewer means (other than orally, across a campfire) of reading about and listening to such stories. It would be a much poorer world, both materially and cognitively, that I’m grateful I don’t live in!
Footnotes
This is one obvious point of departure from much of sci-fi, which can focus instead on asking “what if” one or more rules of the universe were different.↩︎
In The Martian the set-up is essentially “solve engineering challenges or die”; whereas in Project Hail Mary it’s “solve engineering challenges or humanity dies”.↩︎
Basically Robinson Crusoe in space… so was Robinson Crusoe the first Eng-Fi novel? I guess it depends on how much detail it goes into about how exactly Crusoe makes fire and makes shelter!↩︎
Think Chinatown… but on The Moon!↩︎
Think Ocean’s Eleven… but on The Moon!↩︎
Two ways of improving lie-detection are: i) to focus on logical inconsistency and external verification for the statements others make, for which text transcripts of statements can be more effective than verbal or video records of those statements; ii) to look for ‘tells’ in someone’s behaviour in parts of their body they are less likely to seek to ‘lie with’. For FBI interrogator Joe Navarro, this leads to the suggestion to look at people’s feet more than their faces.↩︎