Ryan Gosling looking at some equipment as Ryland Grace in Project Hail Mary

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If you're an aspiring science fiction novelist, you would do well to take the advice of author Andy Weir, who's red hot in publication and Hollywood thanks to the runaway successes of "The Martian" and "Project Hail Mary." That the former was self-published before getting turned into a bestseller and a blockbuster film directed by Ridley Scott — one that starred Matt Damon and earned seven Academy Award nominations, including a nod for Best Picture — is the dream of every up-and-coming writer.

So, genre authors have good reason to hang on Weir's every word, especially when it comes to capturing his profitable vibe. And while I'm a firm believer in finding your own vibe, there's a time-honored tradition in this industry of proving you can write comfortably within established formulae. With Weir, it's about straddling the line between hard science and uplifting, humanistic engagement with a vast universe that needn't be as harsh as we've been led to think. We can always, as Damon's character in "The Martian" says, "science the s*** out of" our various predicaments. I think that's naively hopeful in an age where the United States government is vehemently anti-science (unless it lines the pockets of AI-shilling tech billionaires), but Weir's got that storytelling magic that makes you want to believe we're not too far gone.

Weir is but one man, though, so if you're wondering where you can find his vibe in other work, he shared some suggestions with /Film's Jeremy Mathai, starting with his go-to recommendation:

"Well, if you consider an Andy Weir vibe to be just hard science fiction, with accurate science in there, then you got to go for [James S.A. Corey's] 'The Expanse.' That's really, really good hard sci-fi. That's really solid."

Andy Weir is a proponent of hard science fiction

Joel Edgerton as Jason Dessen and Jennifer Connelly as Daniela Dessen embrace in Dark Matter

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"The Expanse," for those not familiar, deals with a relatively realistic colonization of our solar system that does not initially involve interstellar travel. There's literally a lot of space to fill, but it's subject to the kinds of territorial disputes that have sparked wars on Earth. Ultimately, the narrative expands, bringing in aliens and the like, but, in its television incarnation, Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby (who brilliantly adapted P.D. James' "The Children of Men" in 2006) approach the scenario with intellectual rigor.

Andy Weir also voiced enthusiasm for Blake Crouch's "Dark Matter," a frantically paced sci-fi novel that's been successfully adapted into an Apple TV series via the author himself. The small screen version of Crouch's parallel universe thriller stars Joel Edgerton and Jennifer Connelly, and it finds the former's character struggling to skip back to his reality (where his family is being appropriated by an alternate universe version of himself).

Finally, Weir is a proponent of Ben Bova's "The Grand Tour" novels, most notably the fourth entry in the book series titled "Mars." As Weir explained:

"That's a fairly hard sci-fi approach to a mission to Mars. It's about the first mission to Mars. It's got some pretty interesting twists in there that turn out to be ... at first, they look a little bit woo-woo, aliens, oh no. Then you find out the twist reveal of what's going wrong, and the thing is absolutely scientific and completely sensible and you're like, 'Ah, nice one.'"

Again, I'd advise you to find your own vibe, but if you want to catch the eye of publishers or studio execs, maybe check these works out and find your way forward the Weir way.