What It Is Like Reading Andy Weir.

Date published: 2026-10-24T16:38:20Z

I have been a long time fan of Peter Watts. I love all of his wonderfully pessimistic writings. I have also been a long time fan of Lovecraft and his bleak Cosmicism. Every page of Berserk's Eclipse and Black Swordsman high art and Beksiński's paintings a beautiful vision of hell. I am a natural pessimist, a clinically certified majorly depressed feller, so if the art is dark and brooding and miserable, it is for me.

But one day I've started reading Weir. It felt like I’m out of my reinforced concrete bunker, out of the blast door. I was breathing fresh air and enjoying the sunshine. I was looking at the blue of the sky drawing its negative space around the green of the trees and vice versa. I was looking at the insects scurrying around and the spiders hidden in their nets and hearing the birds and their chirps. That’s how it felt reading Project Hail Mary and then reading The Martian.

There is a certain practice in Buddhism called Metta* Bhavana. In English they've translated "Metta" with the disgustingly saccharine term "Loving-Kindness". In this practice you try cultivating a certain attitude towards yourself and towards others where the automatic emotion and attitude of mind rising to any event is care and love** rather than envy, anger, etc.

The procedure is as follows: you sit alone with yourself and wish onto yourself and onto others various good things. Instead of silently repeating to yourself and to your brother "I fucking hate your guts", like you normally do, you silently say "may you be happy", you repeat "may you be healthy", and similar wishy washy hippie crap like that. With time, negative emotions and thoughts and attitudes towards yourself and towards others are crowded out and replaced with positive ones.

It is an extremely hard practice for negative pricks like me, so I almost never sit and practice Metta, but when I earnestly sat and followed it to the letter, it was one of the few times where it felt like I donned a pair of rose tinted glasses.

What I am getting at is that we brains have a certain degree of maleability. The forces working this clay are the thoughts and emotions we regularly experience, or choose to experience through fiction and other media or through bona fide meditation practices.

So anyway, I need to read more things like Andy Weir. Recommendations, please?

* There are several others, some rather similar but distinct, attitudes Buddhism tries to cultivate. One is Mudita, a good natured version of Schadenfreude. Rather than feeling joy at others' misfortune, one feels joy at others' good fortune.

** If you are currently being murdered, or something like murdered, I would advise that Metta would be the last to rise.