Steve Kettmann

For more than 20 years, my friend Pedro Gomez and I had been saying that even in our 70s we’d be laughing over stories...

Nothing Andy Weir says in his calm, understated, chuckling-at-himself voice can begin to explain how this unassuming software engineer who lives in Mountain View--just another productive drone in the Silicon Valley hive for countless years--turned out to be the One.

It's been building a while, the sense that the novel, far from being exiled indefinitely from the hurly-burly of relevance, was tacking back into the mix, recovered from the fashion consciousness of campus influence and other existential threats, ready to stand and be counted.