I think Weir creates an unfortunate dichotomy in this interview: writing to entertain vs. “preaching” (i.e. writing with a message). He’s basically throwing shade at every great science fiction author from Issac Asimov to Ted Chiang, which is sad, because a great writer/storyteller does both — uses an entertaining and page-turning story to help us look at our own world and ideas. Weir is playing into the anti-intellectualism rampant in our country today by saying, “hey, I don’t play those artsy-fartsy games, I just write.”

Rudyard Kipling said that a writer is like telegraph wires — picking up the signals from elsewhere, channeling them, but not in full control of their material. Any writer knows that this is true to some extent. Characters and themes get out of hand, and develop far beyond what you ever expected (especially in a threadbare outline). Weir himself proved this with The Martian, which is full of ideas and commentary, and is profoundly thoughtful about the ethics of sending people into space, and who should be in the ultimate authority of exploration — the corporations or the explorers themselves?

His recent novel, Artemis, however, seems like a thundering mantra for his idea that “novels shouldn’t be intellectual.” It’s a dud. Not entertaining, not enlightening, just derivative of so much good science fiction before it. Maybe he wrote it too quickly, or was pressured by publishers to cash into The Martian’s success. But to me, it validates the idea that if you only write to spin words, and make anti-intellectualism a motto, you get Artemis: a threadbare, naive, characterless, boring potboiler of a novel.

If you fear ideas your in the wrong profession — maybe stick with your day job?