Reading the Andy Weir books in order couldn’t be easier. The author has written a couple of standalone science-fiction books, including the popular The Martian, the book that sparked the creation of the blockbuster movie with the same title featuring Matt Damon.
While The Martian was the author’s debut novel (you don’t see many debut novels becoming bestsellers and being picked up by Ridley Scott), he has written several other stories as well, including The Egg, a short story about which some people might say it’s the author’s best work yet.
Here are the Andy Weir books in order for his sci-fi works. While at the moment there is not a lot to report, the list will be updated with everything new that he will be writing in the future.
New Andy Weir Book
Project Hail Mary, 2021
Publication Order of Andy Weir Books
- The Egg (short story), 2009
- The Martian, 2011
- Diary of an AssCan, 2015 (The Martian #0.5)
- Artemis, 2017
- Cheshire Crossing, 2019
- Randomize, 2019
- Project Hail Mary, 2021
Andy Weir Biography
Andy Weir was born in 1972 in Davis, California, the home of the Davis University of California. Both his parents had relevant careers that would shape the writing that the author would put out later in his years. His father was an accelerator physicist, and his mother an electrical engineer.
Andy grew up reading classic sci-fi books, including stories by Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. His first job was as a computer programmer at Sandia National Laboratories, which he started doing at the age of 15. While he attended the UC San Diego’s computer science courses, he did not graduate due to lacking the funds to complete his studies in full.
Instead, he obtained several other jobs as a pc programmer with prestigious companies such as AOL, Blizzard (the company that created the WOW and Diablo games), Palm, and Mobileltron. In fact, while being employed by Blizzard, Andy Weir worked on Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness. He has been working as a software developer since then while writing books in his spare time.
During his twenties, Andy Weir began writing fiction. He published many of his stories over the years on his personal blog. One of his popular creations, which drew lots of visitors to his site, was Casey and Andy, a humorous webcomic series.
The first book he tried to publish, Theft of Pride, a space opera, turned out to be a failure. Written at a time before the internet, it was not picked up by publishers; however, that didn’t deter the author from writing further stories.
The debut novel by Andy Weir, The Martian, was written as a series and published on his website. His readers wanted to get the book published on Amazon, which the author sold for less than a dollar. It soon became an Amazon Kindle bestseller and got the interest of a literary agent who helped him sell the book rights to Crown Publishing Group. The book was finally published in 2011, and in 2015 was made into the popular movie that we know and love.
An interesting tidbit about the author is that he is afraid of flying. So much, in fact, that he could not go to Hungary to visit the set where most of The Martian movie was made. The same reason also stopped him from flying to Los Angeles to meet with the people who wanted to offer him jobs, and he resolved everything through telephone calls.
The Martian, 2012
The Martian focuses on Mark Watney, an astronaut who is stranded on the hot and dusty planet without a means to get back home. It details his life on Mars, his ways of surviving the hostile environment until a spaceship is able to return for him and take him aboard.
As the crew thought he died there, it took them a while to realize that he was, in fact, alive and waiting for them to rescue him. It took Mark a lot of effort, creativity, and knowledge to make his stay on Mars work and not get killed in the process.
The story is said to be as scientifically accurate as possible, and the author has spent a lot of time researching the history of manned spaceflight, the living conditions on Mars, and the orbital mechanics/astrodynamics involving spacecraft.
Andy Weir’s short story, The Egg, was also published and made into a Youtube series. As for his next novel, The Artemis, the author says that it is even more scientifically accurate than The Martian. Artemis was published in 2017. The story features Jazz Bashara, who has lived on the Moon since the early age of six. She is now in her 20s and is a petty criminal who earns money by smuggling people and goods to Artemis, the Moon’s only inhabited place, a frontier town.
Just like for The Martian, the author did a lot of online research again. While he by now knows a lot of NASA scientists, he finds that online searching goes that much faster.
After writing Artemis, Andy Weir mentioned in a recent interview that, while Jazz would not necessarily feature in future stories, he wants to create a whole living world around the town of Artemis, with many more books to come. The movie rights for Artemis have been picked up by Fox and New Regency, and while right now things proceed slowly, at some point we will be seeing a movie featuring Jazz as well.
The latest Andy Weir book is a short story titled Randomize, featured in the Forward futuristic sci-fi techno-thriller collection, where other authors like Blake Crouch, Veronica Roth, N.K. Jemisin, Amor Towles, and Paul Tremblay have also contributed their own short stories. It is an Amazon Originals Stories publication.
Andy Weir currently lives in a rented apartment in Mountain View working on his next book. I hope we will soon get to read more Andy Weir books, be it part of the Artemis universe or something else.
Praise for Andy Weir
Fascinating (Tim Peake)
An action-packed techno-thriller of the first order…the perfect vehicle for humans who want to escape, if only for a time, the severe gravity of planet earth. The pages fly by (USA Today)
Makes cutting-edge science sexy and relevant…Weir has created a realistic and fascinating future society, and every detail feels authentic and scientifically sound. (Associated Press)
Weir has done the impossible—he’s topped The Martian with a sci-fi-noir-thriller set in a city on the moon. What more do you want from life? Go read it! (Blake Crouch)
…a sensational project… (Spine Magazine on Randomize)
References
Books Reading Order » Science Fiction Authors »
I’ve read “The Martian” & “Project Hail Mary” so far. They were awesome. I couldn’t put the books down. I now have “Artemis” on reserve at my library.