Andy Weir Books in Order

If you want his classic survival story: The Martian
If you want a smart lunar heist: Artemis
If you want big, heartfelt space adventure: Project Hail Mary
If you want a quick taste of his short fiction: Randomize → The Egg and Other Stories / Principles of Uncertainty → James Moriarty, Consulting Criminal

Andy Weir is an American science fiction writer who went from posting stories on his personal website to seeing them turned into blockbuster films. He is best known for The Martian, Artemis, and Project Hail Mary, all built on meticulous science and very human characters.

He was born on June 16, 1972, in Davis, California, and grew up in nearby Milpitas. His father worked as a physicist and his mother as an electrical engineer, so talk about science was just part of the background noise at home. As a kid he devoured classic science fiction from writers like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke.

By fifteen he was already working as a computer programmer for a national laboratory, getting an early taste of serious engineering and high stakes problem solving.

After high school he studied computer science at the University of California, San Diego, but left before finishing his degree. Instead he built a career in software, writing code for a string of tech companies, including time at a major game studio working on the fantasy strategy game Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness.

In his spare hours Weir kept turning back to stories. In the early 2000s he launched the webcomic Casey and Andy, a joke filled strip about two mad scientists and their chaotic experiments, followed by the crossover comic Cheshire Crossing, which imagines older versions of Alice, Dorothy, and Wendy colliding across worlds. He also posted short fiction, including the brief, philosophical story The Egg in 2009, which spread widely online and introduced many readers to his work.

His breakthrough came with The Martian. Weir originally published the novel a chapter at a time on his website, obsessively researching orbital mechanics, Mars habitats, and life support systems so the details would feel right. Reader demand pushed him to release it as an inexpensive ebook, where word of mouth turned a niche project into a bestseller and eventually led to a major print deal.

In 2015 the novel was adapted into a feature film directed by Ridley Scott and starring Matt Damon as stranded astronaut Mark Watney. The success of the book and movie let Weir leave day job programming behind and write full time, and he received the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer the following year.

Weir followed with Artemis, a caper set in the first city on the Moon, and Project Hail Mary, in which a middle school science teacher wakes up alone on a starship and slowly remembers that he is on a one way mission to save Earth’s dying sun. Project Hail Mary won major science fiction awards, was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and is being adapted for film with Ryan Gosling attached to star.

Across all of these stories, Weir leans into ordinary people stuck in extraordinary technical situations, using math, engineering, and a streak of sarcastic humor to claw their way toward survival.

Even after leaving software, he still talks like an engineer, running numbers and back of the envelope calculations to see if a fictional solution could really work. He has written collections like The Egg and Other Stories and the Sherlockian set James Moriarty, Consulting Criminal, and he continues to experiment with short fiction alongside big novels. He has spent most of his life in California’s Bay Area, and has spoken openly about once having a serious fear of flying, then pushing through it so he could visit places like NASA’s Johnson Space Center and meet the scientists who inspire his work.