Andy Weir

Andy Weir is the New York Times bestselling author behind The Martian, Artemis, and Project Hail Mary. Born in California in 1972, he grew up reading classic science fiction and studied computer science at UC San Diego before spending two decades as a software engineer. He started writing fiction on the side, posting chapters on his personal website, and self-published The Martian as a Kindle edition in 2011 after readers asked for a downloadable version.

The Martian made him a full-time writer. Crown picked it up in 2014, it climbed the bestseller lists, and in 2015 Ridley Scott directed the film adaptation starring Matt Damon, which earned seven Academy Award nominations including Best Picture. The book reads like a survival diary: an astronaut stranded on Mars after his crew assumes him dead, working the problem with a wrench, a calculator, and dark humor. Weir wrote it the same way he reads science fiction, with the physics actually checking out.

His second novel, Artemis (2017), moved the setting to a near-future lunar colony and tracked a smuggler turned saboteur in one-sixth gravity. Project Hail Mary (2021) returned to the survival-by-engineering register that made The Martian a hit. A lone astronaut wakes up alone on a ship he doesn't remember boarding, with two corpses for company and an extinction-level threat back home. The book was a Hugo Award finalist and topped the New York Times list. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller directed the film adaptation, released in March 2026 with Ryan Gosling in the lead.

Weir also wrote Cheshire Crossing, a graphic novel collaboration with illustrator Sarah Andersen that began as fan fiction crossing Alice, Wendy, and Dorothy across the multiverse. He lives in California, calls himself a lifelong space nerd, and keeps current obsessions in relativistic physics, orbital mechanics, and the history of crewed spaceflight.