Andy Weir

Andy Weir grew up in Livermore, California. His father was a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and his mother was an electrical engineer. At 15 he started work as a programmer at Sandia National Laboratories. He studied computer science at the University of California, San Diego, but did not graduate. For about 25 years he worked as a software engineer at AOL, Palm, Blizzard and others.

He wrote fiction on the side and posted The Martian free on his website, chapter by chapter. Readers asked for an ebook, and he sold it on Kindle for 99 cents in 2011. It reached the bestseller list, Crown bought the rights, and Ridley Scott filmed it in 2015.

Project Hail Mary (2021) follows Ryland Grace, a science teacher who wakes alone on a spaceship with no memory. A microbe is dimming the Sun, and he has to find a way to save Earth. On the way he meets an alien engineer he calls Rocky. Like The Martian, the novel solves its problems with real physics and chemistry. It was a Hugo Award finalist and became a film in 2026. His other novel is Artemis (2017), set on the Moon.