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Weir, Andy

Entry updated 2 January 2023. Tagged: Author.

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(1972-    ) US author who has also written as by Jack Sharp and has self-published fiction at his Galactanet site [see links below] since 2009. His first novel, The Martian (2014), initially self-published as a free online ebook in 2012, describes in considerable detail the travails of an astronaut stranded on Mars as fellow-Scientists work out a way to rescue him. His survival techniques include growing potatoes in his departed team's Martian habitat module, and burning hydrogen to make water. The datedness of the tale – no real-life Mars expedition could plausibly be contemplated for the now looming Near Future third decade of the twenty-first century without planning for the incorporation of advanced 3D printers to replicate necessities and to make repairs – may explain the arbitrary nature of his plight; the tale is therefore an old-fashioned but enjoyably worked-out Thought Experiment in the arts of survival, distantly echoing the Martian Robinsonade of Rex Gordon's No Man Friday (1956; vt First on Mars 1957). The novel was very successfully filmed as The Martian (2015), directed by Ridley Scott, which won a Hugo as best long-form dramatic presentation. Weir received the John W Campbell Award as best new writer in 2016.

His second novel Artemis (2017), featuring sabotage, criminal violence and pursuit of a technological McGuffin in and around the titular five-domed Moon base, is similar in tone, with another likable first-person narrator (here female) and many technical Infodumps. Lacking The Martian's tight focus on a single urgent problem, Artemis had a mixed critical reception. Weir's third novel, Project Hail Mary (2021), returns however to the carceral heroics of his first, with a Technology-savvy but Amnesiac protagonist awakening to find himself on a Spaceship where he has been tasked with a mission to save Homo sapiens from an Alien civilization about to invest Earth. [JC]

see also: Agriculture; Seiun Award.

Andy Weir

born Davis, California: 16 June 1972

works

  • The Martian (no place given: Andy Weir, 2012) [ebook: edited in collaboration with Bryan Thomas Schmidt from Weir's 2009 website version: na/]
    • The Martian (New York: Crown Publishers, 2014) [rev of the above: hb/Eric White]
  • Artemis (New York: Crown Publishers, 2017) [hb/Kovalto1/Shutterstock]
  • Project Hail Mary (New York: Ballantine Books, 2021) [hb/]

collections and stories

  • The Egg (place not given: Galactanet, 2009) [story: ebook: na/]

links

previous versions of this entry



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