Convincing You to Read Books by Andy Weir
If you have Goodreads and you follow Maude Garrett, Amanda Tass, or Amanda Guarragi (me), you know that Maude and our book club have read three of Andy Weir’s sci-fi novels.
From The Martian to Project Hail Mary, Maude and the MBC community have loved his humour and how he depicts space. Within the sci-fi genre, the themes of loneliness and survival are very prominent. Weir explores how his lead characters navigate these obstacles in the wide unknown.
Andy Weir built a two-decade career as a software engineer until the success of his first published novel, The Martian, allowed him to live out his dream of writing full-time. He is a lifelong space nerd and a devoted hobbyist of such subjects as relativistic physics, orbital mechanics, and the history of manned spaceflight. He also mixes a mean cocktail. He lives in California.
Themes in Andy Weir’s Books
Artemis: the fear that morality is situational, friendship, space science/engineering
The Martian: isolation, human connection, human ingenuity, abandonment, humans vs. nature
Project Hail Mary: survival, scientific discovery, sacrifice, human connection
Randomize: con-artists, gambling, quantum computing
Synopsis
Jazz Bashara is a criminal.
Well, sort of. Life on Artemis, the first and only city on the moon, is tough if you're not a rich tourist or an eccentric billionaire. So smuggling in the occasional harmless bit of contraband barely counts, right? Not when you've got debts to pay and your job as a porter barely covers the rent.
Everything changes when Jazz sees the chance to commit the perfect crime, with a reward too lucrative to turn down. But pulling off the impossible is just the start of her problems, as she learns that she's stepped square into a conspiracy for control of Artemis itself—and that now, her only chance at survival lies in a gambit even riskier than the first.
Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on Mars.
Now, he’s sure he’ll be the first person to die there.
After a dust storm nearly kills him and forces his crew to evacuate while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded and completely alone with no way to even signal Earth that he’s alive—and even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone long before a rescue could arrive.
Chances are, though, he won’t have time to starve to death. The damaged machinery, unforgiving environment, or plain-old “human error” are much more likely to kill him first.
But Mark isn’t ready to give up yet. Drawing on his ingenuity, his engineering skills — and a relentless, dogged refusal to quit — he steadfastly confronts one seemingly insurmountable obstacle after the next. Will his resourcefulness be enough to overcome the impossible odds against him?
Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish.
Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.
All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.
His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it’s up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery—and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.
And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he’s got to do it all alone.
Or does he?
In the near future, if Vegas games are ingeniously scam-proof, then the heists have to be too, in this imaginative and whip-smart story by the New York Times bestselling author of The Martian.
An IT whiz at the Babylon Casino is enlisted to upgrade security for the game of keno and its random-number generator. The new quantum computer system is foolproof. But someone on the inside is no fool. For once the odds may not favor the house—unless human ingenuity isn’t entirely a thing of the past.
Why You Should Pick Up One Of Andy Weir’s Books
Many readers return to Andy Weir’s sci-fi novels because he makes them accessible to everyone. Some authors use dense scientific jargon or have elaborate descriptions that some readers may find difficult to understand. Weir places the reader in the mind of his protagonist with ease and explores space through different lenses. It’s interesting to read one of Weir’s books because of the similar conventions of the genre but he makes it uniquely his as well.
The characters are normally isolated and face many internal obstacles while craving human connection. Many people can grow tired of other humans, and Weir reminds us that we suffer without building that sense of community. For those who want to understand space exploration or any science, for that matter, Weir makes it easy and fun. You will not only gain a new appreciation for the genre. But you’ll want to read whatever sci-fi novel Weir releases next.
Which Andy Weir books have you read? Let us know in the comments below or join our discord today!
You can become a member today and join us in reading Artemis by Andy Weir as our BONUS BOOK of the month. There is also access to behind-the-scenes content from ‘Maude’s Book Club’.
