Recommendations
Books Like The Martian
Best books to read after The Martian by Andy Weir
Andy Weir's The Martian is the cheerful survival SF landmark — Mark Watney growing potatoes on Mars. These recommendations continue the Weir canon, explore the hard SF tradition, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the problem-solving survival narrative.
- 1Buy
Project Hail Mary
by Andy Weir
Weir's most celebrated novel and most common second recommendation — Ryland Grace waking alone on a spaceship with no memory, widely considered an improvement on The Martian in character, stakes, and the quality of its central relationship.
- 2Buy
Artemis
by Andy Weir
The second Weir novel — Jazz Bashara, criminal porter and smuggler in the lunar city of Artemis, a heist novel on the Moon for readers who want more Weir after The Martian.
- 3Buy
The Martian Chronicles
by Ray Bradbury
The lyrical Mars companion — Bradbury's classic linked stories of the colonization and failure of Mars, the polar opposite of Weir's engineering-focused approach, showing the full range of what Mars can mean in fiction.
- 4Buy
Red Mars
by Kim Stanley Robinson
The most comprehensive Mars colonization novel — the First Hundred scientists terraforming Mars over decades and centuries, Robinson's trilogy the most scientifically rigorous and politically serious treatment of Mars colonization in fiction.
- 5Buy
The Martian War
by Gabriel Mesta
The alternate history companion — H.G. Wells caught up in a real Martian invasion, mixing Wells's own writing and life with his War of the Worlds for readers who want a very different kind of Mars fiction alongside Weir.
- 6Buy
Seveneves
by Neal Stephenson
The catastrophic survival SF companion — humanity responding to the fragmentation of the moon with a desperate engineering project to survive in orbit, Stephenson's novel sharing Weir's love of detailed engineering solutions to existential problems.
- 7Buy
Old Man's War
by John Scalzi
The accessible military SF companion — seventy-five-year-olds rejuvenated to fight an interstellar war, Scalzi's novel sharing The Martian's tone of cheerful competence in the face of impossible odds.
- 8Buy
The Expanse
by James S.A. Corey
The comprehensive solar system hard SF series — humanity spread across Earth, Mars, and the Belt, the most complete contemporary treatment of a spacefaring civilization, sharing Weir's commitment to realistic physics and engineering.
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