Forward Collection (Andy Weir) Books in Order

Forward is a collection of six separate science fiction stories curated by Blake Crouch. Each writer began with the idea of a significant technological turning point and explored what might follow from it. The collection brings together Crouch, N. K. Jemisin, Veronica Roth, Amor Towles, Paul Tremblay and Andy Weir. Their stories share that starting question while taking place in different settings, with different characters and very different kinds of danger.

Weir's contribution, Randomize, turns the question into a Las Vegas heist. In its near-future setting, a casino uses a quantum computer to make its keno system resistant to manipulation. That promise of security becomes an invitation to people who understand the technology well enough to challenge it. A physicist and her husband see an opportunity to profit from a system that appears impossible to beat. The casino's confidence and the would-be thieves' ingenuity place scientific reasoning inside a familiar crime-story setup.

The central contest is over who understands the machinery better.

Readers of Weir's longer novels will recognize the interest in working through a technical problem, although the scale here is much smaller than a mission through space. Randomize concentrates on a particular scheme, the assumptions behind it and the people trying to take advantage of those assumptions. Its suspense comes from the gap between a system's advertised reliability and what an inventive opponent might discover. The short format allows that problem to remain the story's main focus, with the gambling setting giving every calculation a financial consequence.

The surrounding collection shows how widely the same prompt can travel. Crouch's Summer Frost follows a game designer confronting a character that appears to become aware. Jemisin's Emergency Skin sends an explorer back to an Earth his ancestors abandoned. Roth's Ark considers human connection as the world approaches destruction. Towles's You Have Arrived at Your Destination looks at a fertility clinic's ability to influence an unborn child's future, while Tremblay's The Last Conversation concerns a patient whose recovery raises troubling questions. These are independent visions rather than chapters of a shared adventure.

There is no continuing cast to follow between the stories.

On this author page, the Forward entry represents Weir's Randomize rather than a six-book series written by him. It can be read on its own, without preparation from his novels or the other contributions. Readers who continue through the collection will move between technological suspense, personal uncertainty and broader speculation, with each author choosing a different distance from the present and a different emotional response to change.