The Martian

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first men to walk on the surface of Mars. Now, he's sure he'll be the first man to die there.

It started with the dust storm that holed his suit and nearly killed him, and that forced his crew to leave him behind, sure he was already dead. Now he's stranded millions of miles from the nearest human being, with no way to even signal Earth that he's alive--and even if he could get word out, his food would be gone years before a rescue mission 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 get him first.

But Mark isn't ready to show more 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. But will his resourcefulness be enough to overcome the impossible odds against him?

My Review: The Doubleday UK meme, a book a day for July 2014, is the goad I'm using to get through my snit-based unwritten reviews. For today, which appears to be World UFO Day (snort), it's your favorite SF/F novel, and boy howdy does this qualify!

Starting from the get-go, "Well, I'm fucked", you know Mark Watney isn't going to be one of those steely-eyed, square-jawed Ken-doll astronauts. Those came on the first and second Mars landings, vetted and trained (I don't doubt) by PR consultants as heavily as by scientists. Watney's on the third Mars landing, the one that won't get a parade on their safe return just a handshake and a Groupon for free Tim Horton's or summat like that.

And thank goodness for that, because Kendoll Astronautibot would've Died the Glorious Death for PR purposes. Watney's a helluva lot more fun.

And that is the crux of my review: FUN.

“Well, it is a photo taken from orbit,” Mindy said. “The NSA enhanced the image with the best software they have.”

“Wait, what?” Venkat stammered. “The NSA?”

“Yeah, they called and offered to help out.”

Maybe some po-faced Grimsby McFrownington doesn't think that's side-splittingly funny, but I sure as hell do.

This book is something unusual in my long experience of reading SF. It is exciting, it is convincing, and it is FUN. (Make that reading, not just reading SF.) Andy Weir took a very, very serious situation...life and death, not remotely figuratively...and didn't minimize any of the stakes, didn't make the mistake of downplaying OR overplaying the main character's nature, and delivered a believable smartass engineer, a lateral thinker and a complete fatalist who refuses to give up until he's actually assumed room temperature:

I could cut off an arm and eat it, gaining me valuable calories and reducing my overall caloric need.

I need a minute...laughing....

Now that, my chick-a-biddies, is Andy Weir making an angry, frustrated, maddened-by-stupidity old man lose it, howling with laughter, before he's finished his first cup of coffee. If I were religious, I'd have him on the Sainthood Watch List for performing miracles while still alive, from a long distance.

We all know that there's a movie on the way, starring Matt Damon and directed by Ridley Scott (he's a hard sneeze away from EIGHTY YEARS OLD and he's directing this! mother, may I please be Ridley Scott in my next lifetime?). The odds are reasonably good that this team won't eff it all up and make it into a s'mores-around-the-campfire-Kumbaya-singin'-Murrika-First nightmare. There are real stakes here, and the book delivers laughs while delivering some deeply pulse-pounding action.

And Everything Comes Out Right.

How refreshing is that. How very seldom do we get entertainment where everything comes out right. Post-apocalyptic zombie-plague vampires-eating-your-mama political/prison dramas. Kids dying of cancer before they're old enough to drink played as a romantic theme. Soldiers coming back from the idiot wars our political scum sent them to fight for hugely profitable untaxed corporate "people," who now even have religious rights that I don't think ordinary humans deserve.

It is not a pretty world out there. But for a blessed day or so, Andy Weir made me, the bitterest angriest most man-the-barricades-and-lube-the-tumbrils old cynic y'all know, smile with the uncomplicated happiness of a churchgoer at a picnic. It didn't last, unlike the idiot's bliss, but I treasured it while it was happening. Mark Watney, you get the last word:

I can't wait till I have grandchildren. When I was younger, I had to walk to the rim of a crater. Uphill! In an EVA suit! On Mars, ya little shit! Ya hear me? Mars!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. show less

The Martian by Andy Weir is brilliant. That's one word I try not to overuse or water down—brilliant. This novel earns it.

It's the story of an astronaut, Mark Watney, a member of the Ares III mission to explore Mars, who gets stranded on Mars when the rest of his crew abandons the planet and believes him dead. On his own in an environment lethal to life, Watney must find a way to survive with only the equipment and supplies left behind. If he can survive, he also needs to find a way to get back home...

This xkcd comic sums it up perfectly: https://xkcd.com/1536/

There's an age-old formula for how to structure compelling stories: "First act—Get your hero up a tree; second act—throw rocks at him; third act—get him down." The Martian show more is a master class in how to throw bigger and bigger rocks, and drive a character farther and farther up the tree. The stakes and the suspense just keep building. The worst-case scenario just keeps getting worse.

Mr. Weir spins a tremendously engrossing story. But the real key to this novel is that it attains a level of hyper-realism almost unmatched in the SF genre.

It's difficult for me to find the right words to describe how much I love this book. I would rather shoot myself in the foot than have to choose between The Martian and Ready Player One (my other favorite novel from the past couple of years).

And then I'd hobble off with The Martian.

RP1 is a near-perfect ode to the nerd and geek culture that I grew up in and belong to. But I've always been a scientist at heart, and The Martian, more than anything else, is a book written for scientists. It's an ode to engineers and the people who figure out how to make stuff work.

RP1 is a book written for my people. The Martian is a book written for me.

It even has my sense of humor. I have the sense of humor of a well-educated, intelligent, and dirty-minded 12-year-old. That's Mark Watney's sense of humor in a nutshell.

So The Martian shares my love of science, my love of space, my love of exploration, and delights in the same sort of juvenile snarky jokes I do. All wrapped up in a suspenseful story of extreme survival.

The only thing it's missing for it to be fully me-in-book-form is a strong dose of philosophy. This is actually something other people have noted about this book (and also, now, about the movie): None of the characters in this story indulge in big picture, "What does it all mean?" reflections. At no point does the story flirt with any sort of spirituality or larger philosophical implications. This is something which sets it apart from most other stranded / left behind / survival stories.

This is also what makes the character of Mark Watney completely believable to me. Watney is an engineer and a practical scientist. He deals with his situation the way an engineer and a scientist would. He faces each challenge as it arises and deals with it as best he can. Survival occupies all of his attention and energy.

All of the characters in this book are scientists and engineers (plus one media relations person). They all deal with their jobs accordingly. Shoe-horning philosophical musings or existential crises into a book populated by these characters would ring false. Mr. Weir knows scientists and engineers well. He knows how they think, how they approach the world, what makes them tick. He nails it with this story.

There's only one slightly sour note in the book and it's minor. There's a perspective shift at the very end which is awkward and unnecessary.

The book is divided into three different narrative threads which interweave each other:

- Watney on Mars;
- NASA back on Earth;
- Watney's crewmates on the ship, Hermes, headed home to Earth.

Watney's story is told in the first person, as a personal log he's keeping of his ordeal. The parts with NASA and the rest of the Ares III mission crew are told in the third person, as a more conventional narrative.

The shifts between these first and third person perspectives are necessary. The first person perspective emphasizes Watney's solitude. It heightens the intimacy and the sense of isolation, thereby raising the stakes of his situation. In contrast, the third person perspective captures the team effort undertaken by NASA and Watney's crewmates to rescue him.

The book concludes, though, with a couple of pages that are written differently than all that precede them: the story focuses back on Watney, but from a third person perspective. It's the only time third person narration is used to tell any part of Watney's story thread.

It's awkward. It's a strange shift to encounter right at the very end. I think I understand why Mr. Weir chose to write the ending this way but I don't think it works, and I don't believe it's necessary.

However, this is such a minor hiccup in an otherwise stellar novel that I can't bring myself to hold it against him.

After I finished The Martian, I felt as though I'd been waiting for this book ever since Kim Stanley Robinson wrote his genre-defining Mars Trilogy. That it fills a need I hadn't even realized I had. Robinson's work marks the moment in SF when stories about Mars could no longer be Burroughs- or Bradbury-esque fantasias. After Robinson, writers had to deal with Mars using up-to-date, hard science. As we've explored Mars in more depth and detail, as our understanding of the planet has become more granular, it stands to reason that our stories about Mars become more intimate, more personal, and even more realistic.

Perhaps it was inevitable that a novel like The Martian would come along to take the crown as the reigning standard for Mars stories.

Inevitable or not, I'm very happy that it did. show less

“Tears. I’m not going to say whether they are tears of joy or sadness, but just know. Tears.”

I said that to my husband about five minutes ago, when I finished this fucking fantastic novel. I loved it. I started it last night around 7:30. I finished it five minutes ago. During that time I slept, worked a nine-hour day, and read this book.

I don’t really read science fiction. And I don’t even know if that’s how I’d categorize this book. Yes, it is fiction, and yes, it is all about the science. And it is set some days in the future, enough days that we can already be sending a third mission to mars. But it’s not, I guess, how I pictured science fiction could be.

The Martian is the tale of Mark Watney. He was left behind when show more the other five members of his crew had to make an emergency evacuation from Mars. They thought he was dead. But he’s not. The story is mostly told from his entries into a computer log. The first lines of the book, in fact, are: “I’m pretty much fucked.” And indeed he is. Six days into a 31-day mission. So he’s got, what enough food for that long, for six people? That’s about it. He doesn’t have any way to communicate with Earth, or the crew that left him back.

What would you do?

Mark is amazing at keeping his sense of humor. He’s a guy I’d want to know. And his will to figure out a way to first, survive and then to get off the planet is amazing. It’s a nearly 400-page book, so you can imagine that shit happens. Not every second, but often enough to keep the book believable but totally engaging. And the science! Oh the science. It’s just a joy to read. So fun. So captivating. I’m sad it’s over.

However … apparently it is being turned into a movie. DO NOT look at IMDB until you’ve read the book, but I can say that I think the casting is perfection. show less

Oh, my! What a wild ride this novel is!

I borrowed it (as an ebook) from the library almost 3 weeks ago but didn't start it right away, and then I forgot I had it until 3 days before it was due back. I thought about not bothering to read it ~ it just wasn't "calling" to me, seemed too "hard science-ish," if you know what I mean ~ but I recalled that msn59 and jnwelch and drneutron loved it, and I figured I should at least crack it open and read the first chapter to see if I wanted to try and renew it or just forget about it. So, around 5 p.m. yesterday, I read the first line: "I'm pretty much fucked," and, at 2:30 a.m. when I "closed" the book to go to sleep, I was 91% through it. The next day, after running a few errands, I got right show more back to it and read to the end. And what a spectacular ending it was too! In fact, I tried really hard not to cry (because for a change I had put on some eye makeup to go out and didn't want it to smear), but couldn't help it, the tears just had to come.

This is scifi that is so realistic that it was almost as if it were a true story. I learned a whole heck of a lot about physics, thermodynamics, chemistry, mechanics, astrophysics, rocket science (haha), relatively painlessly and all within a thrilling story about an astronaut who, through a series of unforeseeable mishaps, ended up stranded on Mars after his fellow astronauts had to abort the mission quickly due to an unexpected but deadly sandstorm. I loved the characters, loved the dialogue (including the internal dialogue of Mark Watney, the stranded astronaut, whose specialties were botony and mechanics), loved the worldbuilding, even loved the hard science (though I admit my eyes glazed just a bit whenever mathematical calculations were discussed, which was fortunately not all that often).

Here are a couple of my favorite lines from the novel spoken by Watney:

"Hell yeah, I'm a botanist! Fear my botany powers!"

"Yes of course duct tape works in a near-vacuum. Duct tape works anywhere. Duct tape is magic and should be worshipped."

Bottom line: Very very highly recommended, for everyone, even those who don't like "hard-science" scifi or scifi of any type.

UPDATED 1/2/15 to add that this is one of three books I have purchased after reading it to give to someone else because I loved it so much I HAD to share it. (The other two, in case you're wondering, were "The Sparrow" by Mary Doria Russell and "The Rosie Project" by Graeme Simsion.) show less

I saw this book come through in my Goodreads feed and thought I'd try it. What a grabbing opening line! I've read a quite a few page turners, but if I'm turning the page, it's either to find out why Dan Brown insists on an annoying cliffhanger every three pages, or to hurry up and finish. I've read many so-called thrillers in my lifetime, but none of them have been. Thrillers, that is. Brown, Child, Larrson, Ludlum, Crichton, Collins, Koontz, Patterson, King ... sometimes interesting (well, not King...Stephen King writes dull, predictable novels), but never "thrilling". The Martian is the first one I would call a thriller. Edge of seat kind.

Why? Well, Weir did a great job, plus I eat this stuff up - nobody with a lust for science show more growing up in the Apollo era couldn't. And as for Apollo, somebody here panned it as Apollo 13 meets something or other. Maybe, but it has the most science I've seen in a science fiction novel probably ever (and I've read a lot of science fiction.) It's problem solving. Plus, the main character is a smart-ass and quite funny under the circumstances.

On my normal scale, this might get four stars, but it is the only fiction I can think I've read as an adult that both entertained and stimulated my mind. Predictable ending? Perhaps, but not a predictable plot. Recommended for true science fiction fans. show less

Andy Weir’s The Martian is a gripping survival story set on the red planet, following astronaut Mark Watney after he's mistakenly left for dead during a mission to Mars. With no way to contact Earth and limited resources, Watney must rely on his ingenuity, scientific know-how, and wry humor to survive against the odds.

The novel shines in its portrayal of a resilient protagonist who approaches life-or-death situations with cleverness and sarcasm, making a science-heavy story surprisingly light and entertaining. Written largely in a log-entry format, the book reads almost like a blog — casual, humorous, and deeply personal. Watney’s voice is distinct and engaging, even as he faces one life-threatening obstacle after another.

However, show more while the book is undeniably enjoyable, it does stretch the boundaries of believability. The sheer number of catastrophes Watney endures borders on excessive, and yet he always seems to find a solution just in time. This can make the story feel overly convenient and formulaic at points. Additionally, some passages — especially those heavy on technical detail — tend to drag, slowing the otherwise fast-paced narrative.

Still, The Martian succeeds in what it sets out to do: entertain, inspire, and celebrate human ingenuity. It's a smart, funny, and mostly optimistic look at space exploration and the will to survive. Even if it sometimes feels more fictional than scientific, it’s a journey worth taking. show less

If I told you Andy Weir’s The Martian is packed with lists, math, and chemistry, but no aliens, you’d probably pass, right? But that would make me a terrible friend, because The Martian is a great read (or listen—I went through the audiobook in four days).

The story starts out as “Cast Away” in space: Mark Watney, an astronaut in the near future, is left for dead on Mars after what appears to be a fatal accident. His team also leaves behind plenty of equipment, though, including rovers and a Hab (short for Martian Habitat—essentially a fancy tent capable of maintaining an Earth-like atmosphere). Watney can’t communicate with Earth, but he knows another Mars mission is coming in four years. If he can survive until then, he show more can go home.

There’s just one problem (initially): he has less than a year’s worth of food.

This is where the math and science come in. Watney takes detailed stock of his available resources, calculates how many calories he needs, and sets about growing potatoes (from the fresh spuds NASA originally packed for Thanksgiving dinner) in the Hab. Improvised agriculture is his first solution to a relentless series of problems that force him to continually adapt or die.

That endless need for innovation drives much of the plot. Other entries in the survival genre share the premise: Man (it’s almost always a man) versus Nature in a battle for the most fundamental of stakes. But few stories keep the crises and resulting try-fail cycles coming as fast and furiously as The Martian does; Watney is almost always working to overcome some seemingly insurmountable obstacle. That he does so plausibly is a testament to Weir’s imagination and research.

My only real criticisms are about point of view: Watney’s account is mostly delivered via first-person log entries. This allows his good-natured sarcasm to come through, but when Weir finally cuts back to Earth to show the moment NASA realizes Watney’s alive, the scene is in third-person objective. The shift is a bit jarring. If Weir had incorporated more third-person for Watney, the transition would have been smoother. Going this route also would have kept the few existing third-person sections on Mars from being such obvious precursors to something going horribly wrong. And Weir would have been able to better frame a passage in which, for some reason, Watney feels compelled to narrate his actions via audio recorder during one of the direst moments in the book. (I mean, he probably talks to himself all day long, but I just didn’t buy it in such an extreme situation.)

But these are quibbles. Generally speaking, I found The Martian as enjoyable as it was smart. I can’t wait to see the movie.

(For more reviews like this one, see www.nickwisseman.com) show less