Title The Martian Series --- Author Andy Weir Cover Art Eric White Publisher Broadway Books - 2014 First Printing 2011 Category SF Warnings None Main Characters Mark Watney Main Elements Mars Website andyweirauthor.com

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.

Armed with nothing but his ingenuity, his engineering skills - and a gallows sense of humour that proves to be his greatest source of strength - Mark embarks on a dogged quest to stay alive. But will his resourcefulness be enough to overcome the impossible odds against him?

I loved the movie, usually I read the book first but there wasn't time, but I ran out and bought it right after then waited a while to start forgetting stuff so I could feel a bit more like I'm reading it for the first time and not noticing any difference between the two versions.

I loved this book, it was wonderful. Mark Watney is a great character, his attitude and snarky comments were worth reading just on their own, even if you leave out plot or scientific accuracy. The plot itself is simple, astronaut accidentally gets left behind on Mars in the near future, how do you keep him alive long enough to put together a rescue mission? After all, if you want to be scientifically accurate about such things, you just don't have rockets and boosters and food and everything just sitting around waiting to be used. It takes a year to put a mission together (if you rush it and cut corners) and then it takes 9 months for anything to get to Mars. Let's just say Mark is really on his own, especially when his communications are knocked out by the same storm that caused him to be left behind.

See I was looking for a Hard SF book for a reading challenge I had. But pretty much everything I could find had some unrealistic element to it. Like Saturn's Run, lot's of good hard SF in it, but they were able to slap together a mission to Saturn in about a year and invent a whole new propulsion system at the same time. Nope. I read The God's Themselves which had some hard bits, but the premise was totally hand waving (what if you could find a whole to another universe and exchange rules of physics through it?). But Weir really thought all the details through here. In fact, the book started as an exercise in creating various disaster scenarios and then figuring out how astronauts could survive them. And when he decided to make it a book, he even did his best to keep the disasters realistic, you know enough bad things happened to make it real (unlike Robinson's Mars trilogy while being full of good hard SF, also had the characters turn Mars from Red to Green within a hundred years or so, and pretty much nobody died or even got hurt in the process). He also didn't want to make it silly, like hit Mark with lightning one day then drop an asteroid on him the next. It could happen but was pretty unlikely.

And yes, if you've seen the movie and not read the book yet, he does grow potatoes in poop! I guess for the sake of survival one can learn to live with offensive smells.

And the science isn't all on Mars, you have scientists on Earth trying to figure out how to save him, but unlike Watney, they need to balance the lives of others, money, politics, and all that fun stuff. Watney probably had the easy part, as he contemplates intriguing things like how Mars is basically international waters and he's going to go commandeer another ship already on Mars so that technically makes him a space pirate. Let's just say when you live by yourself on Mars for over a year, you spend a lot of time thinking about unusual things. Survival may take a lot of work, but there's also a lot of downtime, and it wasn't as if you packed for that, no books, no TV, no internet...just whatever you can scrounge out of your crewmates junk left behind.

I highly recommend this book and consider it a must read for anyone interested in the future of Mars exploration. The Red Mars trilogy definitely covers a lot of ground and takes the topic much further as to the implications of putting an Earth colony in space, but in the near term, if you want to see what it would be like to put a man on Mars, well, this book could be used run simulations on various scenarios of things that could, and probably will, go wrong.