The Martian in On Paths Unknown

May 28, 2014 Cecily rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: film-tv-version-not-good, usa-and-canada, solitary-protagonist, colonialism-exploration-empires, maps-geography, scifi-future-speculative-fict, landscape-location-protagonist, survivalist

Log Entry: Sol 6

“I’m pretty much fucked.”

Six days after I finished this book, and I still can’t get my shit together.

Let’s see… where do I begin?

I read great things about this from GR friends – with the odd dissenter (very odd – man, that Apatt keeps me amused!). I kept meaning to get a copy, but in the end, my husband was given it first. But before he could read it, I swiped it. You’ve gotta take opportunities when you can. "Hell yeah I’m a ~~botanist~~ GoodReader! Fear my ~~botany~~ GoodReading powers ...more

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Feb 02, 2015 Andrew Smith rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction

I’ve always included some science fiction in my everyday reading diet. In my formative years I was a big fan of the Original Star Trek television series and loved 2001: A Space Odyssey and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind in both film and written form. Later I formed a fascination for time travel books. So this appealed to me straight away. There have been mainly positive reviews on Goodreads and it seemed to be a book grounded on ‘almost there’ technology. These days I do like sci-fi I can ...more

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Mar 13, 2014 Melki rated it really liked it

Shelves: adventure, science-fiction

It's a strange feeling. Everywhere I go, I'm the first. Step outside the rover? First guy ever to be there! Climb a hill? First guy to climb that hill! Kick a rock? That rock hadn't moved in a million years!

I'm the first person to be alone on an entire planet.

Yeah, I know - I'm the LAST person on ANY planet to read this book, and there's already a scadzillion reviews.

Oh, well . . . here's another one.

This is a fun thrill ride of a book, though it packs the emotional wallop of a technical ma ...more

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Aug 19, 2015 Brian rated it liked it

For everything that can be said about this book the thing I love the most is that Weir wrote this on his terms and produced it outside of the publishing world grind. Like Hugh Howey, Weir is a beacon for all authors that want to avoid that quagmire.

I liked this book. It was clear from the first mind-breaking equations that Weir knew his subject matter. It didn't bother me that much of the dialogue and character interactions were forced into their places based upon the flow of the narrative. A pa ...more

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Jul 09, 2014 Terry rated it really liked it

Shelves: audio-books, sci-fi

So, yeah this book was pretty sweet. It was one of those cases where the reality managed to live up to the hype…a rare case as far as my experience goes.

In a nutshell the premise of the book, on the off chance that you didn’t already know, is that a lone astronaut is inadvertently left stranded on the red planet after a catastrophic accident leaves his crewmates believing he is dead. Coming to alone and marooned millions of miles from home Mark Watney is left with the choice to try and fight nea So, yeah this book was pretty sweet. It was one of those cases where the reality managed to live up to the hype…a rare case as far as my experience goes.

In a nutshell the premise of the book, on the off chance that you didn’t already know, is that a lone astronaut is inadvertently left stranded on the red planet after a catastrophic accident leaves his crewmates believing he is dead. Coming to alone and marooned millions of miles from home Mark Watney is left with the choice to try and fight nearly impossible odds to survive or give up and die alone on an alien world. Given the circumstances he finds himself in I think most of us would inevitably fall into the latter course sooner or later. We come to find, however, that Mark is the kind of man who doesn’t take failure lightly. Taken at its most basic level I guess one could boil the story down to the movie Gravity meets Robinson Crusoe, but, as with all analogies of this kind, taking that too far would be doing the book a disservice. While I found Gravity visually stimulating I thought it was pretty bland as a story and _The Martian_ is anything but bland. There were enough ups and downs in the plot itself to keep me excited and wondering just how the hell the most recent crisis was going to be resolved. Ultimately though, the question of what makes this book work so well comes down to two words: Mark Watney. Our intrepid hero and narrator is an ingenious astronaut with a penchant for botany and engineering whose sharp wit and never-say-die attitude manage to be uplifting without being cloying. And he can bring the funny. I found myself smiling often and even laughing out loud much more than is normal for me when reading. When it comes down to brass tacks Mark Watney is a truly likable protagonist and I’m not sure I could say that I found the afore-mentioned Robinson Crusoe half so charming.

I had the audiobook version and must say first off that the narration by R. C. Bray was great. He hit the humour notes just right and did a pretty good job with accent and voice shifts where required, though his female characters did end up sounding pretty same-y…though I’m not sure if there’s an easy way around that for a male narrator short of caricature. I’d be curious to see if the humour works as consistently for me with the print version given Bray’s excellent delivery.

I can’t really go into too much detail on the plot since I think that the surprises in store for the reader are integral to one’s enjoyment of the story. Suffice it to say that the (sometimes actual) shit is often hitting the (mostly proverbial) fan and it’s up to our intrepid astronaut to try and find a clever way out of problems that threaten to end his life nearly every day. While I don’t doubt that every single obstacle Watney had to face was an actual one (in the sense that they were all ‘real’ issues a man stranded on Mars would have to face) some of the crises occasionally bordered on predictable as I knew by the pacing of the story when we were due for a new catastrophe, but that’s a pretty small nit to pick. One other related problem I had with the book was the sheer amount and detail involved in the technical information Watney provides for each crisis throughout the book. I think for the most part these details were necessary, especially given the conceit that the bulk of the book was made up of log entries by Watney where he would obviously want to be pretty scrupulous in detailing exactly what he was doing for posterity. Still, I often found myself rewinding in order to try and get my head around all of the minutiae I was given…I wasn’t always completely successful at getting the full nuance of things (hey, I got an Arts degree, ok?), but I generally got the gist. As implied a lot of these explanations border on the territory of infodumps, something that usually makes me break out in hives, but in this case I would have to admit that the structure of the narrative and manner of their insertion made them seem much more like valid requirements of the story itself as opposed to merely being literary wanking by the author. While I still didn’t like the fact that I was often at a loss for exactly what was being expressed the first time I heard it I readily admit that without these details the reality of Watney’s situation, as well as their ultimate repercussions, would have been pretty vague instead of vivid and visceral.

Ultimately this book is all about the human ability to come up with creative solutions in order to overcome adversity…and the adversity comes pretty hard & fast. Basically anything that can go wrong will and the real burden on suspension of disbelief lies on the reader being willing to accept that Mark Watney is clever enough to think his way out of them consistently. It means we have to accept that Watney is enough of a specialist that he can come up with pretty difficult science-based solutions without needing to consult unavailable resources, but also that he’s enough of a generalist to be able to solve problems outside of a limited range of knowledge. To be fair he does (view spoiler) The book also relies heavily on the belief in the power of positive thinking…something I have to admit I’m not always in line with, but for anyone without the optimistic outlook of Watney day 1 (or I should say Sol 6) would have been the end of the story. (view spoiler) At first I thought the book might wear a little thin if all we were doing was listening to Watney monologue about his lone existence on Mars, but not only is he a rather charming narrator, Weir was also able to expand the story beyond Watney himself to include other characters affected by his predicament (no spoilers!) and I often found myself looking forward to these segments away from Mars and felt like they allowed me to have a bit of a break from the marooned astronaut so that when we did return to him I felt like I was coming back to him with a fresh attitude and his story never grew stale. I certainly learned the important lesson that if you’re ever trapped on Mars you must never forget to bring some serious scientific know-how and a can-do attitude.

Oh, and lots of duct tape! ...more

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Sep 05, 2015 Brad rated it liked it

Shelves: sci-fi, cinematic, audio-book, read-in-2015, hard-sci-fi-lite

The kindest thing I can say about Andy Weir's The Martian is that it is going to make an excellent Ridley Scott film. I will be thoroughly shocked if the film is worse than the novel. I expect it to be much, much better on screen. This may sound like an insult, but I truly mean it as a compliment because from the beginning of the story until the end, I felt Andy Weir's fingers deliberately tapping out a tale for sale to Hollywood -- and good for him for succeeding so well.

The Martian is, essent ...more

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Nov 10, 2015 Chinook rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: america, science, 1-kindle, adventure, space

That was amazing. I'd heard it was mathy and was expecting it to be a bit drier, more boring. Not the case at all. There's great tension and all the problems Mark faces seem realistic and probable. Loved the humour too. ...more

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Sep 29, 2014 Kamakana rated it liked it

Shelves: science, aa-unitedstateslit, speculative-fiction, zz2014, conceptual-fiction

this is a later addition: i have read a few less than laudatory reviews, i have had a few chuckles, i see that at least one group is going to talk about it, another group is going to talk about it, movie, matt damon... and i just thought to revisit my review, restate my original take: if you like a certain subgenre of sf known as 'hard': https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7..., then you will like this book, if you have never even heard of that subgenre, if you do not like implicit heroism in gr this is a later addition: i have read a few less than laudatory reviews, i have had a few chuckles, i see that at least one group is going to talk about it, another group is going to talk about it, movie, matt damon... and i just thought to revisit my review, restate my original take: if you like a certain subgenre of sf known as 'hard': https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7..., then you will like this book, if you have never even heard of that subgenre, if you do not like implicit heroism in growing food from your shit, drinking water from your piss... no you will not like it. there are no women, no natives, no others of any sort. nothing like close psychological inspection, but then, what can he add to his basic outline of all the ways he will probably die? that takes about a half page...

for those who have ever read 'gateway' by fred pohl: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2..., this is a situation on-site computer psychoanalyst would be fun. better than what passes as humour. this is not what we call a 'novel', this is a 'romance', in a technical sense not genre romance. this is the world, the terrors, the triumphs, and our character is just a viewpoint, and like the efficient prose, his psychological, emotional, sensory, human reality, is deliberately not 'rounded' because such lens would distort obvious, material, mechanical, endless round of things-to-fix...

is 'agency' the problem here? is the fact he copes rationally in a (super)human way, with his 'situation', a sceptical if not cynical impossibility? there are perhaps other ways to tell something like this story, from recounting what got him into this to having aliens rescue him... because aliens. but that is another story. i have read sf is a literature of hope: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8.... you cannot get much more hopeful than this...

first review: read in one sitting so obviously an easy, compelling read. or i just reached a point where i wanted the whole effect, did not want to read it in thoughtful increments. i can certainly see how this book greatly appeals to any sf reader, yet also how it might repel readers unfamiliar with sf. not a surprise. science fiction as engineering fiction written by engineers for engineers. science, particularly surpassing solutions against inflexible physical constraints, thus enabling, saving our first-person protagonist, nothing more or less. reminds me of verne, in particular the mysterious island: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3..., so that review says basically all this updated version of survival by science says, dropping other survivors but adding over a century...

this is mostly first-person, on occasion switching to earth long distance support, which shows why he should stay with the astronaut. fun, naive, quaint- i may have been too young for Apollo, but i remember the shuttle program, my father a scientist, my early love for only the best sf, my later exploration of limits to that genre, all this combines to emotionally attract even against the rather thin characters. there are a few comic moments, a few satirical jabs, but for the most part the plot is a series of things-to-fix. but then, who needs complex characters when the important thing is how to generate water, how to scrub the air, how to navigate without compass, how to grow potatoes in Martian soil... fun. implausible perhaps, but rigorously possible. fun but not something i will likely ever read again... i will watch the movie though... ...more

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Sep 25, 2014 [Name Redacted] rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: sci-fi, futurity, the-film-was-better

Pretty much by-the-numbers. You can feel the author artificially generating conflict & tension simply to pad things out. Science was neat though -- there's not nearly enough hard-science sci-fi these days. But overall? Only okay. I just don't see what all the fuss was about. ...more

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Jan 31, 2015 Damon rated it liked it

Shelves: sci-fi

*SPOILER* (There is stuff about the ending)

I finished the book yesterday and was disappointed by the ending. BECAUSE he should have DIED.

The book started out grounding the reader for a long time by pointing out the stark reality of Dying on Mars. At some point the book rushed into a sequence where the Martian was saved in a very unrealistic sequence right at the end.
I think Watney would have been happy dying after having attempted his potato growing venture; having given everything he had to sur ...more

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Mar 29, 2014 Jlawrence rated it liked it

Shelves: sword-and-laser

3 and 1/2 stars.

Disaster strikes on a near-future Mars mission and one of the crew of six is left behind, presumed (for very good reasons) dead. But he's alive, and the book is the story of him Robinson Crusoe/MacGyver-ing his way to survival.

That main character Mark is likable and funny, making him an enjoyable narrator as we follow his mission logs of trials and troubleshooting.

But the constant repeat of new crisis/engineering solution started to wear a little thin, and some of the science, w ...more

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Feb 07, 2014 Jill rated it it was amazing

So much fun!

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Jun 27, 2017 Sean DeLauder rated it it was amazing

Marstronaut Mark Watney blogs about getting marooned on Mars and chronicles his wacky misadventures and plans for survival, how his skill set works out perfectly for surviving just long enough to be rescued, sprinkled with explanations of how he plans to do so, his trials and errors, and an uncrushable sense of humor that manages to endure so effectively one has an easy time forgetting the relentless and extreme stress under which Watney struggles. In the face of all-but-certain-death, Watney re ...more

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