The Martian in Around the World in 80 Books

Aug 03, 2015 Sera rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, other-fiction, own, science-fiction

Super cool book! Who would have thought that things like water reclaimers and orbital trajectories could be such fun?

Weir has interesting backstory in regard to this book. He started it as a serialized novel on his blog (ala Dickens sans the blog) where his followers could read it for free. Some of these followers asked Weir to put the book in Kindle format, which he did. Amazon said that Weir had to sell it for a $.99 minimum, since again, Weir wanted to provide it for free. The book continued ...more

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Dec 13, 2014 Sarah rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: recommend-to-friends, pants-crappingly-awesome, kindle, page-to-screen, magic-sci-fi-fantasy, audio

On a mission to Mars, astronaut Mark Watney is injured in an accident. His crewmates, believing him to be dead, leave him alone on Mars when they evacuate. What follows is the story of Mark's survival, NASA'a discovery via satellite photos that he's alive, and the rescue mission.

This isn't the kind of book I'd normally read. I'm not big on science, or sci-fi, or space travel. It's OK, but it's not my first choice of genre. But it's one of the best books I've read all year. Watney's survival depe On a mission to Mars, astronaut Mark Watney is injured in an accident. His crewmates, believing him to be dead, leave him alone on Mars when they evacuate. What follows is the story of Mark's survival, NASA'a discovery via satellite photos that he's alive, and the rescue mission.

This isn't the kind of book I'd normally read. I'm not big on science, or sci-fi, or space travel. It's OK, but it's not my first choice of genre. But it's one of the best books I've read all year. Watney's survival depends upon his smarts - he's a botanist as well as an engineer, so he can fix stuff and build stuff and even grow food on Mars to prolong his life. It depends on some luck - there are, of course, accident after accident after mishap and somehow nothing gets truly FUBAR. And it depends on his spirit and good sense of humor, superbly delivered by R.C. Bray in the audiobook. I don't want to give the whole book away, but here are a couple of gems:

[NASA:] He’s stuck out there. He thinks he’s totally alone and that we all gave up on him. What kind of effect does that have on a man’s psychology?” He turned back to Venkat. “I wonder what he’s thinking right now.”

[WATNEY:] LOG ENTRY: SOL 61 How come Aquaman can control whales? They’re mammals! Makes no sense.

and

I broke two ribs during the MAV ascent. They were sore the whole time, but they really started screaming when (view spoiler). I didn’t want to distract the people who were saving my life, so I muted my mic and screamed like a little girl. It’s true, you know. In space, no one can hear you scream like a little girl.

But it's not all chuckles all the time. There is real drama here. While Mark Watney struggles to survive and NASA struggles to find a way to save him, the world watches. I kept imagining how I would feel if I were watching this play out for real on CNN. And while I don't think that it's realistic that there would be a daily Mark Watney Watch segment on CNN for 18 months (because humans have short attention spans and if nothing exciting happened for a few days, someone somewhere would get shot by a cop or pose naked on Paper Magazine and we'd forget about Watney for awhile), I did feel the excitement and the stress of wondering what would happen. I got a little choked up in the end.

I'll just leave you with this:

The cost for my survival must have been hundreds of millions of dollars. All to save one dorky botanist. Why bother? Well, okay. I know the answer to that. Part of it might be what I represent: progress, science, and the interplanetary future we’ve dreamed of for centuries. But really, they did it because every human being has a basic instinct to help each other out. It might not seem that way sometimes, but it’s true.
If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search. If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood. If an earthquake levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies. This is so fundamentally human that it’s found in every culture without exception. Yes, there are assholes who just don’t care, but they’re massively outnumbered by the people who do. And because of that, I had billions of people on my side. Pretty cool, eh?

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Jul 15, 2014 Tok rated it liked it

Shelves: book-i-own, read-in-english

ศัพท์วิทย์ฯคงไม่เหมาะกับข้าพเจ้า สนุกช่วงแรกกับช่วงท้าย กลางเล่มมีความยืด แต่เอาเข้าจริงๆก็ความผิดที่เราด้วยที่ตอนมันอธิบายศัพท์(น่าจะ)ง่ายๆหลายๆอย่างเราไม่รู้ เดี๋ยวไว้ดูหนังกับอ่านฉบับแปลไทยอาจจะเปลี่ยนคะแนนอีกที

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Apr 21, 2016 Stil de scriitor rated it really liked it

Recenzia pe blog:

https://literarybook.wordpress.com/20... ...more

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Mar 15, 2017 Patrick rated it it was amazing

An Incredible read. I'm not normally too into Sci-Fi books but this is a fantastic read. An incredible amount of research clearly went into writing this. Extremely well done Andy Weir. I'd recommend to anyone. ...more

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