The Martian

, #1

Hardcover, 369 pages

English language

Published Feb. 11, 2014 by Crown.

ISBN:
978-0-8041-3902-1
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OCLC Number:
932376129

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5 stars (4 reviews)

A mission to Mars.

A freak accident.

One man's struggle to survive.

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 the planet while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded on Mars' surface, completely alone. with no way to signal Earth that he's alive. And even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone years before a rescue could arrive. Chances are, though, Mark 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. But Mark's not ready to quit. Armed with nothing but his ingenuity and his engineering skills—and a gallows sense of humor that proves to be his greatest …

38 editions

A fairly realistic near-future hard #scifi story about survival on #Mars

4 stars

Probably boring if you're not interested in the technical problems involved in being stranded on Mars as those make up most of the book but for someone like me who is interested in the exploration of Mars and everything to do with space in general this is a great hard Sci-Fi story set in the near future.

The writing could be much better, I wish there was more of backstory to how Watney became a person able to survive so well in a situation like this (nothing really explains it to me) and not everything is beliveable to me but the overall concept and most of the details are solid. Wil Wheaton's narration of the audiobook edition was good but not perfect.

reviewed The Martian by Andy Weir

Fun read.

4 stars

And probably at least semi realistic? Didn't like it as much as Project Hail Mary by the same author. This sorta read as a sequence of "oh crap, another thing went wrong" problems, followed by solutions. I'm certain this is realistic - or even still overly optimistic, given what they were surviving through - but kinda made for an overly long, repetitive narrative. I suspect this is part of why they cut some of these out of the movie (and to save time, but also it got repetitive). Nevertheless, a fun read if you enjoy sci-fi that sticks close to contemporary science.

Subjects

  • Astronauts--Fiction.
  • Survival--Fiction.
  • Mars (Planet)--Fiction.

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