the martian

The Martian is Andy Weir's first book. Obviously this book made a big splash, especially when you consider that Weir self-published this book originally! Gives hope to all the struggling novelists out there, right? yeah, me too I saw the movie a few years ago, and it was good and I figured I'd read this at some point, and as it often happens, I run into a book like this at a book sale. This copy came from a library book sale, and looks like a British copy, which may have been purchased for a flight home perhaps?

I read another book by Weir a couple of years ago, which I recommended. I said then that I'd seen some murmurs on line about potentially making a movie based on that book. Haven't seen it yet, but who knows. The Martian as a book, is much more involved than the movie, as is typically the case. So seeing the movie a few years ago didn't prevent me from enjoying this book at all. Writing a novel with a single protagonist, who has no one to speak to, seems like a daunting challenge, but Weir does a good job of delivering this story in way that kept me engaged from beginning to end. I enjoyed this more than I expected to.

What I think holds this story together is the science, and the problem solving Weir's character Mark Watney has to continually do in order to stay alive. As I said to my wife, understanding modern science and technology, the ability to project forward where the technology might go, and then using fiction to test those technologies is a tactic that many great SF authors have used. Asimov and Stephenson are two authors that come to mind that do this.

Read this book.