Book Review: The Martian by Andy Weir

This is yet another book that makes me want to write a review that simply says:

Loved it. Read this book.

But that’s not terribly helpful, is it? Unless you trust me so very much that you’re willing to take my word for it, just because. No? Okay, I’ll tell you just what I loved about this smart, funny, dramatic, and utterly entertaining book.

As you’d guess from the cover image, The Martian is the story of an astronaut. Mark Watney is part of a crew of astronauts participating in NASA’s third manned exploration of Mars. Six days into their mission, a massive dust storm prompts an evacuation of the planet, during which Mark is struck by flying debris and believed to be dead. With only minutes to spare before their emergency launch, the mission leader makes the tough call to leave Mark’s body and get the heck off the planet. The world mourns.

Surprise! Mark isn’t dead… but he may be soon. Mark is the sole human on all of Mars, left with the mission’s habitation structure and equipment, a 100-something day food supply, and no means of communication or rescue. The next mission to Mars won’t arrive for another four years. So what’s Mark to do? He has no intention of giving up, and sets about figuring just what it will take to breathe, drink water, and not starve to death in the years he’ll have to wait before he has a shot at returning to Earth.

When NASA finally realizes, thanks to satellite imagery, that they left a very much alive Mark behind, the entire world becomes obsessed with Mark’s survival, and it takes all the brains of NASA and then some, plus the determination of Mark’s crewmates, to figure out a rescue plan with any chance of success.

Ultimately, though, it’s all up to Mark and his incredible brain. As with all NASA missions, the crew members serve multiple roles, and Mark is the mission’s botanist/mechanical engineer. With his knowledge of botany, Mark figures out how to grow crops to sustain himself when the stored food runs out, and with his engineering skills, he’s able to jerry-rig solutions whenever equipment breaks — which is often.

You’d think a book in which the main character spends time calculating the square footage of arable soil needed to produce enough calories for survival or figuring out how to use rocket fuel to create water might get a little weighed down by science-speak… but you’d be dead wrong. I’ve never been more fascinating by geeky science talk. Stuff like this:

I can create the O2 easily enough. It takes twenty hours for the MAV fuel plant to fill its 10-liter tank with CO2. The oxygenator can turn it into the O2, then the atmospheric regulator will see the O2 content in the Hab is high, and pull it out of the air, storing it in the main O2 tanks. They’ll fill up, so I’ll have to transfer O2 over to the rovers’ tanks and even the space suit tanks as necessary.

The point is, the narration here is super-smart yet super engaging. Mark is in battle for survival — but he’s so extremely funny that even in his direst of straits, there’s plenty to make you laugh. Everything that can go wrong, does go wrong, and half the fun is seeing how crazily creative Mark’s solutions are.

One thing I learned after reading The Martian is that author Andy Weir created his own programming in order to figure out things like trajectories and orbits, and his need to make sure that the science works results in a book that’s full of compelling and weird details — which, strangely, don’t weigh down the narrative, but instead let us feel like we’re right there next to Mark, trying to figure out how to rig a heat supply without blowing things up. (I loved Entertainment Weekly’s recent write-up about Andy Weir – check it out here.)

Bottom line? I loved this book. With never a dull moment, The Martian is a treat for the brain as well as providing plenty of laughs along with true suspense and a nail-biting battle for survival. Mark’s voice is what makes reading The Martian such a fun experience, so I’ll leave you with a few choice selections from the logs of astronaut Mark Watney:

If you asked every engineer at NASA what the worst scenario for the Hab was, they’d all answer “fire”. If you asked them what the result would be, they’d answer “death by fire.”

About the e-mails that come pouring in once the world realizes Mark is alive:

One of them was from my alma mater, the University of Chicago. They say once you grow crops somewhere, you have officially “colonized” it. So technically, I colonized Mars.

In your face, Neil Armstrong!

In other news, it’s seven sols till the harvest, and I still haven’t prepared. For starters, I need to make a hoe. Also, I need to make an outdoor shed for the potatoes. I can’t just pile them up outside. The next major storm would case the Great Martian Potato Migration.