I broke the cardinal rule of being a book nerd. I saw the movie first.
Let me plead my case first: I had every intention of reading The Martian prior to it’s theatrical release; I had my name on the wait list at the library but by late August I was still sitting in the low 30s. After my sister declared I had to read it sooner rather than later I went ahead and bought a copy. But then Careless People took forever to read and I had a couple other books with looming due dates and then Mindy Kaling wrote a book and October 3rd rolled around and I hadn’t picked up The Martian yet. And my husband wanted to see it opening weekend because he is a nerd (the man has a physics degree- who needs a physics degree?)
It took me a day to finish this. We spent all day last Friday in the car, if I’d chosen to read The Martian instead of converse with my husband I could have finished before we saw the movie Saturday…
“Actually, I was the very lowest ranked member of the crew. I would only be “in command” if I were the only remaining person.”
What do you know? I’m in command”
The plot, assuming you haven’t read one of the other twenty reviews on Cannonball or seen the trailer staring Matt Damon, is that Mark Watney has been stranded on Mars following an accident that causes his crew to believe him dead during an evacuation. Wantey is a mechanical engineer and botonist who proceeds to science the shit out of his situation in order to stay alive long enough to get rescued by NASA. He is charming and self-depreciating as he journals his experiences for the reader.
After he is discovered by NASA satellites you are also given a third person narrative of their side of the rescue mission. There are dozens of people involved in his rescue; the whole world is watching and getting Mark home is priority one.
The technical aspects (and math) can get a little tedious but Mark purposely omits a lot of his calculations for that very reason. For the most part it’s quickly paced and well narrated. I’m interested to see what Weir does next, since prior to The Martian he was a full time soft-ware engineer who wrote in his spare time for his website.
I can’t say enough good things about this novel and like 99% of the other reviews I can only encourage you to seek it out for yourself. The movie is great too and it’s pretty true to the source material.
“You know what? “Kilowatt-hour per sol” is a pain in the ass to say. I’m gonna invent a new scientific unit name. One kilowatt-hour per sol is… it can be anything… um… I suck at this… I’ll call it a “pirate-ninja”.”
