Author: Andy Weir
# of Pages: 369 (paperback)
Genre: Fiction, Science Fiction, Adventure
Rating: ★★★★☆
Synopsis: 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 while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded and completely alone with no way to even signal Earth that he’s alive—and even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone long before a rescue could arrive. Chances are, though, he 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 isn’t ready to give up yet. Drawing on his ingenuity, his engineering skills — and a relentless, dogged refusal to quit — he steadfastly confronts one seemingly insurmountable obstacle after the next. Will his resourcefulness be enough to overcome the impossible odds against him?
Review: I was very surprised by how much I was able to enjoy this book.
By no means am I a science fiction buff (the opposite actually, aside from a brief obsession with dystopian YA books). However, since this book was so popular, and there was even a movie based on it, I decided to give it a shot.
Weir does a great job making a likable protagonist; his log entries are fun, so the reader actually wants him to survive. The biggest drag on the story is how much science there is. While I appreciate a well researched book, even the dumbed down science in Mark's log entries force readers to slow down to understand what exactly is going on.
This story is told in first person (the log entries) with the occasional section of third person narration and third person POV from the people at NASA. In this case, jumping between log entries and NASA is fine since there is a clear distinction between these two perspectives and they give a clear picture of what is going on at that moment. However, there still was some overlap between NASA's perspective and Mark's log entries that could have been eliminated to make the way the story was told perfect.
I enjoyed the read and would recommend it to those interested in the book. If you are scared of there being too much science, trying reading an excerpt and see how you fare; it doesn't get much more technical than it is in the beginning.
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