The Martian

Author	Weir, Andy
Year	2014
First published	2011
Publisher	New York: Crown
Number of pages	384
Edition	First US hardback
ISBN	9780804139021
Keywords	botany, astronomy, speculative fiction, scientist main character

Abstract

Astronaut Mark Watney is accidentally left for dead on Mars when an extreme sand storm causes his crewmates to have to abort their mission and head back to Earth. When Watney regains consciousness, what follows is practically a day by day (or “sol” by “sol”) account of his efforts to survive and, hopefully, get back home.

Presumably because Watney is a NASA astronaut, he suffers very few internal conflicts in terms of despair, loneliness, fear, or insecurity, so almost all of the conflicts in the book (with the exception of a few chapters about what’s happening down on Earth), are Man against Nature. What enables Watney to survive are his skills as a scientist and a problem-solver, and the novel is essentially an account of his scientific analysis of the situations he is facing and his very technical descriptions of attempted solutions. Practically every paragraph is a discourse on some scientific subject or another, ranging from chemistry to aeronautics to biology and botany to geology, meteorology, and physics. As one Goodreads user put it, the book reads like “a really long SAT question.”

The technical descriptions are vivid and instructive, and Watney’s efforts to stay alive give them a sense of immediacy and urgency, but it’s interesting that the science really doesn’t seem to affect the book’s themes or Watney’s (very flat and stereotyped) character at all.

--Jean Hegland (FMS Novelists Network)