Miles Ovadia★ Curator · Lv 5
todayGenuinely laugh-out-loud funny and the tension never lets up. I learned more chemistry than in school.
Science fiction
The Martian
by Andy Weir
4.5· 1,520 ratings
Published 2011407 pagesEnglishThrilling · Funny
I'm going to have to science the shit out of this.
Why read it
Left for dead on the surface of Mars after his crew evacuates in a storm, an astronaut wakes up alone, injured, and stranded on a planet where nothing grows, with no way to signal home and food for only a fraction of the years before rescue could ever arrive.
The premise
Astronaut Mark Watney must survive on Mars using only the equipment left behind and his own training as a botanist and engineer. Told largely through his sardonic mission logs, the novel is a relentless chain of life-or-death problems, growing food, making water, crossing the planet, that Watney meets with ingenuity and gallows humor, while NASA and his crew race to bring him home.
The story behind it
Andy Weir originally self-published The Martian in 2011, posting it chapter by chapter on his website before releasing a 99-cent Kindle edition that drew a huge audience. Crown republished it in 2014, it became a runaway bestseller, and Ridley Scott's 2015 film adaptation earned multiple Academy Award nominations.
What awaits inside
- 01
Science as suspense
What awaits is a plot where each chapter is an engineering problem, and getting the math right is the difference between living and dying.
- 02
Growing food on Mars
Watney's attempt to farm potatoes in Martian soil inside the habitat is a masterclass in improvised survival.
- 03
Humor under pressure
The mission-log voice keeps a terrifying situation buoyant, making competence feel like the ultimate optimism.
- 04
A world that mobilizes
As NASA and his crewmates learn he is alive, the story widens into a global effort to defy the odds.
From the book
Watney performing surgery on himself to remove the antenna shrapnel embedded in his abdomen after the storm.
The potato farm inside the Hab, and the catastrophic breach that later destroys his carefully engineered crop.
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