I’m not big on Science Fiction or Space stuff. I couldn’t care less about spaceships and intergalactic travel. It just bores me. Yeah, I know that most SciFi tries at making a point to parallel our own life with a future scenario in an effort to gain some perspective on the human experience but, whatever, you know. Well, The Martian isn’t like that at all. Yes, it’s SciFi in the sense that it takes place in the future when Man has the ability to go visit Mars but that’s about where it ends in the SciFi department.
What first got me interested to pick this book up was the description. It sounded like someone held a meeting and said, “Hey, that Burn Notice show is pretty popular…and everyone loved McGyver, right? How about we take that concept and put it on Mars?”
“You mean with a cyborg?”
“No, a real guy.”
“So you’ll put a guy on Mars to make bombs? What’s the catch.”
“No, he’s abandoned on Mars.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know, four years.”
“Well, how will he protect himself from the cold, make air, get food, communicate, get off the planet? This sounds absolutely impossible.”
“…let’s do it.”
And then someone wrote it.
Here’s the skinny on the story: Some astronauts go to Mars to do some experiments over several months. When they’re on the surface a bad storm kicks up and the crew thinks that one of their members has been killed. They can’t see him from the dust storm but they have his vitals on their display…and it doesn’t look good. They decide that if they don’t get off the planet they’ll all be done for. So they leave.
There’s just one thing, he isn’t dead. What happened was that an antenna broke off and punctured his suit and went into the side of his stomach. This caused pressure loss and he blacked out for a while, dropping his blood pressure. The escaping blood sealed off the hole in the suit just enough for him to regain consciousness and for him to create a permanent seal for it. Of course, this is after everyone has left. Then he realizes that, oh shit, he’s the last person on the planet and there’s no way that they can come back to get him. He’s alone on Mars.
It sure does seem grim. Okay, so at least he has the Hab unit that’s stocked with food. Well, the food is enough for 6 people for 6 months. That will keep him alive for a while. But for what? Well, there’s another Mars mission coming…in four years.
So he has to figure out some things. He has to figure out how to make oxygen, make water, make food, stay pressurized, and figure out a way to talk to Earth. Do you think things don’t go according to plan? Do you think things break? Yeah, it’s Murphy’s Law in full effect up on Mars. Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. And the author doesn’t take the easy way out. I’m talking about nothing goes to plan. Every situation is dire.
About every five pages something catastrophic happens and he has to figure a way to solve the problem. It’s almost like “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” but in space and without some annoying kid whining every mile.
I tore through “The Martian” in about four days. Every chapter was a cliff hanger so I found myself wanting to immediately get back to the book to see how Mark Watney (the stranded astronaut) was gonna get out of his new jam. It would make a great TV mini-series.
Of course, I went to Amazon to see the reviews on this thing and most of them were 5 star reviews…as they should be. But then you have those assholes that have to post 1 star reviews. Here are a few that annoyed me:
“I don’t know what I was expecting but the whole story was about putting things together and was way too technical for me. I could not make heads or tails out of the equipment. my husband enjoyed it. But I could not get one quarter of the way through it. I did not like the writing, it did not engage me.”
It’s not technical at all. I mean, in a sense, it is. But, listen, he explains the problems and explains the solutions to the problems in an elegant way, summing things up with analogies and explaining why the process is important. Look, when you’ve got a scenario of a guy trapped on Mars then the problems that will arise are going to be based on the elements of a foreign planet and the equipment he has at his disposal. There’s going to be an element of technicality. But if you’re not in kindergarten you can get it.
Technical jargon aside, it was one of the most exciting things I’ve read. I mean, I don’t normally read this kind of stuff but you know what I mean. I’m rarely compelled to write about a book or a movie anymore. It either has to be really bad or really good. In this case, it was really good. Go check it out, already.
