Customer Reviews

How to Live on Mars: A Trusty Guidebook to Surviving and Thriving on the Red Planet

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Once again, Zubrin delights and informs like no other. This concise, easy-reading, laugh-out-loud, little volume is packed with more solid scientific and engineering information about Mars, Mars exploration and settlement than even "The Case for Mars." Whereas the latter was informative and interesting, but fairly straight-laced, Zubrin here takes a decidedly more lighthearted approach, creating a fictional, early 22nd century guide to surviving and thriving on the new frontier.

As usual, Zubrin's strongest suit is his ability to turn his caustic wit against the foolish, timid, bureaucratic, cowardly, thoughtless paralysis which presently cripples the aerospace establishment, and indeed, Zubrin suggests, the entirety of terrestrial "civilization" (if what we have down here still merits the term.) Perhaps my favorite example is the following passage detailing water reclamation from the exhaust of a space suit's methanol/oxygen fuel-cell (used to provide electric power) in order to extend the endurance of Martians on EVA.

"The water you obtain will include a significant quantity of carbon dioxide in solution, which is why NASA has banned systems that plumb fuel-cell wastewater directly back to the suit canteen. However, despite the claimed medical problem, it is a fact that in the twentieth century, many people chose to drink carbonated water as a matter of preference."

I do not hold with those who regard Zubrin's political asides as an interruption of an otherwise interesting presentation of scientific or engineering information. Zubrin's ability to decisively skewer folly of all sorts, technical, medical, political, social, is the primary reason that he has always impressed me, and in my opinion, constitutes the single best feature of this particular book.

Zubrin's brutal and sustained critique of bureaucracy toward the end of "How to Live on Mars" is positively brilliant. If it doesn't make you yearn to give up the soul-destroying stagnation and conformity of Earth to live on a planet full of misfits, outcasts and rugged individualists, then there's just simply no trace of idealism, romance, nobility or heroism left in your black, flabby, little heart.

I'm pleased to see Zubrin take such a radical turn, or maybe simply to more openly embrace the radicalism which he has never been able to entirely prevent from seeping into his work. This one is not going to win Zubrin any friends in high places, but I suspect it will contribute to the immortality he achieves when the Martians (descended from pioneers who will make the first crossings in Mars-Direct inspired spacecraft) finally throw off their tyrannical Earthling overlords and establish a truly civilized branch of humanity for the first time in far too long.

Bob Zubrin really knows his stuff when it comes to the Red Planet. And here he gives us a somewhat tongue-in-cheek, projected look at the guidebook he would write for the wanna-be Mars immigrant of the late 21st century. That's cool. And it's fun and informative.

But that's the end of the good news. Here's the bad news.

1. This work is extremely short. It is barely more than novella-length. It is about half of the length of a "normal" best-selling novel. That's word count, not pages - the print edition must have pretty big type. And fully 5% of the "book" is a bullet list of the topics! The market value of a locked digital copy of a novella-length work is about $2, not $10. So this is a rip off in the basic sense of content-per-dollar.

2. The Kindle Edition is a trashed OCR scan that borders on unreadable and will drive you nuts. Starting halfway through the first chapter, a few random words or phrases in each sentence are in italics. I can't get my REVIEW to emulate THAT, so instead I'LL SHOW you by inserting some WORDS IN capitals TO emulate the problem. Don't YOU think this IS really irritating? IF it doesn'nt BOTHER YOU yet, then you haven't SEEN enough of IT and you'll just have TO take my WORD FOR it, it IS really annoying.

So how do I know it's OCR? Smoking gun: part of a caption reads "A/lost people look better in...". Classic and obvious OCR glitch: a flyspeck in the M caused it to mis-read "Most people.."; once it saw the first hump in the M as an A, it was lost in morphospace trying to assign some char values to the rest of the M! There are hundreds of other cases, in many of them it is quite difficult to work out what the actual text is supposed to be.

I have no idea why they did this stupid book trick. Clearly Zubrin did NOT type this on a Selectric and mail them a hardcopy typescript! Clearly they HAD a perfectly good digital copy to start with! So it took real incompetence to decide to put the print edition through OCR to get this. But then to not PROOFREAD IT AT ALL? If anyone had EVER read the edition released here, it could not have been released. Because it is absolute trash.

So it was not proofread - just OCR'd and heaved out the wire. Well, there are millions of Americans recently unemployed. And IMO everyone involved in producing this garbage Kindle Edition should be added to that roll call, at once.


ATTENTION ANGRY MARS FAITHFUL!

Zubrin wrote a good little book. And I'm a big Zubrin fan. In fact, some years back I met him in a social context that allowed me to have a treasured one-on-one conversation with him. But here I'm REVIEWING A COMMERCIAL PRODUCT AT A GIVEN PRICE. My review asserts my considered opinion that THIS PRODUCT AT THIS PRICE IS AN ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE VALUE. Not that "we shouldn't go to Mars", or "Zubrin is terrible", or any other thing you want to impute other than what I just asserted. If you read the KINDLE VERSION OF THE BOOK and don't agree, by all means comment and/or post your own review, and explain your position. But spare us all from a hate campaign of "not helpful" votes from people who already made up their minds [if you already made up your mind about a book before you read a review and thus were not looking for 'help' then a not helpful vote is a LIE that pollutes the Amazon community!] and just want to "punish" speech they don't agree with, and from a stream of insulting comments that misrepresent what my review says.

Supposedly written by a Robert Zubrin born on Mars in the year 2071, when there are Martian settlements, this book mixes humor and science fact in a guidebook format.

Chapters include:
* How to Get to Mars
* How to Choose a Spacesuit
* How to Choose Your First Ground Rover
* How to Choose Your Homestead
* Choosing the Right Technology for Your Hab
* How to Save Money on Radiation Protection
* How to Stay Alive in the Desert
* How to Make Anything
* How to Grow Food (That is Actually Edible)
* How to get a Job that Pays Well and Doesn't Kill You
* How to Fly on Mars.
* How to Invest Your Savings
* How to Make Discoveries That Will Make you Famous
* How to Profit from the Terraforming Program
* How to be a Social Success on Mars
* How to Avoid Bureaucratic Persecution.

The book is an enjoyable, easy and quick read. You need not have a physics or engineering degree to understand it (I have both) and it is written for the layperson, which chapters with more technical content having warnings. I smirked at the jabs at NASA but ridicule is not my thing.

I'm not sure the last two chapters had much to add to the book. For example, in the social success chapter, the pick up lines were funny, but don't really say much about Mars. I would have rather had much more technical content than humor, but the book is what it is; and what it is is a book that everyone can enjoy.

This book was a delightfully enjoyable read. Written with clever mix of humor, anecdotes, ridiculing stagnant status quo, and science in a wonderful blend.

Written from the point of view of a hypothetical early 22nd century Martian as a guide to getting to, living on, and living a happy and successful life on Mars for those brave and adventurous Earthlings wishing to make the trip to Mars.

While having the humor and straight talk that make this book such an easy and enjoyable read it still has the science and engineering data that a new Martian (or anyone interested in Mars) should know. The technical sections are clearly labeled for those wishing to simply skim those sections, which also increases it's readability as you decide how much of the technical sections you wish to read with each siting.

Bob Zubrin's writing has always been fascinating, as he has a knack for combining imaginative speculation on what human society might look like in a real space age with an engineer's love of detail and pragmatism. So I went ahead and bought this book, even though a retail price of $13.95 seemed a bit steep for a 200-page paperback that looked to be largely fluff.

Considering that several of those 200 pages are taken up by Martian pickup lines--no joke--and a glossary, I expected to get little bang for my buck. I also expected to deal with the general contempt with which Zubrin has always dismissed competing ideas. I had hoped, though, that I would be able to read past all of this and still pick up some interesting food for thought.

I'm sorry to say that this wasn't possible. The book is framed as advice to Martian newbies given by an old Martian salt. It turns out, however, that the fictional Martian veteran (named, naturally, Robert Zubrin) is also a sexually-obsessed libertarian scalawag, whose ideology curiously mirrors that of his twentieth-century namesake. Many reviewers, including those on the back cover of the book, claim that this framing makes the book "funny." Here, for your judgment, is a prime example of the "humor" involved: Hiding from solar flares in your craft's flare shelter can actually be fun, as long as "...you have taken the trouble to arrange in advance with your ship's purser to assign you to the same shelter as another person whose intimate acquaintance you might find desirable." Ha ha ha! Nothing like a ponderous, roundabout sexual innuendo to spice up a discussion of radiation shielding!

This nonsense, along with Zubrin's naive and out-of-place political invective (government corruption is behind absolutely everything), is not just sprinkled here and there amid practical and technical discussions: it saturates the entire narrative. The clumsy sex jokes appear at least twice per chapter, which pales in comparison to the relentlessly snide jabs at NASA. Even more absurd nonsense crops up far more often than it should. In a chapter devoted to agriculture, for instance, there are a few interesting ideas about ideal dome pressure, what it might be like to live on a Martian frontier farm, etc. But to get to these, you have to sit through: a page-long tirade against global warming legislation (that's right, an aerospace engineer writing a book about Mars spends an entire page sneering at 30 years of climate science done by, you know, actual climate scientists); an attack (one of several) on vegetarians, environmentalists and conservationists ("...starvation of the poor on [Earth] is not caused by a food shortage but by the corrupt governments that pay veggie schoolpreachers to go around making everyone else feel guilty"); a not-too-subtle bashing of George Bush's Vision for Space Exploration (the capital city on the Moon is George Bush City, or "Loonopolis," and all they do there is sit around eating human excrement); and--you guessed it--a heavy-handed insinuation that it just might be possible to have SEX in the farm domes in question.

This goes on and on, with tasteless, unfunny jokes and political claptrap often outnumbering the actual discussions of Mars. I enjoyed "The Case for Mars," and "Entering Space" was an inspiring read. But this latest book is a terrible turn for Zubrin, who seems to have become bitter, sexually frustrated, and even more cantankerous in his declining years.

How to Live on Mars is yet another book on the topic by Robert Zubrin. He is an aerospace engineer who wrote The Case for Mars, which describes his Mars Direct plan. That is a fine book and makes a good argument for why his plan is the best one.

How to Live on Mars revisits the same points as The Case for Mars in a a very different format. Unfortunately there is no new information here. The format is of a veteran Mars settler advising a novice before they ship out to Mars. There is a lot of thinly disguised libertarian political polemic. This is not done very well. The author seems to be attempting humor. The political outlook is extreme. It is possible that any settlement on Mars will be a very "wild west" sort of libertarian enterprise, but the author does not really argue why that would be the case, or that it is better then any alternatives.

There are several places were the author describes how the new settler can obtain stolen goods from a supposed NASA agency on Mars. He does this with a approving tone. He does not explain why it is worthwhile to pursue a settlement where one must steal to survive. In another section he suggests the prospective settler go into business selling hyped up property that will be available on Mars once the terraforming succeeds. He admits that this would be fraud, since no one can tell if the terraforming will work, or what the results would be. The reader is basically told the settling on Mars is only viable for criminals.

I would love to see human exploration and even settlement of Mars. This text does not advance that case at all. Zubrin should have stopped with The Case for Mars.

I hesitated between one or two stars and finally settled on one star. I was hopefully going to use the book as source material for writing stories set on Mars, but in the book unfortunately his narrator inserts far too much politics into the discussion. Worst of all, there is a lack of data that would be highly useful. For example, in the section of agriculture, the narrator advocates using sunlight for the planets. Well, what about heating a sunlit greenhouse through the night? Would the power requirement offset the lighting requirement? I have to take the narrator's word for it, because there is no discussion. THe narrator does state how much sunlight falls on a 250 acre field on earth and states the power requirement to generate that much light, but does not take into account that the plants only need 40% of it - the same intensity as sunlight on Mar. There is no discussion on number of acres per person required, what plants are needed for a balanced diet and so on.

Perhaps if the politics more closely aligned with mine (moderate), the book would get a higher rating. The narrator character seems to have a libertarian emphasis. He repeatedly advocates smuggling, stealing from the government and stealing from your employer. Libertarians believe in less government but I didn't know they advocate smuggling and stealing. The chapters on getting rich, becoming famous and mating were completely useless.

THere are a few tidbits of information - eg goats in your plastic dome will eat the outer wall, or so far we cannot design biologic recycling systems that work for the long term. OF course if we can't do that in a Mars dome or cycling asteroid, how can we properly terraform the planet? Just hope the huge size of the system has enough redundancy and buffer to work?

I don't know what alternative to suggest. Obtain ILL privileges at a local college library and start searching the technical papers?

Lots of fun but GOD was it a nightmare to read in its Kindle edition. For ten bucks I expect that SOMEONE has proofed the silly thing, but apparently not. Kindle editions are plagued with all-too-common OCR problems and lines that break in the wrong place, but this was beyond the pale. Barely a single page goes by without a word puzzle like this one:

"... Forerunners said, by setting up factories to manufacture fluorocarbons, anddumptthemata rate of athou sand tonn es an hour..."

If this were some free public domain book painstakingly typed in by some unpaid volunteers, then I'd understand.

Mr. Zubrin wrote a nice book; he ought to smack his publisher on the head for doing this injustice to that book. (Or perhaps it's Amazon that converts books to Kindle?)

This book is overall fairly good, with plethora of of speculative information about future life on mars. However, it has three major issues:

The first is that (for the kindle at least) it has not been properly formatted. Some words are (apparently at random) spaced improperly so that they show up on the kindle with gaps in the middle of them: like th is. It's not frequent enough to prevent easy reading, but it happens enough to be noticeably irritating.

The second is that the author tends to have a rather pessimistic (and in my mind, slightly unrealistic) view of future technology. Aside from the cynicism about scam artists and criminals creating hard life on the frontier of a new planet, which is fine, the author also tends to ignore probable technological advances: to the point that I initially assumed this book was published in the late 80's instead of last year. A couple of early examples are his claim that MIR had to be abandoned because the inside was contaminated with intolerable amounts of disgusting "green gunk" organic residue, when actually it was de-orbited due to lack of funding and plans for MIR2 (which eventually was incorporated into the ISS), or the assumption that by the year 2100+ we won't be able to create socks with heating elements woven into them that won't short out and electrocute the user when he or she sweats.

The final con for this book is the author's attitude towards NASA, which is so far beyond acerbic that it gets tiresome and frankly makes him come of as something of a complete jerk. I get that NASA as an organization is somewhat bureaucratic, inefficient, and makes mistakes. But in this book, it's portrayed as being laughably backwards, corrupt, and criminally negligent. Constantly. Almost every applicable aspect of colonization discussed, especially those dealing with transportation and equipment, has a section designed solely to point out and mock NASA sponsored ideas and technologies, portraying them as corrupt fatcats who would rather justify government spending by continuing to push ideas that obviously do not work rather than re-design or alter their propaganda. It's less annoying when you step back and realize that the author is just expressing his doubts about proposed technologies, but the book is written as a retrospective guidebook set a hundred or more years into the future, and with that illusion comes the assumption that NASA is an organization that would rather reuse technologies that just don't work for decades rather than adopt ideas that are proven to work, which is, in my opinion, unfair.

Other than that, it's a good book: entertaining, informative, and interesting.

Not to say you oughtn't...but before you decide to retire to Mars you really ought to read Dr. Robert Zubrin's informative and very funny new book, How to Live on Mars. Written from the perspective of a Robert Zubrin who was born on Mars in 2071, it's a chatty, snarky sort of pamphlet, that's equal parts encouragement for new settlers, score-settling with various technologies and strategies that Mr. Zubrin disfavors, space science made comprehensible for laymen, and patriotic boosterism for the socio-econo-political system that the author envisions arising on Mars--nakedly capitalistic and generally libertarian.

Had I realized just how scatalogical the humor is I might not have let him, but our 11-year old grabbed the book as soon as it came into the house and read it cover to cover. He's now eager to move to the Red Planet, if for no other reason than, "to get as far away from you as possible." At any rate, it'll encourage many to want to make the move, but ensure that they're making an informed decision. That it amuses in the meantime makes it worth anyone's time and attention.

Mr. Zubrin's Middle East satire, Holy Land is also, unfortunately, timely at the moment.