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Andy Weir

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The Martian: A Novel Kindle Edition

by Andy Weir (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.7 172,196 ratings

Editors' pick Best Science Fiction & Fantasy

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Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read

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?

Reading age

15+ years, from customers
Print length

385 pages
Language

English
Lexile measure

HL680L
Publisher

Ballantine Books
Publication date

February 11, 2014
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ISBN-13

978-0593357132
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Editorial Reviews

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

LOG ENTRY:

I’m pretty much fucked.

That’s my considered opinion.

Fucked.

Six days into what should be the greatest two months of my life, and it’s turned into a nightmare.

I don’t even know who’ll read this. I guess someone will find it eventually. Maybe a hundred years from now.

For the record . . . I didn’t die on Sol 6. Certainly the rest of the crew thought I did, and I can’t blame them. Maybe there’ll be a day of national mourning for me, and my Wikipedia page will say, “Mark Watney is the only human being to have died on Mars.”

And it’ll be right, probably. ’Cause I’ll surely die here. Just not on Sol 6 when everyone thinks I did.

Let’s see . . . where do I begin?

The Ares Program. Mankind reaching out to Mars to send people to another planet for the very first time and expand the horizons of humanity blah, blah, blah. The Ares 1 crew did their thing and came back heroes. They got the parades and fame and love of the world.

Ares 2 did the same thing, in a different location on Mars. They got a firm handshake and a hot cup of coffee when they got home.

Ares 3. Well, that was my mission. Okay, not mine per se. Commander Lewis was in charge. I was just one of her crew. Actually, I was the very lowest ranked member of the crew. I would only be “in command” of the mission if I were the only remaining person.

What do you know? I’m in command.

I wonder if this log will be recovered before the rest of the crew die of old age. I presume they got back to Earth all right. Guys, if you’re reading this: It wasn’t your fault. You did what you had to do. In your position I would have done the same thing. I don’t blame you, and I’m glad you survived.

I guess I should explain how Mars missions work, for any layman who may be reading this. We got to Earth orbit the normal way, through an ordinary ship to Hermes. All the Ares missions use Hermes to get to and from Mars. It’s really big and cost a lot so NASA built only one.

Once we got to Hermes, four additional unmanned missions brought us fuel and supplies while we prepared for our trip. Once everything was a go, we set out for Mars. But not very fast. Gone are the days of heavy chemical fuel burns and trans-Mars injection orbits.

Hermes is powered by ion engines. They throw argon out the back of the ship really fast to get a tiny amount of acceleration. The thing is, it doesn’t take much reactant mass, so a little argon (and a nuclear reactor to power things) let us accelerate constantly the whole way there. You’d be amazed at how fast you can get going with a tiny acceleration over a long time.

I could regale you with tales of how we had great fun on the trip, but I won’t. I don’t feel like reliving it right now. Suffice it to say we got to Mars 124 days later without strangling each other.

From there, we took the MDV (Mars descent vehicle) to the surface. The MDV is basically a big can with some light thrusters and parachutes attached. Its sole purpose is to get six humans from Mars orbit to the surface without killing any of them.

And now we come to the real trick of Mars exploration: having all of our shit there in advance.

A total of fourteen unmanned missions deposited everything we would need for surface operations. They tried their best to land all the supply vessels in the same general area, and did a reasonably good job. Supplies aren’t nearly so fragile as humans and can hit the ground really hard. But they tend to bounce around a lot.

Naturally, they didn’t send us to Mars until they’d confirmed that all the supplies had made it to the surface and their containers weren’t breached. Start to finish, including supply missions, a Mars mission takes about three years. In fact, there were Ares 3 supplies en route to Mars while the Ares 2 crew were on their way home.

The most important piece of the advance supplies, of course, was the MAV. The Mars ascent vehicle. That was how we would get back to Hermes after surface operations were complete. The MAV was soft-landed (as opposed to the balloon bounce-fest the other supplies had). Of course, it was in constant communication with Houston, and if there had been any problems with it, we would have passed by Mars and gone home without ever landing.

The MAV is pretty cool. Turns out, through a neat set of chemical reactions with the Martian atmosphere, for every kilogram of hydrogen you bring to Mars, you can make thirteen kilograms of fuel. It’s a slow process, though. It takes twenty-four months to fill the tank. That’s why they sent it long before we got here.

You can imagine how disappointed I was when I discovered the MAV was gone.

It was a ridiculous sequence of events that led to me almost dying, and an even more ridiculous sequence that led to me surviving.

The mission is designed to handle sandstorm gusts up to 150 kph. So Houston got understandably nervous when we got whacked with 175 kph winds. We all got in our flight space suits and huddled in the middle of the Hab, just in case it lost pressure. But the Hab wasn’t the problem.

The MAV is a spaceship. It has a lot of delicate parts. It can put up with storms to a certain extent, but it can’t just get sandblasted forever. After an hour and a half of sustained wind, NASA gave the order to abort. Nobody wanted to stop a monthlong mission after only six days, but if the MAV took any more punishment, we’d all have gotten stranded down there.

We had to go out in the storm to get from the Hab to the MAV. That was going to be risky, but what choice did we have?

Everyone made it but me.

Our main communications dish, which relayed signals from the Hab to Hermes, acted like a parachute, getting torn from its foundation and carried with the torrent. Along the way, it crashed through the reception antenna array. Then one of those long thin antennae slammed into me end-first. It tore through my suit like a bullet through butter, and I felt the worst pain of my life as it ripped open my side. I vaguely remember having the wind knocked out of me (pulled out of me, really) and my ears popping painfully as the pressure of my suit escaped.

The last thing I remember was seeing Johanssen hopelessly reaching out toward me.

I awoke to the oxygen alarm in my suit. A steady, obnoxious beeping that eventually roused me from a deep and profound desire to just fucking die.

The storm had abated; I was facedown, almost totally buried in sand. As I groggily came to, I wondered why I wasn’t more dead.

The antenna had enough force to punch through the suit and my side, but it had been stopped by my pelvis. So there was only one hole in the suit (and a hole in me, of course).

I had been knocked back quite a ways and rolled down a steep hill. Somehow I landed facedown, which forced the antenna to a strongly oblique angle that put a lot of torque on the hole in the suit. It made a weak seal.

Then, the copious blood from my wound trickled down toward the hole. As the blood reached the site of the breach, the water in it quickly evaporated from the airflow and low pressure, leaving a gunky residue behind. More blood came in behind it and was also reduced to gunk. Eventually, it sealed the gaps around the hole and reduced the leak to something the suit could counteract.

The suit did its job admirably. Sensing the drop in pressure, it constantly flooded itself with air from my nitrogen tank to equalize. Once the leak became manageable, it only had to trickle new air in slowly to relieve the air lost.

After a while, the CO2 (carbon dioxide) absorbers in the suit were expended. That’s really the limiting factor to life support. Not the amount of oxygen you bring with you, but the amount of CO2 you can remove. In the Hab, I have the oxygenator, a large piece of equipment that breaks apart CO2 to give the oxygen back. But the space suits have to be portable, so they use a simple chemical absorption process with expendable filters. I’d been asleep long enough that my filters were useless.

The suit saw this problem and moved into an emergency mode the engineers call “bloodletting.” Having no way to separate out the CO2, the suit deliberately vented air to the Martian atmosphere, then backfilled with nitrogen. Between the breach and the bloodletting, it quickly ran out of nitrogen. All it had left was my oxygen tank.

So it did the only thing it could to keep me alive. It started backfilling with pure oxygen. I now risked dying from oxygen toxicity, as the excessively high amount of oxygen threatened to burn up my nervous system, lungs, and eyes. An ironic death for someone with a leaky space suit: too much oxygen.

Every step of the way would have had beeping alarms, alerts, and warnings. But it was the high-oxygen warning that woke me.

The sheer volume of training for a space mission is astounding. I’d spent a week back on Earth practicing emergency space suit drills. I knew what to do.

Carefully reaching to the side of my helmet, I got the breach kit. It’s nothing more than a funnel with a valve at the small end and an unbelievably sticky resin on the wide end. The idea is you have the valve open and stick the wide end over a hole. The air can escape through the valve, so it doesn’t interfere with the resin making a good seal. Then you close the valve, and you’ve sealed the breach.

The tricky part was getting the antenna out of the way. I pulled it out as fast as I could, wincing as the sudden pressure drop dizzied me and made the wound in my side scream in agony.

I got the breach kit over the hole and sealed it. It held. The suit backfilled the missing air with yet more oxygen. Checking my arm readouts, I saw the suit was now at 85 percent oxygen. For reference, Earth’s atmosphere is about 21 percent. I’d be okay, so long as I didn’t spend too much time like that.

I stumbled up the hill back toward the Hab. As I crested the rise, I saw something that made me very happy and something that made me very sad: The Hab was intact (yay!) and the MAV was gone (boo!).

Right that moment I knew I was screwed. But I didn’t want to just die out on the surface. I limped back to the Hab and fumbled my way into an airlock. As soon as it equalized, I threw off my helmet.

Once inside the Hab, I doffed the suit and got my first good look at the injury. It would need stitches. Fortunately, all of us had been trained in basic medical procedures, and the Hab had excellent medical supplies. A quick shot of local anesthetic, irrigate the wound, nine stitches, and I was done. I’d be taking antibiotics for a couple of weeks, but other than that I’d be fine.

I knew it was hopeless, but I tried firing up the communications array. No signal, of course. The primary satellite dish had broken off, remember? And it took the reception antennae with it. The Hab had secondary and tertiary communications systems, but they were both just for talking to the MAV, which would use its much more powerful systems to relay to Hermes. Thing is, that only works if the MAV is still around.

I had no way to talk to Hermes. In time, I could locate the dish out on the surface, but it would take weeks for me to rig up any repairs, and that would be too late. In an abort, Hermes would leave orbit within twenty-four hours. The orbital dynamics made the trip safer and shorter the earlier you left, so why wait?

Checking out my suit, I saw the antenna had plowed through my bio-monitor computer. When on an EVA, all the crew’s suits are networked so we can see each other’s status. The rest of the crew would have seen the pressure in my suit drop to nearly zero, followed immediately by my bio-signs going flat. Add to that watching me tumble down a hill with a spear through me in the middle of a sandstorm . . . yeah. They thought I was dead. How could they not?

They may have even had a brief discussion about recovering my body, but regulations are clear. In the event a crewman dies on Mars, he stays on Mars. Leaving his body behind reduces weight for the MAV on the trip back. That means more disposable fuel and a larger margin of error for the return thrust. No point in giving that up for sentimentality.

So that’s the situation. I’m stranded on Mars. I have no way to communicate with Hermes or Earth. Everyone thinks I’m dead. I’m in a Hab designed to last thirty-one days.

If the oxygenator breaks down, I’ll suffocate. If the water reclaimer breaks down, I’ll die of thirst. If the Hab breaches, I’ll just kind of explode. If none of those things happen, I’ll eventually run out of food and starve to death.

So yeah. I’m fucked.

Chapter 2

LOG ENTRY: SOL 7

Okay, I’ve had a good night’s sleep, and things don’t seem as hopeless as they did yesterday.

Today I took stock of supplies and did a quick EVA to check up on the external equipment. Here’s my situation:

The surface mission was supposed to be thirty-one days. For redundancy, the supply probes had enough food to last the whole crew fifty-six days. That way if one or two probes had problems, we’d still have enough food to complete the mission.

We were six days in when all hell broke loose, so that leaves enough food to feed six people for fifty days. I’m just one guy, so it’ll last me three hundred days. And that’s if I don’t ration it. So I’ve got a fair bit of time.

I’m pretty flush on EVA suits, too. Each crew member had two space suits: a flight spacesuit to wear during descent and ascent, and the much bulkier and more robust EVA suit to wear when doing surface operations. My flight spacesuit has a hole in it, and of course the crew was wearing the other five when they returned to Hermes. But all six EVA suits are still here and in perfect condition.

About the Author

ANDY WEIR was first hired as a programmer for a national laboratory at age fifteen and has been working as a software engineer ever since. He is also a lifelong space nerd and a devoted hobbyist of subjects like relativistic physics, orbital mechanics, and the history of manned spaceflight. The Martian is his first novel. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Amazon.com Review

8 Tips for Surviving on Mars from Andy Weir

So you want to live on Mars. Perhaps it’s the rugged terrain, beautiful scenery, or vast natural landscape that appeals to you. Or maybe you’re just a lunatic who wants to survive in a lifeless barren wasteland. Whatever your reasons, there are a few things you should know:

1: You’re going to need a pressure vessel.

Mars’s atmospheric pressure is less than one percent of Earth’s. So basically, it’s nothing. Being on the surface of Mars is almost the same as being in deep space. You better bring a nice, sturdy container to hold air in. By the way, this will be your home forever. So try to make it as big as you can.

2: You’re going to need oxygen.

You probably plan to breathe during your stay, so you’ll need to have something in that pressure vessel. Fortunately, you can get this from Mars itself. The atmosphere is very thin, but it is present and it’s almost entirely carbon dioxide. There are lots of ways to strip the carbon off carbon dioxide and liberate the oxygen. You could have complex mechanical oxygenators or you could just grow some plants.

3: You’re going to need radiation shielding.

Earth’s liquid core gives it a magnetic field that protects us from most of the nasty crap the sun pukes out at us. Mars has no such luxury. All kinds of solar radiation gets to the surface. Unless you’re a fan of cancer, you’re going to want your accommodations to be radiation-shielded. The easiest way to do that is to bury your base in Martian sand and rocks. They’re not exactly in short supply, so you can just make the pile deeper and deeper until it’s blocking enough.

4: You’re going to need water.

Again, Mars provides. The Curiosity probe recently discovered that Martian soil has quite a lot of ice in it. About 35 liters per cubic meter. All you need to do is scoop it up, heat it, and strain out the water. Once you have a good supply, a simple distillery will allow you to reuse it over and over.

5: You’re going to need food.

Just eat Martians. They taste like chicken.

6: Oh, come on.

All right, all right. Food is the one thing you need that can’t be found in abundance on Mars. You’ll have to grow it yourself. But you’re in luck, because Mars is actually a decent place for a greenhouse. The day/night cycle is almost identical to Earth’s, which Earth plants evolved to optimize for. And the total solar energy hitting the surface is enough for their needs.

But you can’t just grow plants on the freezing, near-vacuum surface. You’ll need a pressure container for them as well. And that one might have to be pretty big. Just think of how much food you eat in a year and imagine how much space it takes to grow it.

Hope you like potatoes. They’re the best calorie yield per land area.

7: You’re going to need energy.

However you set things up, it won’t be a self-contained system. Among other things, you’ll need to deal with heating your home and greenhouse. Mars’s average daily temperature is -50C (-58F), so it’ll be a continual energy drain to keep warm. Not to mention the other life support systems, most notably your oxygenator. And if you’re thinking your greenhouse will keep the atmosphere in balance, think again. A biosphere is far too risky on this scale.

8: You’re going to need a reason to be there.

Why go out of your way to risk your life? Do you want to study the planet itself? Start your own civilization? Exploit local resources for profit? Make a base with a big death ray so you can address the UN while wearing an ominous mask and demand ransom? Whatever your goal is, you better have it pretty well defined, and you better really mean it. Because in the end, Mars is a harsh, dangerous place and if something goes wrong you’ll have no hope of rescue. Whatever your reason is, it better be worth it.

--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Review

“Brilliant…a celebration of human ingenuity [and] the purest example of real-science sci-fi for many years…Utterly compelling.”--Wall Street Journal

“Terrific stuff, a crackling good read that devotees of space travel will devour like candy…succeeds on several levels and for a variety of reasons, not least of which is its surprising plausibility.”—USA Today

“An impressively geeky debut…the technical details keep the story relentlessly precise and the suspense ramped up. And really, how can anyone not root for a regular dude to prove the U-S-A still has the Right Stuff?”--Entertainment Weekly

“Gripping…[features] a hero who can solve almost every problem while still being hilarious. It’s hard not to be swept up in [Weir’s] vision and root for every one of these characters. Grade: A.”—AVClub.com

“Andy Weir delivers with The Martian...a story for readers who enjoy thrillers, science fiction, non-fiction, or flat-out adventure [and] an authentic portrayal of the future of space travel.”--Associated Press

"A gripping tale of survival in space [that] harkens back to the early days of science fiction by masters such as Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke."--San Jose Mercury News

“One of the best thrillers I’ve read in a long time. It feels so real it could almost be nonfiction, and yet it has the narrative drive and power of a rocket launch. This is Apollo 13 times ten.”
--Douglas Preston, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Impact and Blasphemy

“A book I just couldn’t put down! It has the very rare combination of a good, original story, interestingly real characters and fascinating technical accuracy…reads like “MacGyver” meets “Mysterious Island.”
--Astronaut Chris Hadfield, Commander of the International Space Station and author of An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth

"The best book I've read in ages. Clear your schedule before you crack the seal. This story will take your breath away faster than a hull breech. Smart, funny, and white-knuckle intense, The Martian is everything you want from a novel."
--Hugh Howey, New York Times bestselling author of Wool

“The Martian kicked my ass! Weir has crafted a relentlessly entertaining and inventive survival thriller, a MacGyver-trapped-on-Mars tale that feels just as real and harrowing as the true story of Apollo 13.”
—Ernest Cline, New York Times bestselling author of Ready Player One

“Gripping…shapes up like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe as written by someone brighter.”
--Larry Niven, multiple Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author of the Ringworld series and Lucifer’s Hammer

“Humankind is only as strong as the challenges it faces, and The Martian pits human ingenuity (laced with more humor than you’d expect) against the greatest endeavor of our time — survival on Mars. A great read with an inspiring attention to technical detail and surprising emotional depth. Loved it!"
--Daniel H. Wilson, New York Times bestselling author of Robopocalypse

“The tension simply never lets up, from the first page to the last, and at no point does the believability falter for even a second. You can't shake the feeling that this could all really happen.”
—Patrick Lee, New York Times bestselling author of The Breach and Ghost Country

"Strong, resilent, and gutsy. It's Robinson Crusoe on Mars, 21st century style. Set aside a chunk of free time when you start this one. You're going to need it because you won't want to put it down."
—Steve Berry, New York Times bestselling author of The King’s Deception and The Columbus Affair

“An excellent first novel…Weir laces the technical details with enough keen wit to satisfy hard science fiction fan and general reader alike [and] keeps the story escalating to a riveting conclusion.”—Publisher’s Weekly (starred)

"Riveting...a tightly constructed and completely believable story of a man's ingenuity and strength in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds."--Booklist

“Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery…Weir displays a virtuosic ability to write about highly technical situations without leaving readers far behind. The result is a story that is as plausible as it is compelling.”—Kirkus

"Weir combines the heart-stopping with the humorous in this brilliant debut novel...by placing a nail-biting life-and-death situation on Mars and adding a snarky and wise-cracking nerdy hero, Weir has created the perfect mix of action and space adventure."--Library Journal (starred)

“A perfect novel in almost every way, The Martian may already have my vote for best book of 2014.”—Crimespree Magazine

“A page-turning thriller…this survival tale with a high-tech twist will pull you right in.”—Suspense Magazine

--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From Booklist

Remember Man Plus, Frederik Pohl’s award-winning 1976 novel about a cyborg astronaut who’s sent, alone, to Mars? Imagine, instead, that the astronaut was just a regular guy, part of a team sent to the red planet, and that, through a series of tragic events, he’s left behind, stranded and facing certain death. That’s the premise of this gripping and (given its subject matter) startlingly plausible novel. The story is told mostly through the log entries of astronaut Mark Watney, chronicling his efforts to survive: making the prefab habitat livable and finding a way to grow food, make water, and get himself off the planet. Interspersed among the log entries are sections told from the point of view of the NASA specialists, back on Earth, who discover that Watney is not dead (as everyone assumed) and scramble together a rescue plan. There are some inevitable similarities between the book and the 1964 movie Robinson Crusoe on Mars, but where the movie was a broad sci-fi adventure, the novel is a tightly constructed and completely believable story of a man’s ingenuity and strength in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. Riveting. --David Pitt --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00EMXBDMA
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Ballantine Books; Reprint edition (February 11, 2014)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ February 11, 2014
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 3693 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 385 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #8,305 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #21 in Space Exploration Science Fiction eBooks
- #23 in Education & Reference (Kindle Store)
- #24 in Humorous Science Fiction (Books)

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4.7 172,196 ratings

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Andy Weir

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ANDY WEIR built a two-decade career as a software engineer until the success of his first published novel, The Martian, allowed him to live out his dream of writing full-time.

He is a lifelong space nerd and a devoted hobbyist of such subjects as relativistic physics, orbital mechanics, and the history of manned spaceflight. He also mixes a mean cocktail.

He lives in California.

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Jennifer

You Had Me At, "I'm pretty much ****ed."

Reviewed in the United States on August 28, 2014

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Log Entry: _The Martian_ Day 1

I've never been much of a novel reader; I've always been the "Why read the book when you can watch the movie" type. I totally understand and acknowledge that it's a smart-ass attitude, and also recognize that it reflects a certain amount laziness and ignorance. Nevertheless, I'd say before I opened an account on Audible.com it had been at least 5 years since I last read a novel. I opened the account just over 3 months ago as a trial, because I spend 30-45 minutes each way driving to work, and frankly I had grown weary of all the NFL draft discussion, speculation, and subsequent analysis on sports-talk radio here in Jacksonville. Don't get me wrong. I think Blake Bortles is awesome and I can't wait to see him play for the Jags, but there are only so many ways you can analyze his throwing motion and potential before he ever plays an NFL game. Since I opened the account I've read [listened to] 4 books: one sci-fi thriller, one self-help, one classic and one educational. I really enjoyed the sci-fi so I checked the recommendations based on that book and found _The Martian_ by Andy Weir. I read some reviews, then read the first couple pages with the Amazon "Look Inside" feature, and I was immediately hooked. I also found that it was substantially less expensive to purchase the Kindle version first on Amazon, then purchase the Audible version in order to enable a feature called Whispersync. So I made the purchases and added _The Martian_ to both the Kindle and Audible libraries. I have no intentions of actually physically reading the book, but hey, money is money.

I wanted to jump into the book immediately, but there was one obstacle. There is a podcast I listen to called "This Week in Photo." I moonlight as a photographer and I love the show. It drops every Friday afternoon-ish and, based on the last handful of episodes, averages roughly 75 minutes, so I normally try to listen to it on the ride home from work on Friday and finish it on my Monday drive to and from work. Since I've been listening to books, I've completely ignored TWiP, so now I have a 12 episode backlog. That's roughly 900 minutes, or 15 hours of TWiP. I haven't missed an episode in at least 5 years, and I have no intentions of missing any of these. Frederick Van Johnson is the host of TWiP, and ironically it was his sponsor pieces for Audible that encouraged and convinced me to open the account. So Frederick, THANK you for helping me to discover Audible! And **** you for causing this massive backlog. :)

I'm making myself a rule that I cannot listen to any more books until I get caught up on TWiP. If I estimate that each leg of my drive to work is 37 minutes, it would take roughly 24.3 legs to work through the backlog of TWiPs. I'll factor in an estimate of 5 legs of silence (call me crazy, but occasionally I enjoy driving to work in silence), 8 legs to get my sports-talk radio fix, and I'll generously add 8 "random" legs for phone calls, music etc, and I'm at just over 45 legs. Considering that that's 4.5 work weeks I'll need to allot time for 5 more TWiPs which will be an additional 10.1 legs. So all total I should be caught up in roughly 56 legs, or 28 workdays, or 5.6 weeks. It's a long time, but when I'm driving to and from work, time is something I have plenty of. Time to get busy listening to TWiP.

Log Entry: _The Martian_ Day 33

I finished all the TWiPs and I'm glad I did it. A few days ahead of schedule too. It helped that I had a few evening and weekend photography gigs that were a relatively long distance from my house, so I had plenty of extra time to listen. From now on Friday and Monday are designated TWiP days. Today I began _The Martian_. 10 hours and 53 minutes. I used the Audible app to download it to my iPhone and listened to it the entire way to and from work. 9 hours, 36 minutes remaining.

Log Entry: _The Martian_ Day 34

One quick note. You may notice that my name is Jennifer, but that is incorrect. I opened our Audible account under my wife's Amazon account, which she had before we were married. You aren't truly committed to your spouse until you share an Amazon account. My wife is not nearly the geek I am, so I wanted to clear up any confusion before I went further. My name is James. Nice to meet you.

I came up with a solid plan today. I *really* enjoyed listening to _The Martian_ yesterday and I have no reason to believe I'm not going to absolutely love the rest of the book. On September 19 I'm leaving for Tuscaloosa to photograph the Florida/Alabama game. It's an 8 hour drive each way and I'll be driving alone. This book would be perfect to pass the time. After some serious consideration, I've decided I'm going to suspend all listening of _The Martian_ until Sept. 19. I listened to sports-talk radio today while I devised a plan for my next listen.

Log entry: _The Martian_ Day 35

I was real gung ho yesterday about The Tuscaloosa Plan. It's a stupid idea, and I'm not doing it. I listened to the book for the entire drive to and from work, then sat in the driveway for an additional 4 minutes waiting for a good stopping point. I'm finding myself looking forward to getting back into the truck to listen to the book. This is a really good read [listen]. If you have any recommendations for the Tuscaloosa trip, I'm all ears. 8 hours, 17 minutes remaining.

Log entry: _The Martian_ Day 36

I listened to sports-talk radio in the morning today, and _The Martian_ on the drive home. During the drive home I had to endure one of the mini-monsoon wind storms that have become a way of life on summer afternoons here in Florida. I drove past 3 crashes on I-95 and traffic was pretty slow. It took me 1 hour and 13 minutes to get home. Didn't even notice. Then I sat in the driveway for a few minutes to get to a stopping point. 7 hours, 1 minute remaining.

Log Entry: _The Martian_ Day 37

When I first opened our Audible account, I made a personal rule that I could only listen to books when I'm in the car or when I'm exercising. Even with the childish attitude toward books that I explained above, I still cannot bring myself to actually *LAY AROUND THE HOUSE* while somebody else reads me a book. Granted, I've done exactly zero exercise so far, but hey this is a book review, not a confessional of my exercise habits. This rule, combined with the lack of exercise, does however severely limit the amount of book consumption I do on the weekends. Today is Friday. I listened to _The Martian_ in the morning, and TWiP on the ride home. 6 hours, 25 minutes remaining.

Log Entry: _The Martian_ Day 37 (2)

Friday nights aren't what they used to be. Back in my younger days before marriage and kids, I would spend the evening at some loud disco tech, probably have way too much fun, and wake up Saturday morning feeling like I was hit by a Martian rover. These days we put the kids to bed by 8ish and I'm in bed by 11 or 12 and ready for an early Saturday morning. After the kids were tucked in I came back downstairs, clicked on the TV and plopped down onto my couch for some good old deceleration time.

It's amazing how you can have over 200 channels and still not find a single thing to watch. Three's Company? Nope. Cubs game? Nope. Agatha Christie mystery? Nope. VH1 Behind The Music: Elton John? Maybe... Then I remembered, "Wait a second! Didn't I buy the Kindle version of _The Martian_ too??" My rule has always been that I can't listen to any books when I'm sitting around the house, but I never placed any restrictions on actually reading the books! If I'm willing to actually read a book, then that's a good thing, right?? When I first purchased the book, I never had any intention of physically reading it, but desperate times call for desperate measures. I went and found my wife's iPad (the kids' Kindles were on lockdown, and I don't know the password), opened the Kindle app, downloaded the book which was already sitting in the library, and what do you know? It placed me exactly where I finished listening to the book this afternoon. Isn't technology amazing??

Log entry: _The Martian_ Day 40

It was a super busy weekend and I didn't have much spare time, but whenever I did have a few spare moments, I tried to read a chapter or so. Jenn asked me twice this weekend if she should take my temperature. I declined both times. In total, I made it from page 152 to page 330 (out of 369). Today is Monday so it was a TWiP day. There's no reason I shouldn't be able to finish _The Martian_ tomorrow. Looking forward to it. 39 pages remaining.

Log entry: _The Martian_ Day 41

I woke up and went to work early this morning, just so I could get a jump on the book. I opened up the Audible app and started listening immediately. I remembered reading the words that I was listening to, and immediately realized I was out of sync. It seemed close enough though, so I decided it would be a good thing to just re-listen to some of the material as a refresher. Plus I was driving and didn't want to fumble with the phone. As it turns out, I listened to a total of 21 minutes before I got to any new material, and finished the morning drive with 56 minutes remaining. I'm sure the sync issue was something I did in my haste to start listening, but the fact remains; unless I have major traffic on the way home, it looks like I'll be altering my plans and finishing this book tomorrow on the way to work.

Log entry: _The Martian_ Day 41 (2)

I was left behind by my normal lunch group at work today. It wasn't their fault. I had implied that I was in for lunch but also said I needed to resolve a pressing issue and that it might take some extra time. They misunderstood and went on without me. Just to be clear, it was NOT their fault I was left behind. After a few minutes of scrambling around for another group, I finally came to the realization that I would be dining alone. Then I remembered the book. I had 56 minutes left in the book, and with a projected 37 minute drive home that evening, I would be left with 19 minutes of content, in what could potentially be the most exciting part of the book. So I decided to skip the cafeteria and go solo out to lunch, in order to close that gap and ensure that I will finish the book on the ride home. I chose an Applebee's that Google maps told me was a 9 minute drive from the office, plus I estimated 2 minutes each for exit and reentry into the parking garage. If I listened to the book from the office to Applebee's and back, I projected that I would have 34 minutes remaining in the book, a perfect amount to finish on the ride home. All went as planned and when I returned to the office I had 33 minutes remaining in the book. I finished out my work day, got back in the truck and immediately settled in for the finale of _The Martian_. There was some traffic but not much, and I completed the book with 7 minutes remaining on my drive home; just enough time to decompress and wrap my head around the whole of what I had just read and listened to.

_The Martian_ was without a doubt the most satisfying book I've ever read. I looked forward to every opportunity I had to listen to or read the book, and there wasn't a single point that I felt I had to trudge through or glaze over. I laughed and I cried.

I hear a movie will be coming out in late 2015, starring Matt Damon and Directed by Ridley Scott. I can't wait see it, so I can be the guy that proudly boasts about how much better the book is.

Highly Recommended, and not just for geeks like me.

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JuJu

One of the best stories you could read today! Fall in love with space travel again.

Reviewed in the United States on November 14, 2015

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UPDATE - Even if you saw the movie, READ THE BOOK!
Since reading this book, we have watched the movie at least ten times. It's wonderful of course, but incapable of including all the wonderful bits and pieces, and events, that the book has. Many things have to be left out to produce a movie that isn't four hours long. You will not be bored or disappointed reading this at all if you saw the movie but didn't read the book. It will be even better, and give you all the bonus scenes the movie couldn't.

ORIGINAL REVIEW:
Absolutely fabulous story. An astronaut that gets stranded on Mars and needs to find a way to stay alive as time passes and supplies & equipment run out or degrade. Instead of giving you any "summary" of the rest of the story line, I'm going to talk about why it's such a great book to read and leave all the cool, funny, suspenseful and dramatic details untouched so you can really enjoy them as you read it yourself. I knew absolutely nothing about the story before reading it, beyond what I've just said in my second sentence above, and I do believe it would make a huge difference. My husband and boys all read this when I did and we were constantly laughing out loud or asking each other, "Where are you at....what's he doing right now?" My oldest is still reading it and I'm finding my self enjoying the revisiting of the story as he passes each chapter.

Andy Weir has a very cool writing style. It is different than a lot of other styles I have gotten used to, and I found myself enjoying the change a lot, which means he does it very well. He's really funny and it comes out in his main character in so many ways. After the first few chapters, you find yourself with a page turner that you hate to put down and can't wait to fall back into. I actually paused at the last page of the last chapter thinking there was going to be more, and when I returned to the story the next day with my feet curled under me on the couch I was heartbroken to find the next page was not the start of another chapter but the "Thank you for reading" screen. It was like losing a best friend or a family member to find I had nothing else to read in the book, (well, the interview with Weir at the end of the book was a nice bonus as I was desperate for more...) While others might think it's a negative strike against a book for it to end while the reader thinks there's going to be more, and it is in most other cases, it wasn't in this book. It could have ended at a lot of various different points without leaving the reader to feel like too many loose ends had been left. He chose a good place to end it, but the story was soooo good I would have eaten up 10 more chapters easily, and then some! There's another whole book of real challenges and suspense he could write about after the point he ended this one at. It didn't seem like he did that intentionally, but I would love to read the "next adventure" picking up where he left off. I kept telling my husband after I had finished it, "I miss my martian!!!" I was literally sad for a day or two wanting to hear the details of his next day and not being able to. LOL

Now, the science part. Don't click away with a yawn looking for something else. Andy Weir's writing will completely take you by surprise as you find out how much you enjoy understanding the finer scientific reasoning, physics and chemistry behind things this astronaut can or can't do on Mars, and following his logic as he tries to figure out ways to survive. Almost everything the astronaut does is absolutely believable, and his attitude, reactions, and emotions all ring true to the reader as something they themselves probably would think, feel or do. It's so "down to earth" (but on Mars - ha ha) that it makes it engaging. Reading this story doesn't leave you in that fun "what if" wonderment state like some science fiction does with unbelievable circumstances or worlds that are not based in our reality. Weir basis his entire story on our present reality, and writes about the actual probable circumstances if this actually happened. It leaves you thinking, "that's probably just what it's like, or would be like," and you feel incredibly educated about the planet Mars, a fresh wonderment all it's own. You find yourself more motivated to see the real-life discoveries mankind has about Mars in the future; as well as our potential for space travel in general from a realistic point of view. Has Weir found the magic formula to reignite the excitement and imagination of the American public once again for space travel? I think so.

As for reading about the physics or chemistry behind his adventures, don't make the mistake of thinking it will be too boring or complex to enjoy. Weir knows how to word things so that you're eyes don't glaze over, and instead you find yourself understanding completely, or quickly Googling something you want to know more about, (and never thought you would!) That's something I found myself doing a LOT!! That's pure inspiration and what makes Weir such a good writer. He also let's the reader off the hook in so many places throughout the story with graceful and/or funny transitions into laymen's terms or explanations, or by having the character admit he really doesn't understand the science behind something, (that's the other astronaut's specialty,) and then he goes about talking plainly while you laugh at how simple to understand it really was. Rather than struggling to understand the science he explains, you find yourself enjoying it with his relaxed writing. This character is a highly intelligent NASA astronaut, and yet the writing, without cutting too many corners, makes you feel like you're on equal footing intellectually. What's really funny is the realization that mankind has created a lot of complicated lingo to communicate within each of the different specialties of knowledge. An efficiency necessity among equally trained individuals for sure, but those who choose to speak their specialized lingo at all times unnecessarily alienate those outside their field. When that same communication is put more simply, it's actually not that hard to understand at all. Kudos to Weir for knowing this and humorously getting around it.

Don't pass on this read. Trust me, you will love it and be glad to have read it.

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KelseyLarnderHaddad

Nice cover, worth the read

Reviewed in Canada on January 3, 2024

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The film adaptation cover is very nice. It’s paperback but it’s very thick and glossy. The pages are also quite thick for a paperback. If you loved the movie, you’ll love this. If you didn’t love the movie, still give this a try because there are some differences. A very nice piece for any paperback or movie book collection.

Luis Velazquez

Pretty good

Reviewed in Mexico on September 13, 2023

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Provides exceptional scientific and technical details that sometimes might cause one to get lost but at the same time gets you involved so much in the moment you see yourself in the red planet

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GENIAL

Reviewed in Spain on January 18, 2024

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Interesante, emocionante y de fino humor e ironía

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Tino George

Too good.

Reviewed in India on September 24, 2023

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Excellent book. Hard to keep it down. It tells the story of the human resilience on adversity. The attention to the small details is unbelievable.

Kindle Customer

Better than the movie

Reviewed in the Netherlands on May 21, 2023

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Better than the movie for sure, and the movie is damm good . Full of science facts on an ultimate, epic science fiction drama

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