Random Book Review: The Martian · 7:29am Oct 16th, 2014
Yes, here we are again, with another random...
Wait. This one is not about a game? Even worse, it's not even about something free? Nyerguds, what are you doing? Stahp!
Nope. Still doing it! Here's Andy Weir's "The Martian"! Why? Because SCIENCE!
Now... there's a fun little story behind this story. Years back, before all this pony nonsense, I was a complete webcomic addict. One of these webcomics I was addicted to was the magnificent "Casey and Andy"; an utterly silly comic which follows the random exploits of two rather failed mad scientists, named, well, Casey and Andy. It also involves nut-punching aliens, wolverine claws, a sexy female Satan, a Mime Assassin, and a bunch more silliness. This comic was written by, you guessed it, Andy Weir.
So, colour me more than a little surprised when, on some random google search for something utterly different, I land on a book review of The Martian, a novel written by that very same guy, which is apparently going to be turned into a movie soon. By Ridley Scott. Holy wowza
I do a little research to make sure it is, indeed, the same guy, and find out that the publishing history of this novel is a rather crazy little story all by itself. Andy Weir is a hobby writer, and he has published many of his writings, fan and other fiction, on his website. The same website as the aforementioned webcomic, but a part of it I'd never taken note of back in these days. Mind you, I did know he dabbled in the Dark Arts of Writing; he'd posted a pdf of an older novel project, "Theft of Pride", in the comic section before. But yes, The Martian, now a big shot in the sci-fi circles, started on that simple black-and-white webpage as a list of chapters. In fact, here's the crazy part of the story: after he finished it, some of his readers asked for an easy-to-install Kindle version of the book, which led to Andy Weir putting it on Amazon for 99 cent (the minimum price). And then, somehow, it shot up to the top 10 in the sci-fi category, and attracted actual publishers... which inevitably led to it getting taken down from that nice little white web page.
So... let's go into what actually makes the book itself interesting, shall we?
The aforementioned review of The Martian I found said that the author painstakingly got all the technical details right, and more or less wrote the book from the science. I was instantly intrigued. Not surprised, though. From the author comments that went with the Casey and Andy strips, I knew that the basis for the comic's mad science theme was the fact Andy Weir and his real-life friend Casey Grimm were hobby inventors who constantly created stuff like home-built hovercrafts and other strange and sometimes ridiculous contraptions. So, no, Andy writing a book where all of the inspiration was SCIENCE! did not surprise me in the least.
So without further ado: SCIENCE!
(C&A presenting their Mad Science award to NASA)
Science is a fun thing to use as inspiration. Andy Weir apparently started this whole thing not as a novel, but as a computer program to calculate orbits on a constant-acceleration ion engine, a very real (if still experimental) technology that allows space travel without requiring ginormous amounts of fossil fuel. From his Mad Scientist background, all this research into the latest existing ideas for Mars missions inevitably led him to the one question that drives the whole novel. The question which a Mad Scientist should never ask:
"What could go wrong?"
But, this isn't an Apollo 13. This isn't a giant set of failures which all boil down to "sorry guys, we gave you outdated and malfunctioning equipment". No... this is far more intriguing. So, finally, after all that crap I wrote above, let's get to the premise of the book. A 6-person Mars mission is forced to evacuate after some rough weather threatens to damage the vehicle that needs to bring them back in orbit. The situation takes a turn for the worse, and one of the astronauts, Mark Watney, gets stabbed in the gut by a torn-off antenna, and is left for dead. Against all odds, he survives, but he finds himself stranded on Mars. The good news: they were less than a week into their stay, so with the food supply for six people, he can last about a year. The bad news: there won't be another Mars mission until three years after he runs out of that food, the communications array is destroyed, and the backup communications systems were in the ascent vehicle, which the rest of his team just took off with.
What follows is a story of how this poor lonesome Martian tries to survive there long enough for someone to notice he's still alive. He does this by growing potatoes inside the inflated tent they used as living space. This leads to the slightly-mad science of "burning rocket fuel to create enough water to grow potatoes on Mars". One of the things I love about the story is how every problem leads to another one, either because Mark missed some small but important detail, or because he is forced to use equipment in ways it really wasn't designed to be used, or simply because, well, further into the story, there is the issue that the equipment he uses was really only meant to last a month. So, in his journey to both reestablish contact with Earth, and actually find a way off the dusty rock ball, there are plenty of things to go wrong.
I personally cheated a bit on the "acquiring the book" part, and read it by using the good old Internet Archive to recover the original pages published on his site. (Because nothing ever truly disappears from the web!) This technically means I didn't read the final book as it is published now, but his original full draft, but I can live with that. It turned out this got me a small extra which doesn't really transfer well to printed format, namely, an animation generated by the aforementioned program to calculate orbits, showing the flight plans of the space ship "Hermes" used in the novel. If you want that animation, you can get it here, though, without having read the book, it won't make a whole lot of sense, and might, in fact, contain spoilers. Though, the same animation can be found on youtube too, in a presentation he did for the Google folks.
Still, if you find this book somewhere, I'd say, go buy it, and give it a read. It's definitely worth it. The Amazon listing is here, but I'll be buying myself a dead tree version from a local book shop instead. Dear Celestia, they even translated it to Dutch!
(Not that I'd buy a translation of an English book. Hah! )
(So, I ended up buying it. In Dutch. Heh. Mostly because Andy Weir said he preferred the book cover they made for the Dutch one, and now I own that version! Muahahaaa.)
Read the entire thing in a day after watching the movie. It was awesome.
3515596
Booyah. Awesome movie, too.
Oh, little bonus: I found out Google Maps has Mars, now. So, to put that whole journey into (globe) perspective...
i.imgbox.com/4R4VCJu9.png