Review: The Martian - Andy Weir

Well, this book was all anyone ever talked about a few months back. So naturally I decided to read it. It was also turned into a movie and that had rave reviews as well. I haven’t seen the movie and don’t know if I will. 

The book is about Mark Watney, an astronaut, who due to a number of unfortunate events gets stranded alone on Mars when the rest of his crew leave him behind, thinking he has died. However, he has not died and he sets about trying to survive on Mars until the next mission can pick him up. In four years time. As he has no way of communicating with Earth or his comrades on their spaceship, he is pretty much left to his own devices. He sets about starting to figure out how to stretch 30 days of supplies to last four years. Needless to say this takes some “outside-of-the-box” thinking and it is interesting to see what he comes up with. Unfortunately for me, I am very much out of my depth when it comes to pretty much any science, so when he explained all of the things he was doing to achieve certain ends, I must admit I pretty much skimmed it. I don’t think the science bits are too hard to understand for someone who is slightly more into it, but it was way beyond my means. Luckily there wasn’t too much of that, and most of his struggles were less technical and easier to grasp. 

The first part of the book was definitely the slowest for me. This is when he is all alone and no one knows he has survived, and he has to figure out a number of things all at once. There was a lot of science stuff here, but mixed with the jokes and sarcasm of the Watney it never became too much. Wanted constantly lives on the edge, as any minor thing could kill him. This makes for a very high intensity throughout the book, and there are a number of situations where you think this must be the end. But Watney usually manages to fix things and continue his quest for salvation. I thought there was a nice mix of things going right and wrong for him, although at the end it seemed like everything went wrong, just to be fixed at the last minute. It was suspenseful, but finally you were just like “Really? He pulls it together JUST in time, AGAIN?”

When the Earth crew discovers that Watney has survived, the story picks up a little, as we see the struggles going on on Earth to try and rescue Watney from Mars. I found this aspect of the story quite interesting. They end up spending millions of dollars trying to save this man and scrapping other space missions in order to steal supplies and equipment from them to send to him. The question arises “How much is it worth to save one man?” Watney himself philosophizes very shortly on that at the end of the book and comes up with the fact that helping out is basic human instinct. What is the point of humanity if we can’t help each other out? And I think, a bit more selfishly, you would like to think that if it was you stuck on Mars, people would do their utmost to help you out, too.  

Overall, I thought this book was good, but perhaps just a little too “science-ey” for me. I really enjoyed Mark Watney as a main character though. He was spunky, sarcastic and funny, and his voice was definitely my favorite thing about this book. 

I gave this book 3,5 stars out of 5 on Goodreads.