By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Sept. 16, 2014
Mark Watney is a man with a problem.
Actually, he has lots of problems, but they boil down to one issue: How can he survive being stranded on Mars?
Roughly a decade or two in the future, Watney is part of an American expedition to the red planet. A violent dust storm strikes six days after landing, and during a chaotic evacuation, Watney is struck by debris and swept under the sand. With the wind battering their liftoff vehicle, the mission commander orders a launch, leaving behind what they think is their colleague’s corpse.
But Mars hasn’t killed the astronaut, a botanist with expertise in mechanical engineering. It’s merely wounded him and, by destroying the expedition’s communications array, cut him off from the rest of humanity. Watney drags himself to safety and begins grappling with the hard realities of life as a space-age castaway.
In his favor, the mission’s habitat is essentially undamaged, giving Watney a nearly full complement of food, water and supplies that was originally intended to last six people for a month. Unfortunately, the next spaceship isn’t due for approximately four years…
This is the relatively straightforward setup of The Martian, a science fiction novel by Andy Weir. The book has an interesting history: The first-time author, a California software engineer, began it as a series of posts on his blog. Weir self-published the work as an electronic book in 2012. Earlier this year, Random House released a hardcover edition, and movie rights have been optioned.
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