The Martian

Starred review from November 25, 2013
A dust storm strands astronaut Mark Watney on Mars and forces his landing crew to abandon the mission and return to Earth in Weir’s excellent first novel, an SF thriller. Watney, injured by flying debris and presumed dead, is alone on Mars with no communication and limited supplies. He is, however, the mission engineer, the fix-it guy, and with intelligence and grit he goes to work to stay alive. There are setbacks and triumphs galore as we follow Watney’s sojourn on Mars via his journal entries. Meanwhile, a desperate NASA team concocts a rescue plan on Earth. Watney’s solutions to food and life support problems are plausible, and Weir laces the technical details with enough keen wit to satisfy hard science fiction fan and general reader alike. Deftly avoiding the problem of the Robinson Crusoe tale that bogs down in repetitious behavior, Weir uses Watney’s proactive nature and determination to survive to keep the story escalating to a riveting conclusion. Agent: David Fugate, LaunchBooks Literary Agency.

September 15, 2013

Looks like sf, reads like a thriller. Mark Watney has just become the first man to walk on Mars, and now he's preparing to die there, his crew having left him behind because they assume he's dead after a vicious dust storm. Film rights for this first novel have been sold, and foreign rights sales are booming.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

nerdynerdynerd - "Hey there." declared Mark Watney to his first potato plant. This was an interesting book. I enjoyed reading it, but at the same time I was pulled onto Mars and into Mark's world. He had a lot of food-the rest of his crew aborted misson and left him there, supposedly dead. But no! He was alive, and (partially) well. (Except for the fact that a satellite slammed into him and stabbed him, but that's unimportant.) With the potatoes in his food stash, he decided to grow some. And maybe set himself on fire once. Maybe. Then, his potatoes died. Nobody likes cold temperatures on Mars. Then, Rich Purnell decides to try to help save him. NASA declines. But the rest of the Ares III crew (those rebels!) use Rich's maneuver. And Mark is saved. The rest you know.

December 1, 2013
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)