The Martian by Andy Weir

I've been reading so much YA lit, that it feels strange to be blasting through more adult material. I was fairly sure that my high reading rate had to do to with the level of the books I was reading. Let's face it, it almost certainly does have to do with that. However, I blasted through this 370 page book in less than a day. I almost literally couldn't put it down, and, considering it was sci-fi, it was not an easy read.

Good, real sci-fi explores an idea. It could be, and often is, hard science. But it can also be psychological or sociological. It can even be something like moral philosophy. Real sci-fi takes that idea constructs a world around it and runs a few characters through the consequences of "the idea." Pulp, on the other hand, only needs zap guns or aliens to be termed sci-fi. I like both types, but I really feel the latter has more in common with the fantasy genre. (Change out the zap guns for magic wands and give the aliens pointy ears and call them elves. Voila, same story no sci-fi.)

The Martian is real sci-fi. The central idea is what would happen to a mars astronaut stranded on Mars. How would he survive? What would happen back home on Earth? How would he even get stranded in the first place? Weir does a good job extrapolating out the situation for his unfortunate main character, Mark Watney.

Mark's survival is, of course, unlikely, but Weir did a good job keeping him plausible. The strong implication is that he was simply lucky enough to be the mission's mechanical engineer which gives him most of the background knowledge and skills to survive. I can't imagine the crew's computer specialist being quite so believable.

So, anyway, I haven't seen the film adaptation yet but I'm looking forward to tracking it down. This is definitely a book that I would recommend.