Houston, we have a more serious problem.
On a brief mission to Mars, the crew of the Hermes are forced to abandon the planet’s surface by a vicious storm. One man is injured. One man is left for dead. But he survives. Mark Watney is alone on Mars. As luck would have it, he is a botanist and an engineer gifted with being able to fix things.
It’s hard to say too much about the story without spoiling the book – something they didn’t seem to care about when the movie trailer was created. Suffice it to say that Mark endures all manner of disasters. NASA, in the meantime, are eager to try to find a way to get their boy back once satellite imagery reveals that he is alive. The problem is that he has limited food and oxygen.
The book owes a debt to Apollo 13. Some of the issues Mark encounters are basically the same as the ones Lovell and his crew had to deal with. This does not distract in any way from the story, which is a page-turner. Mark is a likeable man with an extraordinary gift for thinking his way through disasters. There was only one point where I felt that he took a major setback a little too easily in his stride. That was in the latter stages of the book, so maybe he had become even more case-hardened by then. The good thing about all these disasters is that the reader never gets to settle in to a predictable story – new twists are always around the corner.
The big question is whether this book is science fiction. I have heard arguments both ways. The science is plausible and well-described. I’m not a scientist, but I think I understood the vast majority of it. To my mind science fiction takes over from regular fiction when the boundaries of science are pushed beyond that which we (not me, personally, but mankind) can currently do. I think this book does go past that threshold, so I categorise it as science fiction. I know a few people who loved this book, but claim to hate science fiction, it being all about aliens and rockets rather than real people. It’s their loss, so far as I’m concerned. The best science fiction books are about people, but are set in a scientific future – including this one.
Highly recommended.