The Martian

The Martian is Andy Weir's 2014 novel, the hard-SF problem-solving thriller that originated as a serialized self-published online novel in 2011, found a paying audience large enough to attract Crown Publishing's 2014 trade edition, and was the source for the 2015 Ridley Scott film with Matt Damon. Mark Watney, a botanist and mechanical engineer on the third manned Mars mission (Ares 3), is presumed dead and abandoned at Acidalia Planitia after a sandstorm forces an emergency evacuation. Watney is not dead. The novel is the eighteen months he has to keep himself alive until the next Ares mission can attempt a rescue, with whatever equipment he can salvage from the Hab and the surface-rover suite.

Weir's project is the patient construction of a hard-SF problem-solving novel where the central protagonist is engineering, agriculture, and physics. The Watney log entries that make up most of the narrative are written in a voice (the engineer-as-stand-up-comedian register) that became the defining mode of 2010s and 2020s popular hard SF. The technical material is meticulously sourced: the Hab's mass balance, the Pathfinder communications hack, the water-from-rocket-fuel chemistry, the long-haul rover modifications, the MAV-launch mass-reduction sequence that closes the novel. The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory operational material that braids through Watney's log entries (the rescue-mission planning sessions, the China National Space Administration cooperation negotiation, the public-relations decisions about whether to tell Watney's crewmates he is alive) is rendered with the kind of procedural patience that hard SF demands.

Recommended as required contemporary hard-SF reading, as the right Andy Weir entry point, and for fans of Larry Niven's Ringworld, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, and Becky Chambers's Wayfarers series. Read Project Hail Mary (2021) next. The R. C. Bray audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.