Mark Watney (played brilliantly by Matt Damon) is a botanist for the Ares crew on mars. When a bad storm hits, they all evacuate but Mark is hit by debris. They all think he’s dead. With heavy hearts, they leave mars. That’s when Mark wakes up almost out of air, half buried in red sand and impaled by an antenna. Oh yeah, he’s also the only human on mars!
This is an odd novel, in terms of point of view. Watney is via the logs he writes. As soon as I learned this my hopes for this book sort of fell. How good can it be if all we get is a bunch of dry telling? Oh, I was so wrong! Happily wrong! The logs are heavy with sarcasm and although I had a hard time following all the math stuff, still entertaining. The personality of Mark really came through and before I knew it I was one hundred pages in. Then two hundred. I couldn’t put the book down. It runs a similar path to the movie. There are some differences which I found rather interesting to read. There’s more sarcasm in the book which made me snicker out loud frequently. If the technical stuff had been paired down a bit this would definitely be five shiny stars. As is, this is still a must read for me. I will be recommended the book and the movie!