When Mark Watney gets left, presumed dead, on
Mars when the rest of the crew abandon their mission in the face of an
overwhelming sandstorm, things don’t look good. Okay, so he is alive through a
fluke of circumstance, and the base (“the HAB”) is intact with all life
supporting systems operational, but the comms dish has blown away and there is
no way of letting anyone on Earth or the receding spaceship know that he needs
rescuing.
The next scheduled mission to Mars will not
arrive for four years and will land over three thousand kilometres away. His
food supply he can stretch to last a year. No, things don’t look good. But he
is resourceful and mentally tough and a botanist with a good grasp of basic
science and engineering, so he gets to, tackling one job at a time, staying
alive, thinking things through, counting his assets.
He has got a couple of Mars rover buggies,
some emergency pop-up tents, five spare space suits, and half a dozen potatoes
meant for Thanksgiving supper. He survives, buys time, waits, makes plans.
Then back on Earth, someone monitoring
satellite images notices things at the Mars base have changed position. Who is
moving them? It can only be an alive Mark Watney. All resources are diverted to
come up with a rescue plan that seems impossible to execute before he starves
to death.
The narrative now toggles between the fight
for survival on Mars and the efforts to launch a rescue mission from Earth.
Watney is tested to the limit as every crisis overcome is followed by a new
problem to solve. On earth the best brains on the planet scheme and model
options, none guaranteed to succeed.
It makes for compulsive reading. Watney’s log
has enough science to convince and its breezy tone gets the reader on board,
urging him on to a testing climax.
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