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“He’s stuck out there. He thinks he’s totally alone and that we all gave up on him. What kind of effect does that have on a man’s psychology?” He turned back to Venkat. “I wonder what he’s thinking right now.”

LOG ENTRY: SOL 61 How come Aquaman can control whales? They’re mammals! Makes no sense.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian
This quote is significant in understanding how the Mark (protagonist) was affected by his situation and how he is working to keep his psychological sanity. Its a unique way to display it but when looked at closely you can see he uses comics to stay grounded instead of giving into the madness.

“I guess you could call it a "failure", but I prefer the term "learning experience".”
― Andy Weir, The Martian
This quote is significant in understanding how Mark tries to approach everything with a positive attitude as to keep motivated in his hopeless situation.

“If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search. If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood. If an earthquake levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies. This is so fundamentally human that it's found in every culture without exception. Yes, there are assholes who just don't care, but they're massively outnumbered by the people who do.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian
This quote is significant in understanding Marks thoughts and how he uses this to fuel his hope of being rescued  and yet again displaying his positive outlook on life to motivate him to keep pushing on through the hard times.

“Also, I have duct tape. Ordinary duct tape, like you buy at a hardware store. Turns out even NASA can’t improve on duct tape.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian
Shows Mark's humour and how NASA likes to improve everything basic thats down on earth for space. So the fact that they didn't improve duct tape shows its worth and overall superiority of tools.

"LOG ENTRY: SOL 381 I’ve been thinking about laws on Mars.
Yeah, I know, it’s a stupid thing to think about, but I have a lot of free time.
There’s an international treaty saying no country can lay claim to anything that’s not on Earth. And by another treaty, if you’re not in any country’s territory, maritime law applies.
So Mars is “international waters.”
NASA is an American nonmilitary organization, and it owns the Hab. So while I’m in the Hab, American law applies. As soon as I step outside, I’m in international waters. Then when I get in the rover, I’m back to American law.
Here’s the cool part: I will eventually go to Schiaparelli and commandeer the Ares 4 lander. Nobody explicitly gave me permission to do this, and they can’t until I’m aboard Ares 4 and operating the comm system. After I board Ares 4, before talking to NASA, I will take control of a craft in international waters without permission.
That makes me a pirate!
A space pirate!”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

It is an important Quote as it shows the humour that is present in the book and gives the tidbit of info that normally Accompanies it,  most people would not know. It shows Mark's thought process and is a way of entertaining himself and how he applies laws down on earth to Mars this also helps him remain tethered to earth.

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Survival(Stranded on Mars), Sci-fi(On Mars in the future), and Ethical quandaries(Should He be Saved).

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In Andy Weir's novel, The Martian, an American astronaut named Mark Watney is stranded on Mars after a vicious sandstorm cuts him off from his fellow crew members. They assume, with good reason, that he has been killed in the storm; their only recourse is to save themselves by aborting the mission and returning to Hermes, the mother ship.

Watney's situation then is the most dire that can be imagined. He has no means of communication with Hermes or Earth; as far as the known universe is concerned, he is dead and therefore no rescue operations are contemplated. He is, Weir writes, "the loneliest man in history."

All this is reminiscent of the recent movie

Gravity, in which an astronaut finds herself drifting through space. In some ways, however, a closer analogy is to English literature's most famous castaway, Robinson Crusoe. The analogy holds good when you realize a key fact, often overlooked, about Crusoe's situation. That fact is Crusoe's ability to recover a vast array of tools from the carpenter's stores in the shipwreck, including hatchets and a (crucially important) grindstone. Far from being a solitary naked individual confronting a wilderness landscape, Crusoe, as one critic writes, "is the lucky heir to the labours of countless other individuals." Watney too is heir to the labours of countless other individuals - he has at his disposal numerous gadgets left behind by his fellow astronauts, ranging from a hammer and screwdriver to a plutonium-fuelled generator called a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. (Such a device does exist by the way - Weir's future fiction is pretty much set in the present.) It is through these devices - mainly an atmospheric regulator, oxygenator and a water reclaimer - that Watney is able to keep breathing and moving around and even to start planting and harvesting a potato crop on the soil of Mars.

Perhaps the greatest analogy with Crusoe is the hero's morale. Tempted to despair, Crusoe, fortified by religious sentiments, keeps his spirits up by constant labour, hunting and farming and generally creating a more or less self-sustaining one man village. A man in Watney's position, meanwhile, would be pardoned for going mad, but like Crusoe he keeps up morale through constant exercise of his mechanical ingenuity. Indeed, he is trained as a botanist and an engineer - the latter discipline, in particular, is crucial. "He's an engineer," a NASA colleague says of Watney. "Fixing things is his job."

On Mars, it turns out to be a pretty steady job. The engineer is called upon to fix one damned thing after another, a routine that helps keep him from falling into despair and also provides a modicum of satisfaction. "I stood back and admired my work," he says at one point. Robinson Crusoe no doubt stood back and admired his work many a time as well.

I have never read the novels of Tom Clancy, but I gather The Martian trades on the same authorial technique of featuring complex mechanical devices - sophisticated weaponry and so on - for the edification of a largely male readership. The Martian takes this to an extreme - U.S. Navy submarines don't seem as exciting as Watney's miracles wrought by chemistry and duct tape. "Duct tape works in a near vacuum," Watney says at one point. "Duct tape works anywhere. Duct tape is magic and should be worshipped."

While he's at it, Watney also praises his homemade sextant. "I'm in my space suit on Mars and I'm navigating with 16th-century tools," he says, and suddenly the high-tech thriller acquires a more human dimension.

I hope I'm not regarded as a sissy by my male colleagues for finding high-tech thrillers in general tiresome. A little of these super-electronic gadgets go a long way, in my opinion. In The Martian, I found myself skimming through many an explanation of how the hero got something up and running, including his description of how he was able to take a bath. "I took [fellow astronaut] Johanssen's cot and cut out the hammock," Watney reports. "Then I draped spare canvas over the frame, making a pit inside the cot, with extra canvas around the edges. Once I weighed down the excess canvas with rocks, I had a watertight bathtub!"

Actually that's low tech, but the reader will recognize the same spirit with which the hero rigs up the plutonium-powered generator. Watney, to the credit of the novel, is also not averse to expanding on miniature science lessons. "The problem with small pressure vessels is CO2 toxicity," he informs the reader at one point. "You can have all the oxygen in the world, but once the CO2 gets above 1%, you'll start to get drowsy. At 2%, it's like being drunk. At 5%, it's hard to stay conscious. Eight percent will eventually kill you. Staying alive isn't about oxygen, it's about getting rid of CO2."

I sort of knew this about CO2, but it was nice to have the point so graphically stated.

Comic relief in the face of this relentless exposition of the mechanical and the scientific is provided by the astronaut's watching crappy 1970s television sitcoms for diversion. The hero's self-deprecating sense of humour is also an ingredient in preventing the seriousness of the situation from getting out of hand. Only on a couple of occasions does the hero give vent to deep emotions. "I bawled like a little kid for several moments," he reports, following a moment of unexpected triumph. Then the hero immediately pulls himself together and reports back for duty, as it were.

As in countless police and military dramas, there is conflict between the risk-taking, front line combatants - in this case, the astronauts - and the desk-bound, doing-things-by-the-book, management types -in this case the "nervous Nellies" of NASA. As always in these dramas, the risk-takers are ultimately vindicated - but not before every last possible hazard and misfortune has been satisfactorily dealt with.

The Martian is true in that sense to the genre, in its manufacture and resolution of suspense carried on to the final pages.

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In Andy Weir's novel, The Martian, an American astronaut named Mark Watney is stranded on Mars after a vicious sandstorm cuts him off from his fellow crew members. They assume, with good reason, that he has been killed in the storm; their only recourse is to save themselves by aborting the mission and returning to Hermes, the mother ship.

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This was his first novel.

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He is a software engineer.

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Author of the Martian

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on mars

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David Fish has Quite a bit to say about this book and it's all worth listening to.

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I learned the "read-the-book-before-you-watch-the-movie" lesson the hard way: with Harry Potter. Somehow I made it all the way to the sophomore year of college before reading the books, and by then it was too late. I had seen all the movies, so the universe had already been imagined by someone else. I had messed up.

So now, if there's even a small chance that I'll want to read the book behind the movie, I won't let myself watch the movie before finishing the book. My decision to read Andy Weir's The Martian is the latest product of this rule.

Why The Martian? First, my dad and sister raved about it. Second, Matt Damon stars in the movie version, and my three favorite movies are Ocean's 11, The Bourne Identity, and Good Will Hunting  - enough said. So, locked out of the movie until I'd finished the book, I finally got around to reading.

I'm of the opinion that you can't fairly judge a piece of writing without considering what it's trying to accomplish. A reader who lambasts a particular novel may simply be scoring it against the wrong criteria. Admittedly, some books are tricky to pin down so it can be challenging to determine what the right criteria are. Not so for the The Martian, which is practically stapled to its own rubric. It has two goals:

1. To ask the question, If a man were stranded on Mars, could we get him back safely?

2. To answer that question in a way that is both entertaining and scientifically possible.

Viewed through this lens, The Martian is a roaring success.

The Martian wastes no time in crossing off its first objective. Here's how it starts:

Log Entry: Sol 6

I'm pretty much fucked.

That's my considered opinion.

Fucked.

Six days into what should be the greatest two months of my life, and it's turned into a nightmare.

I don't know who'll read this. I guess someone will find it eventually. Maybe a hundred years from now.

For the record...I didn't die on Sol 6. Certainly the rest of the crew thought I did, and I can't blame them. Maybe there'll be a day of national mourning for me, and my Wikipedia page will say, "Mark Watney is the only human being to have died on Mars."

And it'll be right, probably. 'Cause I'll surely die here. Just not on Sol 6 when everyone thinks I did.

Let's see...where do I begin?

Right there, apparently: that's a damn satisfying intro if you ask me. It takes one page for The Martian to ask its big question and only a few more to set the scene. We quickly learn that Mark Watney is one of six astronauts on the Ares 3 mission but - spoiler alert - the only one left on the Red Planet when things go wrong. The Martian follows the traditional three-part storytelling model - 1) get your protagonist stuck in a tree, 2) throw rocks at him, 3) help him come down - with unabashed sincerity. The metaphor could only be more literal if Watney were an arborist instead of a botanist.

Yes, you read that correctly. Mark Watney is not only an astronaut but a botanist, too. He's also a mechanical engineer. Why is Watney a botanist and a mechanical engineer? He tells us it's because everyone on the Ares 3 crew is an expert in two scientific fields and his happen to be those ones. But it doesn't take long to realize that his combo is more than fortuitous: it's the only conceivable pairing that could give someone a fighting chance of solo survival on Mars.

The Martian strives to come across as more than fantasy and answer its big question in earnest, so it necessarily operates within the tight framework of the laws of physics. As a result Watney has his work cut out for him. Generating enough water and food to survive is only the beginning. If he wants to get back to Earth, he's going to have to do more than tend to his potato garden and wait for his friends at NASA to come and get him. One of the many issues he must confront is that everyone thinks he's dead.

If watching a brilliant and charismatic scientist invent his way out of a dire situation seems like fun, then The Martian is for you. The majority of the book occurs on the Martian surface and takes the form of Watney's journal entries. Of course, a feel-good novel about a human stranded on Mars can only end one way, so for all of Watney's challenges there's hardly any real suspense. Weir is too obviously invested in answering his question in the affirmative to let his protagonist be "the only human being to have died on Mars." And that's OK. Instead of worrying about whether Mark will find a way to survive after the umpteenth disaster nearly kills him, you can relax and enjoy seeing how he does it.

I can understand why the constant back-and-forth of "shit, I'm fucked" and "phew, that was close" may seem pedantic or even annoying to some readers, but for me the ride was pure joy. I happily went along with the sorcery and catastrophe, and I couldn't get enough of Weir's science experiments. He did a phenomenally thorough job of crafting Watney's challenges and their solutions. One example: he wrote computer programs to simulate the orbital paths taken by his fictional spacecraft. And for anyone who has trouble accepting the technical details, I say to you, Shouldn't suspending your disbelief be easier in low-gravity?

Weir impresses with the precision of his calculations, but The Martian succeeds because of a different type of precision: its limited scope. It is exactly as long as it needs to be to accomplish what it sets out to. It eschews themes, morals, and pretty much anything that resembles a literary device. Another author might have teased some ethical quandaries out of Watney's predicament -  What does it mean to be abandoned? When is a life worth saving? - but I got the sense that these questions never occurred to Weir. With his focus on the science behind the story, it's no wonder that Weir leaves major areas of The Martian underexposed, and it's no problem, either.

There is a problem, however, when Weir tries to find a happy medium between doubling down on a topic and leaving it alone. Characterization is one example: it's shallow at its best and clichéd at its worst. Watney isn't the only character in The Martian. There's also a supporting cast comprising some folks at NASA and the other astronauts from Ares 3, and Weir cannot help but give each of them a little too much attention. The result is a hodgepodge of about a dozen half-baked characters who only slow down the story. We probably don't need to know if a young woman operating satellites for NASA gets a promotion, and we certainly don't need to be there when her superiors argue over it, but Weir feels otherwise.

Unfortunately, Weir's characterization pitfalls extend to Watney as well, who comes off feeling flat. He's easy to imagine but hard to believe. His inspired will to survive against all odds never gets explained; I was left with the impression that he only wants to survive because Weir wants him to. In other words, Watney doesn't harbor his own desires, and this cheapens the narrative because desires are what bring characters to life. How can it be that we spend nearly the entire book inside Watney's head but never get close to his thoughts?

If you can forgive the minor missteps in characterization, you're left with an exciting and entertaining book rooted in science, glorious science. The Martian showcases Weir's ability to ask a magnificent question and then distill the answer into an action-packed novel instead of a drawn-out trilogy. Like space travel, writing is all about keeping only what you need and cutting out the excess, and The Martian travels light.

It's a shame it's not in theaters anymore.

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Book Review: The Martian by Andy Weir - David Fish - Medium

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I learned the "read-the-book-before-you-watch-the-movie" lesson the hard way: with Harry Potter. Somehow I made it all the way to the sophomore year of college before reading the books, and by then it was too late. I had seen all the movies, so the universe had already been imagined by someone else.

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Research the author’s own thoughts on his own work

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Research the author’s own thoughts on his own work

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The author’s thought on his work are that he did find it difficult not to turn it in to a paper about how the technical aspect on the novel would work. He wanted to make sure that the science was explained well but that it did not over take the novel. He also wanted that to be a good balance of humor in the novel.

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This story takes place in the year 2030 and is taken place in NASA headquarters and Mars

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The Martian is a 2011 science fiction novel written by Andy Weir. It was his debut novel under his own name. It was originally self-published in 2011; Crown Publishing purchased the rights and re-released it in 2014. The story follows an American astronaut, Mark Watney, as he becomes stranded alone on Mars in the year 2035 and must improvise in order to survive.

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Inspiration for this work (why did he write this book?)

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Inspiration for this work (why did he write this book?)

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He has always loved space and he’s a hobbyist of subject such as relativistic physics, orbital mechanics, and the history of manned spaceflight. He was thinking about how to do a manned mission to Mars and it turned in to a story.

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Andy Weir chose this title and its fitting because the story is about how Mark Watney an astronaut is left stranded on Mars this makes him the first human to inhabit Mars making him a resident therefore making him a martian.

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Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on Mars.

Now, he’s sure he’ll be the first person to die there.

After a dust storm nearly kills him and forces his crew to evacuate while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded and completely alone with no way to even signal Earth that he’s alive—and even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone long before a rescue could arrive.

Chances are, though, he won’t have time to starve to death. The damaged machinery, unforgiving environment, or plain-old “human error” are much more likely to 🤬 him first.

But Mark isn’t ready to give up yet. Drawing on his ingenuity, his engineering skills — and a relentless, dogged refusal to quit — he steadfastly confronts one seemingly insurmountable obstacle after the next. Will his resourcefulness be enough to overcome the impossible odds against him?