Henry Avila's Reviews > The Martian

You are an astronaut, the immensely able Mark Watney with a great, glamorous job until stranded through a freak accident on the desolate, airless, extremely cold red deserts of Mars in the mid 2030's a powerful dust storm has apparently killed...the five others in the crew ( originally four men and two women including the commander, Melissa Lewis) they barely escape themselves, with their lives, now up into orbit in a small spacecraft rejoining the massive, very expensive Hermes vessel on a long, sad voyage of hundreds of days back home to Earth, its ion engines slowly accelerating in limitless, merciless space leaving their dead companion behind, a shame but nothing can change this fact except that Mark is still alive...The lone not badly wounded spaceman regains consciousness, sees a frightening sight...he's all alone on the vast planet and says I'm pretty much screwed, ( admittedly not an exact translation) the castaway repeats this frequently in the story. Abandoned by his friends little hope to survive, 31 days of supplies left either starve or run out of air no more communications with NASA possible, slowly waiting to die...but Watney will not lay down and expire gently into the night, darkness will be postponed for now as his fertile, brilliant mind keeps working after all he's the fix it man, a mechanical engineer nothing will faze him, Mark with his rather macabre sense of humor, wishes it were true. Planting potatoes in his "Hab" he's a botanist too, ( the best on this planet as he jokes) growing them, a big harvest and yet soon loathing how many can you eat without vomiting... Making water and air repairing anything he views (leaks are fatal here ) especially the Mars Rover, so he can transverse the eerie, lonely, empty nevertheless quite fascinating and attractive, sandy, landscape with dangerous, broad craters...exploring in complete stillness makes for an uneasy journey, no sounds either... find what will be useful his goal, Pathfinder many thousands of miles from his Martian base . This ancient robot craft an old relic, is found miraculously though now communication with Earth and NASA , ( they knew earlier by the orbiting satellites, he was still alive) can be reestablishes, at last...navigating by the tiny, strange nearby Martian moons and stars above, the helpful clear brownish skies at night, keeping constantly busy the next scheduled spaceship back here, by the American space agency brings him depression... four years away...grim Mark thinks...Disaster follows disaster, anything that can will break, mistakes are made by the intrepid but somewhat clumsy spaceman, yet Watney can never succumb until he breathes his last mouthful of air. Deep inside his intelligent brain something occurs, hope...One of the greatest most entertaining science -fiction books ever written, for any reader who wants to travel to another time and exotic place, be thoroughly mesmerized, turn the next page and discover the continuing adventures of a man who never quits. Required reading by new NASA astronauts, the American Space Agency loved this novel, so did I. ....P.S. the film is magnificent also...thank you, Robinson Crusoe.