Tag Archives: mars

Cover of The Martian

The Martian by Andy Weir

Ever gotten a few pages into a book and recognized something you learned about from Kerbal Space Program? I didn’t realize how awesome that would feel until I read The Martian.

Some time in the near future, NASA has organized a manned Mars space program. The first two Ares missions go off without a hitch. On the third, a freak dust storm on the surface of Mars forces the crew to ditch the mission early. An antenna breaks off in the wind and impales astronaut Mark Watney. He goes down and his suit’s vital signs blink out. The rest of the crew don’t have time to recover the body, so they leave.

There’s a problem. Mark Watney’s still alive.

Just … how did Andy Weir manage to make a space disaster thriller hilarious? Watney accepts the fact that he’s probably going to starve to death with surprising aplomb. His mission log entries are the high point of the book. The book’s told in a highly unconventional mix of first person (Watney’s snark), third person (NASA officials, who are freaking out), and omniscient (what’s going on with equipment and unmanned probes). Weir shouldn’t get away with it, but he does because it’s so very entertaining.

You’ll want to read this book if you want to know how a manned mission to Mars would work. Weir’s thought the details through. This book sent me to Wikipedia a lot, and while I don’t understand all of the science, it’s rock-hard. Yet it’s not dry and technical. Weir manages to make nail-biting tension out of Hohmann transfer windows.

If you wanted to know what a mission to Mars would look like, though, you won’t find out here. For example, here’s a description of the Hermes, the spacecraft the Ares crew used to get to Mars:

The Hermes crew enjoyed their scant personal time in an area called “The Rec.” Consisting of a table and barely enough room to seat six, it ranked low in gravity priority. Its position amidships granted it a mere 0.2g.

This is the most extensive description of the Hermes in the book. The Martian surface doesn’t fare much better.

I also have a pet peeve about Vogel’s broken English. His grammar is ridiculously bad for someone who has spent months of mission time and years of training time using English exclusively to communicate. If NASA had caught him saying things like “Very important is thirteen centimeters,” they would have kicked him off the mission.

But that’s a minor point. The Martian is the most entertaining hard science fiction I’ve read in a long time.

Edit: NASA just announced they found evidence of liquid water on Mars. The timing couldn’t be better.

Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson

What happens when you take the best and brightest of Earth’s biologists, engineers, computer scientists and geologists, and coop them up in a tiny habitat on Mars together?  They begin to hate each other with a passion, that’s what.

Red Mars is a fascinating study of what happens to society when we decide it’s time to colonize Mars.  The science of the book is rock-hard.  The first one hundred colonists make their agonizingly slower-than-light journey out to the red planet, and Robinson seems to have done his homework on every other aspect of the colonies: from physics to biotechnology to sociology.  And yet against the backdrop of all this plausible science, the story is character-driven.

Each of the first one hundred colonists who we get to meet has a unique character.  Maya Toitovna, leader of the Russian delegation of colonists, is a twit.  And yet, when times get tough, she gets tough, too.  John Boone is pretty much Buzz Lightyear, charismatic and arrogant.  Nadia Cherneshevsky is the badass engineer who solves problems.  And Frank Chalmers: oof.  The chapters that take place inside Frank’s head are some of the creepiest parts of the novel.  Never have I seen a man so pathologically out of touch with himself.

Each of these early colonists is witness to an epic span of time as Mars fills with people, political unrest and finally insurrection begins.  The end of Red Mars is not the end of the story (it’s part of a trilogy) and I fully intend to read the rest.

P.S.  Though most of the science in this book is excellent, there is one mistake that I found quite amusing.  In Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2026, the Internet is a very boring place.  It’s a handful of message boards that scientists sometimes use to share data.  Nobody thinks of using it for mass media purposes when politics get rough or even to sabotage it.  This in a world that has AI’s and omegendorph, a wonder drug.  Still, the book was written in 1993, so you have to give Robinson credit for even imagining that we will use the Internet in the future.