Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.
When a freak dust storm brings a manned mission to Mars to an unexpected close, an astronaut who is left behind fights to stay alive. This is the first novel from software engineer Weir.
One minute, astronaut Mark Watney was with his crew, struggling to make it out of a deadly Martian dust storm and back to the ship, currently in orbit over Mars. The next minute, he was gone, blown away, with an antenna sticking out of his side. The crew knew he'd lost pressure in his suit, and they'd seen his biosigns go flat. In grave danger themselves, they made an agonizing but logical decision: Figuring Mark was dead, they took off and headed back to Earth. As it happens, though, due to a bizarre chain of events, Mark is very much alive. He wakes up some time later to find himself stranded on Mars with a limited supply of food and no way to communicate with Earth or his fellow astronauts. Luckily, Mark is a botanist as well as an astronaut. So, armed with a few potatoes, he becomes Mars' first ever farmer. From there, Mark must overcome a series of increasingly tricky mental, physical and technical challenges just to stay alive, until finally, he realizes there is just a glimmer of hope that he may actually be rescued. Weir displays a virtuosic ability to write about highly technical situations without leaving readers far behind. The result is a story that is as plausible as it is compelling. The author imbues Mark with a sharp sense of humor, which cuts the tension, sometimes a little too much—some readers may be laughing when they should be on the edges of their seats. As for Mark’s verbal style, the modern dialogue at times undermines the futuristic setting. In fact, people in the book seem not only to talk the way we do now, they also use the same technology (cellphones, computers with keyboards). This makes the story feel like it's set in an alternate present, where the only difference is that humans are sending manned flights to Mars. Still, the author’s ingenuity in finding new scrapes to put Mark in, not to mention the ingenuity in finding ways out of said scrapes, is impressive.
Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3902-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
It's a few thousand years from now, a time of widened horizons but all too familiar contours. The nine known worlds have joined in a sort of interstellar U.N.; the government of Urras has peacefully diverted its anarchists to a world of their own, Anarres, the moon; and now an Annaresti physicist named Shevek (cast in the mold of the ancient Terran Ainsetein) has formulated a theory that will dissolve the barrier of time, only to confront the confounding limitations of humanoid politics. This could so easily have been so bad — the Cold War opposition of Anarres and Urras, grimly heroic collectivity versus brilliant, corrupt high civilization, and these as seen by a character of such unmitigated nobility, who would be disruptive in any society in any case — it is amazing how Le Guin has lightened it up, made it all plausible, and not only that, restored the impact of her point, which is made late and glancingly. The novel flashes back and forth, before and after Shevek's historic trip to Urras, which ends centuries of segregation, and delicately develops both the strengths and weaknesses of the two social systems, the contrasting textures of two kinds of social experience. On Anarres Shevek was a frustrated "egoist"; on Urras he is an exploitable novelty. But in both worlds, there are relationships, and things done in certain ways, and objects firmly there to be seen; and Shevek, in the usual slot of naive-genius plot convenience and destined Charlton Heston vehicle, is a complete, fully active mentality. All through, this impresses with small but incalculably right choices which add up solidly and confirm Mrs. Le Guin as one of our finest projectionists of brave old and other worlds.
Pub Date: May 8, 1974
ISBN: 006051275X
Page Count: 404
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1974
Independently intelligible but best appreciated after volume one—and with a huge surprise twist in the last sentence.
Part two of the topnotch space opera begun with Leviathan Wakes (2011), from Corey (aka Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck).
Previously, a dangerous alien protomolecule was weaponized by an amoral corporation and field-tested against a habitat in the asteroid belt, bringing Earth, Mars and the Belt to the brink of war. Thanks to whistle-blowing Belter spaceship captain Jim Holden, all-out war was averted and the habitat diverted to Venus. Now, the protomolecule has taken over that planet and appears to be building a gigantic, incomprehensible device, a development viewed with alarm by the great powers. Then, on Ganymede, a creature able to survive unprotected in a vacuum, immune to most weapons and hideously strong, wipes out several platoons of marines. Fighting breaks out and the great powers teeter on the brink of war. Mysteriously, just before the monster's appearance, somebody kidnapped a number of children who all suffered from the same disease of the immune system. Botanist Prax Meng, the father of one of the children, asks for Holden's help in finding his daughter. As Ganymede's fragile ecosystem collapses, Holden flees with Prax. Meanwhile, on Earth, fiery old U.N. bigwig Chrisjen Avasarala realizes she's been outmaneuvered by forces in league with the corporation that thinks to control the protomolecule. The characters, many familiar from before, grow as the story expands; tension mounts, action explodes and pages turn relentlessly.
Independently intelligible but best appreciated after volume one—and with a huge surprise twist in the last sentence.Pub Date: June 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-316-12906-0
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Orbit/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
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