Great story! But do you think Mark had a hard time? Weir could not find a publisher. In addition to potatoes, Mark figures out how to get water, energy, and oxygen that will last him until his rescue.

But he knows how to science the heck out of an impossible situation. Now, Weir is not the most sophisticated writer, as made evident by his affinity for cliché. And when he manages to contact a chagrined NASA, his home planet rallies around a rescue effort. Mark is a botanist and a tough cookie, so he survives by growing potatoes using, ahem, the doodoo produced and conveniently packaged for a year by his old team. Back on Earth, they are already naming high schools after him - as memorials.īut, alas. With little food and all sorts of other “intractable” survival problems (like drinking and breathing), he is in deep doodoo. Why 444 days? Well, that’s when money-strapped NASA, which apparently lacks the political clout of the NRA, will again land on the Red Planet and presumably give Mark a proper burial. The marooned fellow, Mark Watney, bleeding and understandably discouraged, has to survive 444 days on an inhospitable planet that kills you if you leave the door ajar. (Don’t worry, there won’t be a quiz.) He is also no slouch when it comes to orbital mechanics and spaceflight.Ī couple of years ago, when he apparently had a few free quarks of time, he wrote The Martian, a novel about an astronaut, presumed dead, who is left behind by his colleagues when they flee disaster on Mars. Weir is the proverbial rocket scientist, a software engineer who is an expert on relativistic physics, a non-quantum description of a system of particles, or of a fluid, where the velocities can be compared to the speed of light. And I also don’t mean that Artemis wouldn’t have seen the light of day in some form, presumably self-published by its author, the brilliant Andy Weir. On the contrary, it is a very entertaining, educational read. That is not to intimate that Artemis is a bad novel.

I think I can safely say there would never have been an Artemis without The Martian.

Artemis by andy weir review