The Martian review

Mark Watney is accidentally left behind on Mars when his crewmates, believing him dead, abort their mission during a storm and launch for Earth. He is now alone on a planet with no way to communicate with NASA and enough food for perhaps sixty days. The Martian is his account of what he does next — told largely through mission logs — and it is, above all, a novel about problem-solving. Watney is a botanist and mechanical engineer, and he uses both disciplines in increasingly improvised ways to extend his survival window from weeks to years.

The book's real subject is competence. Watney's voice is irreverent and funny — he makes jokes in log entries he knows might never be read — but the problems he faces are not comedic. He has to figure out how to grow food in sterile Martian soil, how to generate water from rocket fuel chemistry, how to travel thousands of kilometers across a desert planet in a vehicle not designed for the journey, and how to communicate with a planet that doesn't know he's alive. Weir did the engineering calculations himself before writing the novel, and the solutions are real; readers with science backgrounds have verified most of them.