Andy Weir's THE MARTIAN

You can keep your Heathcliffes, your Darcys, your Rochesters ; my literary boyfriend on whom I call dibs for all time is Mark Watney, almost-omnicompetent botanist, engineer, Martian.

Andy Weir's The Martian feels like it has a very familiar premise -- Robinson Crusoe on Mars anyone? -- but Weir's hero makes it a unique story all its own. Stranded on a newly-established Mars base after a sandstorm forces the rest of his crew to abort their years-long mission (an accident during the evacuation leads everyone to believe Mark has perished), he has to choose whether to give up and die and spare himself a slow suffering death from starvation after his NASA rations run out, or to outthink his situation and live. He chooses, of course, the latter, even though he is pretty sure no one is ever going to come to his rescue. And there is much rejoicing.

His story is told via his logs, in which he details his thought processes and his progress toward survival (making water, making [via a combination of Martian dirt and his own poop] garden soil, growing potatoes, hacking the expedition's exploration and sampling equipment to turn it all into a survival machine) as well as his occasional exasperation at his erstwhile crewmates' taste in culture; the mission commander had a serious Seventies problem, and her choices completely govern how Mark winds up spending his leisure hours while, e.g., waiting for batteries to recharge, for potato seedlings to grow, for hydrolysis to happen.

Intercut with Mark's journal entries are conventional third-person narratives detailing how NASA discovers he is still alive and the extraordinary efforts to which they -- and the rest of the planet, really -- go to get him home again. These characters are as vividly realized as Mark is, and almost as enjoyable to watch in action. Almost.

All this is very exciting and enjoyable, but really, for me it's the competence porn that makes this book the delight that it is. Mark is not truly omnicompetent -- he has some scary near misses and makes some nearly-deadly mistakes -- but he's close enough. Give me a man who can make his own soil, hack a Mars rover and maintain his sanity on a cultural diet of nothing but Three's Company reruns and I'll... no, just give me that man, all right?

And yes, I still want to go to Mars. Maybe my cadaver can go someday at least (which, see next review)...