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)...

Curiosity and Sonnets

One of my earliest contacts on Twitter helped design one of the experiments that we just landed with on Mars tonight.

This is Keri Bean, also known as the AggieAstronaut, at NASA's Johnson Propulsion Laboratory tonight looking pretty psyched to be seeing the first photos from our Curiosity rover, taken from her delightful Twitter stream.

And this is a sonnet I wrote a few minutes after Curiosity was confirmed safely landed on Mars and sending us a photo of its own wheel.

I have written a lot of sonnets about space in my day. Possibly more than anyone ever has. I watch launches and dockings via NASA TV and SpaceFlightNow and similar services all the time. But tonight was truly special. It felt like everyone on the planet was watching; the closest experience I'm likely ever to have to the Moon Landings in 1969, which I experienced as a fetus if not indeed a wicked twinkle in my mother's eye.

So I have just one question for everybody moving forward: Can we please, please, please, at the very least, have a box to check on our tax returns next year to give a dollar or two directly to NASA the way we now have for public funding of political campaigns? Please?