The Martian, by Andy Weir

After finishing Nothing to Lose, by Lee Child on May 31, I had a small book hiatus.  I usually read at night before going to sleep, and during most of June, I was simply too tired to start a new book at bedtime.  I also did not have anything teed up that I was chomping at the bit to read.  The husband read about a new book in the Mercury Newspaper by an author that worked at the company I recently started working at.  Andy Weir was a software engineer, and an author on the side.  The husband thought the book sounded cool, and was intrigued that I worked with the author, so he picked it up.  During the time when he was reading it, he would be laughing out loud quite often, but would never tell me what was so funny.  Upon finishing the book, he announced that I was to read it now, please.  So, on June 29th, I picked up The Martian and started reading it.

The book starts, literally on page 1 with:

I'm pretty much fucked.  That's my considered opinion.  Fucked.  Six days into what should be the greatest two months of my life, and it's turned into a nightmare.

Um, so yeah, there is a lot of cussing in the book.  But it is funny.

The book is about a group of astronauts who land on Mars.  There is a big dust storm, and the astronauts have to abandon their camp and high tail it back to their ship.  In the commotion and chaos of getting out of their living quarters and back into the ship that takes them from the surface of Mars back to their ship in the space around Mars, Mark Watney, a somewhat salty botanist/engineer, gets skewered by an antenna.  His co-astronauts frantically try to find him in the blinding Martian dust storm before the wind knocks over their ship (their only escape), but are unable to.  They tried everything they could to locate them, but were unsuccessful.  Very reluctantly, they had to leave the surface of Mars without Watney.  Unbeknownst to them, he did not die.  His space suit did begin to depressurize, but the small hole was sealed by his congealed blood.  His suit re-pressurized and pretty much saved him.

The book is basically about Watney's life on Mars and his antics and adventures to try and save himself.  He is literally all alone on Mars and has no way to communicate with Earth nor with his co-astronauts.  He is fucked.  Or so we thought...  Watney is one crafty dude.

At one point, he had a zany idea on how he could possibly communicate with Earth / NASA by using the abandoned Pathfinder ship and accompanying Mars rover, Sojourner.  Being the computer engineer he is, Weir, of course figured out how to incorporate tech-speak into his book:

So, I'll have to use ASCII.  That's how computers manage characters... How do I know which values go with which characters?  Because Johanssen's laptop is a wealth of information.  I knew she'd have an ASCII table in there somewhere.  All computer geeks do.

The way the story is told is very clever - it is told by Watney in a series of journal / blog / log entries he writes while trapped on Mars.  Watney is not only crafty, but he's really funny too (and apparently doesn't follow instructions):

My conversation with NASA about the water reclaimer was boring and riddled with technical details.  So I'll paraphrase it for you:

Me: "This is obviously a clog.  How about I take it apart and check the internal tubing?"

NASA: (after five hours of deliberation) "No. You'll fuck it up and die."

 So I took it apart.

In another portion of the book, Watney has to drive a very long way from one part of Mars to another, but he has no navigation equipment, maps, or anything to help him find his way.  In addition to being crafty, funny, and fucked, Watney also has a knack for either directly or indirectly screwing things up.  Once his saving grace, the jerry-rigged Pathfinder / Sojourner communication with NASA becomes useless because of a small mishap by Watney.  So, he's all alone again on Mars and has to high tail it to where the next mission to Mars was going to land in order to have the remotest chance at rescue.  So, he made a sextant:

Latitude and longitude.  That's the key.  The first is easy.  Ancient sailors on Earth figured that one out right away.  Earth's 23.5-degree axis points at Polaris.  Mars has a tilt of just over 25 degrees, so it's pointed at Deneb.

Making a sextant isn't hard.  All you need is a tube to look through, a string, a weight, and something with degree markings.  I made mine in under an hour.

So I go out every night with a homemade sextant and sight Deneb.  It's kind of silly if you think about it.  I'm in my space suit on Mars and I'm navigating with sixteenth-century tools.  But hey, they work. 

I kept expecting for this to turn out to all be a dream - like Watney was just some dude dreaming about being an astronaut.  But, thankfully, it didn't turn out that way.  The book had many twists and turns, and near death experiences for Watney.  But it also had a great conclusion.

The book really sucks you in.  It was difficult to put down, even when I was doing the falling-asleep-head-nod-read-the-same-page-over-and-over-again-thing.  I just wanted to see how it ended.

I finally got there this past Saturday.  I was not disappointed.

I am disappointed that Andy Weir is no longer working at the company.  I did meet him once and overheard him saying his book was optioned and might possibly be made into a movie!  So, that's pretty exciting.

Pick this book up - you won't be disappointed.  And, you might learn a thing or 2 about being an astronaut, Mars, and how to make viable soil with your poop, reclaimed water, and sheer will.

Next up - either a book about Los Angeles, or a book about Paris...  Stay tuned!

Camping and Animals - an animal encounter

So, I was talking with a co-worker today about what each of us did over the weekend.  I spent Saturday night in the City with some friends, eating, drinking, dancing, and frolicking.  She spent the weekend camping.  I almost laughed out loud when she said she was camping.  I think my exact response to her was, "Camping, like sleeping on the ground in a sleeping bag, and cooking food over a camp fire camping?"  She laughingly said, "Yes, and I even helped set up the tent!"  She is definitely a person whom I would not expect to voluntarily go camping.  She said she had a great time.  They went for a hike to a lake, and it looked so majestic that she just jumped in with her clothes on!  That part sounds fantastic to me.

Hearing her tale of camping made me remember one camping trip (of many) when I was young.  I actually grew up camping all over California with my family - some of it was car-camping in spots that had hot showers, toilets, and running water.  Some of it was driving into the middle of the Mojave Desert and pulling off the road and pitching a tent - no toilet (unless you consider the hole you dig in the ground a toilet), no running water, no defined campground, nothing.  Well, one of these trips was to Morro Bay - a small town on the central California Coast, close to San Luis Obispo.  I loved camping there.  One of the day trips we would take was to Montaña de Oro - an area that has beach access, and hiking along the bluffs above the beach.  On this particular trip, we were hiking along the bluffs, and my brother and I had to use the bathroom.  There was one spot with a pit toilet - literally an outhouse with a toilet seat and a big, yucky, smelly, nasty hole in the ground.  So, there were 2 stalls, and my brother and I were each in one, and for some reason, I looked down before I sat down, and saw a snake writhing in the filth.  Yes, a snake slithering around in the ickiness in the pit toilet.  Scared the crap (not literally) out of me.  I think I screamed and my brother jumped out of his stall to see what the problem was.  I pointed out the snake.  We both were too freaked out to use the pit toilet.

I can't remember how old I was when that happened, but it scared and scarred me for life.  Now, literally any time I use the restroom, I check the toilet for snakes.  I have some unfathomable fear that a snake will jump up out of the toilet bowl and bite me in the ass.  Mind you, that has never happened, and I have never again seen a snake in a toilet, but judging by a quick google image search of "Snake in toilet", and the enormous amount of images the search produced, snakes do, in fact, go in toilets, and it is possible for one to bite you in the ass.

Look before you sit people.  That is all.