I wonder how long it'd take before I got space madness.
I was going to post something that wasn't a book review for a change, but then I had two books on the same general theme for the weekend, and I ended up reading them both. So I thought I'd review them both at the same time. So, on the theme of disaster, isolation and survival in a sci-fi setting I take on The Martian by Andy Weir, and The Explorer by James Smythe.
A Bestselling Book - The Martian by Andy Weir.
I’m stranded on Mars.
I have no way to communicate with Earth.
I’m in a Habitat designed to last 31 days.
If the Oxygenator breaks down, I’ll suffocate. If the Water Reclaimer breaks down, I’ll die of thirst. If the Hab breaches, I’ll just kind of explode. If none of those things happen, I’ll eventually run out of food and starve to death.
So yeah. I’m screwed.
I loved this book. This was a great read, and I now understand why I saw it recommended in so many places last year.
The premise alone put it on my 'to read' pile, an astronaut is mistakenly left for dead on Mars, and then forced to survive on his own, via ingenuity, stubbornness and a fair bit of inventive madness for a considerable length of time.
Ignoring the fact that I love Mars anyway, and wish more books could be set there, this felt like realistic science fiction at its best. With interesting science, adventure and a protagonist who's optimistic but also realistic, genuinely funny and fun to be with. Mark Watney is a great pov character, I liked this guy, I really liked him, and I was behind him the whole way. Things go wrong, things go terribly wrong, but the way he reacts to them, and pushes through them, made the book really enjoyable for me. I thought it struck a really good balance between the feel of adventure type novels of old where everything felt a little unbelievable and heroic, and the genuine, terrifying and often unsanitary reality of what he needs to do to survive.
This is definitely going somewhere on my 'favourite science fiction' list.
A Short Book - The Explorer by James Smythe.
When journalist Cormac Easton is selected to document the first manned mission into deep space, he dreams of securing his place in history as one of humanity’s great explorers.
But in space, nothing goes according to plan.
The crew wake from hypersleep to discover their captain dead in his allegedly fail-proof safety pod. They mourn, and Cormac sends a beautifully written eulogy back to Earth. The word from ground control is unequivocal: no matter what happens, the mission must continue.
But as the body count begins to rise, Cormac finds himself alone and spiralling towards his own inevitable death … unless he can do something to stop it.
This book was only 268 pages so I decided to make my weekend a double feature of science disaster and adventure.
I found this book tougher to read than The Martian, and it never really grabbed me in the same way. I liked what it did though, where it went, unexpectedly. But to talk about it more I'll have to go into spoiler territory.
(Spoilers)
Roughly a third of the way into the book you realise the plot is going to be a simple but interesting time travel paradox. Though it is, of course, nothing like simple for Cormac who's living through it, been living through it, and will live through it. It's a good idea, an interesting idea and the book starts off well enough with accidents and grim luck taking the lives of the astronauts.
But weirdly, the reveal of the time travel paradox - when Cormac goes back to the beginning of the cycle - took much of the life out of the book for me. People had died before we learned anything about them, and it made the long sections where we try and get to know them (but mostly observe them and never really interact with them) in the second half of the book, sort of...flat for me. Though it might work fine for other people.
Cormac's voice is not bad, and I like the way he becomes an unreliable narrator fairly early due to isolation, injury and the realisation of what's happened to him. But I found him very hard to get a hold of, his personality, his connections, how he'd react to things. He's almost the only voice in the book, and yet I never really knew what he was thinking or what he'd do next.
It's not a bad time travel book though, and it's short. I'd probably recommend it if you like time travel and you're wondering whether to give it a go.
A Bestselling Book - The Martian by Andy Weir.
I’m stranded on Mars.
I have no way to communicate with Earth.
I’m in a Habitat designed to last 31 days.
If the Oxygenator breaks down, I’ll suffocate. If the Water Reclaimer breaks down, I’ll die of thirst. If the Hab breaches, I’ll just kind of explode. If none of those things happen, I’ll eventually run out of food and starve to death.
So yeah. I’m screwed.
I loved this book. This was a great read, and I now understand why I saw it recommended in so many places last year.
The premise alone put it on my 'to read' pile, an astronaut is mistakenly left for dead on Mars, and then forced to survive on his own, via ingenuity, stubbornness and a fair bit of inventive madness for a considerable length of time.
Ignoring the fact that I love Mars anyway, and wish more books could be set there, this felt like realistic science fiction at its best. With interesting science, adventure and a protagonist who's optimistic but also realistic, genuinely funny and fun to be with. Mark Watney is a great pov character, I liked this guy, I really liked him, and I was behind him the whole way. Things go wrong, things go terribly wrong, but the way he reacts to them, and pushes through them, made the book really enjoyable for me. I thought it struck a really good balance between the feel of adventure type novels of old where everything felt a little unbelievable and heroic, and the genuine, terrifying and often unsanitary reality of what he needs to do to survive.
This is definitely going somewhere on my 'favourite science fiction' list.
A Short Book - The Explorer by James Smythe.
When journalist Cormac Easton is selected to document the first manned mission into deep space, he dreams of securing his place in history as one of humanity’s great explorers.
But in space, nothing goes according to plan.
The crew wake from hypersleep to discover their captain dead in his allegedly fail-proof safety pod. They mourn, and Cormac sends a beautifully written eulogy back to Earth. The word from ground control is unequivocal: no matter what happens, the mission must continue.
But as the body count begins to rise, Cormac finds himself alone and spiralling towards his own inevitable death … unless he can do something to stop it.
This book was only 268 pages so I decided to make my weekend a double feature of science disaster and adventure.
I found this book tougher to read than The Martian, and it never really grabbed me in the same way. I liked what it did though, where it went, unexpectedly. But to talk about it more I'll have to go into spoiler territory.
(Spoilers)
Roughly a third of the way into the book you realise the plot is going to be a simple but interesting time travel paradox. Though it is, of course, nothing like simple for Cormac who's living through it, been living through it, and will live through it. It's a good idea, an interesting idea and the book starts off well enough with accidents and grim luck taking the lives of the astronauts.
But weirdly, the reveal of the time travel paradox - when Cormac goes back to the beginning of the cycle - took much of the life out of the book for me. People had died before we learned anything about them, and it made the long sections where we try and get to know them (but mostly observe them and never really interact with them) in the second half of the book, sort of...flat for me. Though it might work fine for other people.
Cormac's voice is not bad, and I like the way he becomes an unreliable narrator fairly early due to isolation, injury and the realisation of what's happened to him. But I found him very hard to get a hold of, his personality, his connections, how he'd react to things. He's almost the only voice in the book, and yet I never really knew what he was thinking or what he'd do next.
It's not a bad time travel book though, and it's short. I'd probably recommend it if you like time travel and you're wondering whether to give it a go.