"Wonder if he'll ever know he's in the best selling show, is there life on Mars?"
New Reading Bingo entry on this lovely Sunday!
For the "A Book With A Red Cover" square I read Andy Weir's wonderful The Martian. I loved, loved, LOVED this book. I can't find a single flaw, except that I wanted it to never end, but that's not really feasible. :D
First, thanks again to entangled_now and her amazing recommendations, you rock! \o/
The Martian is a 2012 novel about astronaut Mark Watney, a member of the third human expedition to Mars, who, after a series of unfortunate events, is left stranded on the planet. No one knows he's still alive, and while he has some food and tech left from when his teammates had to evacuate the planet, he has to find a way to survive long enough to wait for the next expedition to come by, and find a way to contact Nasa as well. As xkcd wonderfully put it, "you know the scene in Apollo 13 where the guy says 'we have to figure out how to connect this thing to this thing using this table full of parts or the astronauts will all die'? The Martian is for people who wished the whole movie had just been more of that scene".
And that's basically it. Mark is a botanist and a mechanic, and uses that knowledge, and a lot of math, to build himself crops, life-support systems, a radio, a car. Mind you, I'm a classicist: my scientific knowledge is at high school level at best. And that's part of why I enjoyed this book so much, because I kept learning new stuff! These last few days, with Philae making contact with Rosetta again, I would actually get confused if a piece of info that popped into my head came from a BBC article, or from this novel, it was great! \o/
Plus Mark is a great character: he has a great sense of humour, and he's an optimist. He's a realistic astronaut: earlier this year, when there was an emergency on the ISS, it was fun to see how the actual residents of the Space Station were all relaxed and professional, and everyone else at Nasa was shitting bricks. In Hollywood movies they have to go for the panic attacks for the sake of the plot, but it's very unrealistic. Mark finally feels and acts like a real human being chosen to go to Mars would be: calm and collected in the face of his certain doom, but always trying to find a way out of it. It was so refreshing.
The weird thing is, that they just announced a movie. With Matt Damon. And I have absolutely no idea how they could possibly make a blockbuster movie out of this story, since it would have to be two hours of Matt Damon talking to himself while running diagnostics, getting in and out of a spacesuit, and driving a rover at the speed of a walking person. In the novel, it works brilliantly. But it boggles my mind how it would work on the big screen. We'll have to wait and see.
Red cover, red planet, I'm so proud of this square, it feels like fate. :D And now, on to the next one! I'm really enjoying this year's bingo!
For the "A Book With A Red Cover" square I read Andy Weir's wonderful The Martian. I loved, loved, LOVED this book. I can't find a single flaw, except that I wanted it to never end, but that's not really feasible. :D
First, thanks again to entangled_now and her amazing recommendations, you rock! \o/
The Martian is a 2012 novel about astronaut Mark Watney, a member of the third human expedition to Mars, who, after a series of unfortunate events, is left stranded on the planet. No one knows he's still alive, and while he has some food and tech left from when his teammates had to evacuate the planet, he has to find a way to survive long enough to wait for the next expedition to come by, and find a way to contact Nasa as well. As xkcd wonderfully put it, "you know the scene in Apollo 13 where the guy says 'we have to figure out how to connect this thing to this thing using this table full of parts or the astronauts will all die'? The Martian is for people who wished the whole movie had just been more of that scene".
And that's basically it. Mark is a botanist and a mechanic, and uses that knowledge, and a lot of math, to build himself crops, life-support systems, a radio, a car. Mind you, I'm a classicist: my scientific knowledge is at high school level at best. And that's part of why I enjoyed this book so much, because I kept learning new stuff! These last few days, with Philae making contact with Rosetta again, I would actually get confused if a piece of info that popped into my head came from a BBC article, or from this novel, it was great! \o/
Plus Mark is a great character: he has a great sense of humour, and he's an optimist. He's a realistic astronaut: earlier this year, when there was an emergency on the ISS, it was fun to see how the actual residents of the Space Station were all relaxed and professional, and everyone else at Nasa was shitting bricks. In Hollywood movies they have to go for the panic attacks for the sake of the plot, but it's very unrealistic. Mark finally feels and acts like a real human being chosen to go to Mars would be: calm and collected in the face of his certain doom, but always trying to find a way out of it. It was so refreshing.
The weird thing is, that they just announced a movie. With Matt Damon. And I have absolutely no idea how they could possibly make a blockbuster movie out of this story, since it would have to be two hours of Matt Damon talking to himself while running diagnostics, getting in and out of a spacesuit, and driving a rover at the speed of a walking person. In the novel, it works brilliantly. But it boggles my mind how it would work on the big screen. We'll have to wait and see.
Red cover, red planet, I'm so proud of this square, it feels like fate. :D And now, on to the next one! I'm really enjoying this year's bingo!