first post of a new year

[ranua]

First, before I forget, I got the book The Martian for Christmas and finished it already. What a damn good book! I got all teary a time or two even. I don't think I could pick one bit out as my favorite, the whole thing was done so well. The main character's voice was done perfectly, dark humor and all. The science all seemed plausible too, which

Comments

[dodger_sister]

I've seen the movie of The Martian and you'd think it'd be dull, with so many long stretches of Matt Damon alone on the planet, but he delivers it beautifully, the emotion, the humor, the isolation. It's very well done.

Cool thing about the book though - so the guy had like a computer science job and had decided to just write The Martian for fun (had tried being published before, I guess, but it didn't work out so then he was just writing for fun) so when he wrote The Martian, it was just for fun. He was putting it up on the internet, one chapter at a time. He also went to a bunch of science forums and places where like phd scientists hang out online and basically crowd-sourced all of the science out to them, like asked the questions and let them debate stuff and went with whatever they said about space, botany, time and dates and position of the sun, rocket science, etc. And then just like put the book up on the internet so all these scientists could read it, the book that they had basically helped write. Eventually people started asking for the full thing, in one place, so he put it up on Amazon for 99cents. Finally it got sold to a publisher and - here I can't verify but Sis said she heard him on NPR talking about it - donated most of his earnings for the book to charity bc he already had like a really well paying job and had just written the book for fun and idk, he had a lot of help from the scientists writing it and so he donated the revenue or whatever. Cool, right?

Emergency Xanax - me too. I find that once I had it on hand, just knowing I had it made me need it less, like the safety net made me feel safer. So sorry about your family losses this year, bb. I went there this year too and it never gets easier. But hell yes on branching out in your social circle and getting on good meds and losing weight! Today, Sis and I were trying to list all the good things from 2015, to prove to ourselves that it wasn't all bad. And it wasn't, once we laid it all out.

Later, bb!

[ranua]

That is a damn cool thing about the book, I had no idea!

Yay for Xanax and the doctors that prescribe it! :D

[dodger_sister]

Ikr? Like The Martian basically started out as Science fanfic, like you're in the science!fandom, here's some fanfic!