Plot: 8/9. The typical narrative pattern of this book was basically as follows: The protagonist encountered the problem and came up with several plans along with reasonable speculations, which he then tested, executed and reported in extremely unnecessary, redundant, and tedious detail. Sometimes something went wrong and incurred a new problem, thus this pattern was reoccurring… Chapters containing the third-person perspective were more tolerable.

Chapter 1: Sol 6. Begin

The protagonist was stranded on Mars alone as his teammates thought him dead during a dangerous sandstorm and therefore returned to Earth in no time.

Chapter 2: Sol 7-Sol 22. Inventory

  • Food:
    • rations lasting 400 days
    • abundant nutrients
    • The narrator occupied himself in growing potatoes that might extend his life 90 days or so.
  • Water:
    • A reclaimer without backup
    • 300 liters of stored water in total
    • He needed 3 liters per day.
    • The protagonist allotted most of them to the potato.
  • Gas: An oxygenator with a short-term spare
  • Energy: 200 square meters of solar cells
  • Communication: The broken radio array was unredeemable.
  • Transportation: Two rovers and five suits with 1500 hours’ worth of carbon dioxide filters
  • Salvation: The landing of Ares 4 four years later

Chapter 3: Sol 25-Sol 30. Food

He extended the arable farmland by using rovers’ pop-tents and the floor of the Hab, in hopes of fighting against the long-term food shortage.

Chapter 4: Sol 32-Sol 37. Water

He hooked the fuel plant of MAV up to Hab’s oxygenator for the oxygen, and ran the hydrazine, the fuel of MDV, over a catalyst for the hydrogen. He used a wooden cross to ignite oxygen, a spacesuit to store water and several plastic bags to build up a chimney for controlling hydrogen.

However, during the experiment, he was unaware of the other oxygen tank, which led up the tricky overflow of hydrogen in the atmosphere of Hab.

Chapter 5: Sol 38-Sol 41. Water

He put his bacteria into hibernation by lowering the room temperature and bamboozled the atmospheric regulator into extracting all the oxygen in the room so as to burn off the remaining hydrogen bit by bit. Despite a minor explosion caused by the oxygen he exhaled, he managed to get rid of the excess hydrogen.

Chapter 6: Sol ?. NASA found him alive.

Venkat, the director of this project, managed to persuade NASA’s administrator, Teddy, to investigate the protagonist’s presumed corpse for the sake of more grants from Congress, which Teddy intentionally procrastinated for two months for fear of the potential PR issue.

However, NASA found the protagonist still alive and therefore informed the public.

Although they promised to try their best to save the protagonist in public, yet since NASA could not communicate with the protagonist owing to the broken communication array, Teddy didn’t agree to risk the other astronauts’ lives and commanded to conceal this news from the returning astronauts.

Chapter 7: Sol 63-Sol 68. Energy and transportation

In order to reach Ares 4, 3200km away from the camp, he transformed one of the rovers by equipping it with the battery of the other one and connected it with solar plates. After a failed experiment, he decided to have recourse to the dangerous RTG (radioisotope thermoelectric generator) for cheap heat.

Chapter 8: Sol?

Kapoor, the director of Mars Operations for NASA, was interviewed by CNN and announced that they were monitoring Mark closely and would try their best to bring him home. They finally figured out the purpose of Mark’s latest journey was to find out the dilapidated Pathfinder and re-establish communication with Earth.

(The suspense of this chapter and Earth’s reactions were so great that it was a pity that the next chapter once again abounded with the harangue of our protagonist.)

Chapter 9: Sol 79-Sol 83. Communication

The protagonist found the Pathfinder after a seven-day exploration and managed to load it up to the car with a handmade slope.

Chapter 10: Sol 90-Sol 96. Communication

The protagonist brought the Pathfinder back safe and sound before he repaired it to wait for any positive feedback from Earth.

Chapter 11: Sol 97-Sol 98. Communication

The protagonist first communicated with Earth by sending the photos of his handwritten messages and reading ASCII bytes indicated by the rotating remote camera controlled from the Earth.

He then broke his back to transcribe the code of the rover required for building the connection with the Pathfinder. Finally, using the updated pathfinder as the router, he could initiate a more convenient conversation with Earth.

Chapter 12: Sol 6-Sol 96. A recount from the third person perspective centering on the other team members before final good news

On their way to the MAV, flying debris struck the protagonist and carried him away. Commander Lewis risked her life to search for him alone in the nearly invisible sandstorm, acting out of duty. However, other teammates presumed the protagonist’s death and urged Lewis to seize the final precious opportunity of boarding, as the orbital maneuvering system could only alleviate the severe tipping condition of shuttle for a short time, which Lewis complied eventually but painfully.

Four months later, when they heard the breaking news of his survival, Lewis couldn’t help blaming herself for abandoning Watney behind.

Chapter 13: Sol 144-Sol 119. Food: The avulsion of the airlock

The canvas of the airlock tore unexpectedly, so the Hab’s atmosphere breached and throw it forty metres away including an unsuspecting protagonist still inside.

Chapter 14: Sol 119-Sol 122. Food: The avulsion of the airlock

He set his hair alight using the static electricity to patch a hairline fracture in the airlock before fixing his suit. Due to the leaking of his suit, he chose to strenuously roll the airlock back to the Hab.

After a sound sleep in the collapsed Hab, he reconstructed it. Though his farm was annihilated irrevocably, and his current food storage couldn’t support him beyond Sol 584, which meant NASA’s previous rescue scheme of retrieve him at around Sol 856 must be aborted.

Chapter 15: Sol 122-Sol?. Food: A futile launch

In order to save the protagonist’s life in time, they borrowed a booster from another project and launched it without proper inspection and further testing of the payload, which accounted for the final Waterloo.

Chapter 16: Sol? The Hermes mutiny

China volunteered to offer NASA a new booster, presenting two options to take advantage of it—a highly risky plan which, however, only put the life of our protagonist at stake, or a more workable plan that may sacrifice the entire crew of Hermes at worst scenario.

Eventually NASA’s director favoured the former from the perspective of damage control. His subordinate, demurring at the decision, fugitively emailed to notify the crew of the later plan, who then unanimously agreed to risk their lives for their unfortunate teammate and subsequently reset their manoeuvre to make that plan a fait accompli.

Chapter 17: Sol 192-Sol 196. An overhaul of the transportation and the loss of communication

This plan required him to drive 3200 kilometers towards the MAV in Schiaparelli and survive away from the Hab for around a hundred sols. He therefore retrofitted the Rover 1 to accommodate the atmospheric regulator, the oxygenator, and the water reclaimer.

But he leaned the drill against the workbench without turning off the power for a more convenient cooling and inadvertently shorted out the Pathfinder on the workbench. As a result, he lost the sole means of bidirectional communication.

Chapter 18: Sol 197-Sol 211. Preparation for the odyssey #1

For the sake of saving more energy, he dumped the water reclaimer, turned off the oxygenator unless necessary, and retrieved the RTG to heat the air generated by the atmospheric regulator. He then installed some brackets onto the undercarriage to carry more solar panels.

Chapter 19: Sol? Food for the Hermes

Hermes succeeded in capturing the probe smoothly and thus the worst scenario of cannibalism wouldn’t come true.

Chapter 20: Sol 376-Sol 390. Preparation for the odyssey #2

He fabricated a more comfortable tent with resin and canvas cut from the Hab.

Chapter 21: Sol 431-Sol 449. Run a test and head off to Schiaparelli

Chapter 22: Sol 458-Sol 475. Find the sandstorm during the odyssey

In order to ascertain towards which direction he could bypass Marth more efficiently, the protagonist clambered up to the rim of the crater, only to find a haze to the east. Noticing the recent efficiency drop in solar panels, he realized immediately that he was on the periphery of a sandstorm.

Chapter 23: Sol 476-Sol 497. The bypass of the sandstorm and the unexpected turnover of the rovers

The protagonist devised a contrivance to compare power loss of different locations at the same time so as to circumvent his old arch-enemy. Unfortunately, after his rovers eventually outran the sandstorm, they were tripped up by an unseen ridge.

Chapter 24: Sol 498-Sol 504. Arrival

this episode cost the protagonist approximately four sols to recover the rovers before reaching the destination.

Chapter 25: Sol 505-Sol 549. Retrofit of the MAV

NASA, with whom he finally could communicate through the brand-new onboard equipment, instructed him to electrolyse the water so as to fuel the MAV with Hydrogen, and then unload all the non-essential components from the ship such as control panels, life support, the entire front, and the safety backups, because although these things added up to the odds of a successful launch, they were too heavy to match his teammates’ speed.

Chapter 26: Sol 549 or Mission Day 687. The end

The launch missed so badly that the team had to use the attitude adjuster to close the intercept distance and detonate the VAL to minify the relative velocity. In the end, the protagonist successfully came back to his team.

Core: 6/9. In a word, it is a good space Robinsonade. However, personally I do not want to read again in light of the protagonist’s excessively repetitive monologues. He had an annoying habit of depicting the same thing at least twice—first during the speculation, and then again during the execution. The book would be better if it narrated all the events instead of only imminent crises from a third-person perspective.

The character development, the interspersed humor, and the narrative skill especially concerned with the usage of suspense left much room for improvement so as to flavor the tedious technical data and the obtrusive explanation of abstruse operations with more entertainment and readability.

Character: 6/9. The protagonist was a talented problem-solver facing a series of extreme life-and-death circumstances with an optimistic attitude. However much I appreciate his resourcefulness in the face of various conundrums, this guy’s persistent monologues was unbearable for me to enjoy.

In addition, the most impressive person barring the protagonist would be the responsible and capable commander, who risked her life in finding a lost teammate early on and showed her ingenuity and audacity by blowing up their ship in the end.

“Oh,” Lewis said, “well if you won’t let us then— wait… Wait a minute… I’m looking at my shoulder patch and it turned out I’m the commander. Sit tight. We are coming to get you.”

World and Others: 7/9. One of the biggest problems in writing a replica of the real world is its inherent mundaneness or triviality—and this is precisely why being comedians or humourists is such a challenging job. The problem was fully demonstrated in this book, despite Weir’s laborious effort in remedying the limitation of the constant first person narration with his clumsy, nerdy jokes.

Here, in addition, are some flaws, issues or inconsistencies I disliked:

Communication or food

He should have requested an immediate replenishment by laying stones for the satellites right after regaining consciousness, which might have brought forward NASA’s preparation for the probe, thus avoiding the dramatic Waterloo.

Water

Why didn’t the protagonist calculate the heat scientifically, evaluate the potential high risks and prepare precautions just before conducting such a dangerous fire experiment in the one and only Hab?

The fact that he was not a chemist was absolutely not a rightful excuse to avoid learning the necessary chemistry in advance instead of just performing a dangerous experiment himself rashly, considering how adequate the time and resources he enjoyed! Or if not capable enough to learn a new subject in such a short time, he could have spent half a month in getting and repairing the Pathfinder at first so as to receive the instruction from Earth.

In reality, this procedure would undoubtedly have killed him, which made me feel more unrealistic than the unlikely Martian catastrophic sandstorm, let alone the exhaling oxygen that fortunately exploded when the hydrogen was nearly exhausted.

Fire

I doubt NASA would fail to provide the lighters for well-trained astronauts just in case.

Food

NASA was afraid of relying on the sole means of communication and therefore asked the protagonist to learn the Morse code just in case. Yet they felt astonishingly okay with the protagonist’s sole solution of dealing with the crucial problem of famine by postponing the original plan of sending supplies before Sol 400 to Sol 856. I don’t understand any logic here, if it indeed existed.

Salvation

It’s absolutely implausible for a director of China National Space Administration to contact NASA’s administrator on his initiative without an approval from his government at first. Andy Weir obviously didn’t understand Chinese politics, nor did he appear to have done any research about it, so instead, he portrayed them just by his whimsical and distorting imagination.

Electricity

It’s not a good habit to cool down the drill or set electric appliances aside without cutting down the power. This accident arose from the protagonist’s lack of the consciousness about the basic electrical safety. The protagonist should have been thankful for at least not electrocuting himself accidentally.

Tent

Clearly modifying the tent was not a necessity, even though it could provide a good workspace to alleviate some workload in the future. In reality, chances were that his handiwork might not sustain the diurnal use or the bizarrely frequent sandstorms, given the lack of NASA-grade testing. Merely several inspections did not suffice and it would been definitely safer to stick with the original version.

However, it might be a practical idea to create a spare tent from the materials of a useless Hab.

Lights

I find it hard to believe NASA wouldn’t provide any lamps or lights for emergencies requiring astronauts venturing outside during pitch-dark nights.