Posted on 09/29/2015 1:07:58 PM PDT by Textide
Best book I read last year. Or this year. Everyone I’ve talked to loves this book. Hoping the movie doesn’t suck but even if it does, read the book, it rocks.
Yeah, but he won't be getting any money for it.
Watch the monkey dance for free!
I read this also. Also thought very highly of it. An excellent piece of work.
Read it. Loved it. Passed it on to my son. Every
Now and then he says, “I’d love to find another book
As good as “The Martian.”
I respect the fact that it was initially a self-published book and that it sold enough to become a big-name-publisher title and eventually a Hollywood film. Imagination turned into piles of cash.
It is, in many ways good and bad, a novel that reflects our current state of mind and means of communicating. The intermingling of blog posts, limited narration and omniscient narration is clever at times but also a concession to our collective attention deficit.
Watney’s gallows humor is enjoyable at first and generates sympathy (as intended by the author) but after a while becomes tiresome and/or a bit too unbelievable given the dire circumstances. If Damon adopts his Jason Bourne obsessive demeanor given the isolation then perhaps the smart-aleck Watney will become a bit more likeable on film.
As a critic pointed out elsewhere, some do’s and don’t’s of fiction are trampled or ignored altogether, especially in Mission Control where characters are introduced and, at best, remain utterly static or, at worst, are forgotten altogether. The personalities and backstories of Watney’s crewmates are occasionally mentioned but ultimately left unfinished and unrelated to the story arc.
Robinson Crusoe has been told and retold countless times (e.g. ‘Castaway’) and a high-tech version can’t hurt even if the rather obvious denouement isn’t worth the suspense.
All matter has gravity.
Well said. My son recommended it to me and it resulted in several nights of short sleep as I stayed up reading. Good story, engaging challenges, reasonably realistic (or more so than many) in that not everything goes right. In fact a lot goes horribly wrong. Good solid themes of perseverance and self reliance. Some humor thrown in, and teamwork as crew mates risk it all for a shot a saving him.
“They don’t know if Mars has an Iron core, but it probably does. What it doesn’t have is a sufficiently strong magnetic field.”
Mars is basically a dead planet because its core has completely solidified, which is why it has no magnetic field, not to mention there’s no interior heat radiating out to help warm its crust. The slow motoring action of the solid Earth iron core surrounded by the molten mantle is what gives the Earth its powerful magnetic field.
Newton would say Mars has gravity.
It may be less than what we experience, but it can’t be zero.
Rock Hudson proved that in “Martian Chronicles.”
I’m waiting eagerly for the movie!
Man, 11 hours of listening. Would be good for a cross-country trip.
eReader bookmark
but the movie has Matt Damon in it
so is the movie about Global Warming or Fracking ?
Centrifugal force is one aspect of gravity what the thing itself is no one agrees, except that the more mass a body has, the stronger the gravitational pull - Jupiter’s gravity is many time Earth’s.
Orbiting the sun has nothing to do with the strength of a body’s gravity. Mass seems to be the determinate factor.
Mars has weak gravity, and gasses escape it more rapidly than gasses in Earth’s atmosphere, however, Mars does have an atmosphere.
The recent mars/water hype from NASA centers not on the water which the media decided to focus on, but around the presumption that Mars suffered a catastrophic event which blew the atmosphere off. Some obvious evidence for some sort of catastrophe is a comparison of one hemisphere with the other - both are very different - one has many craters, the other only a few. in fact the hemisphere with many craters looks like it was hit by cosmic shotgun pellets. There are also a number of non-mainstream theories on how this might have occurred.
The reason the media neglect to mention the actual message NASA revealed is just that the very idea contradicts the steady state historical model the media favors - also admitting that major historical catastrophes actually happened could cause the same panic in people’s minds that the very thought of Republicans winning the Presidency, House and Senate produces in the media’s collective minds.
Curious about the flick. But I wish Ridley Scott had not cast ... Matt... Daa... Mon.
Mars gravity is .38 that of Earth.
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