![]() ![]() Fortunately, the left-behind astronaut is the mission botanist and he engineers a way to make food for himself and contact Earth to orchestrate a retrieval. What they don’t know is that he’s still alive, it will be four years before anyone can return for him, and he only has thirty days of food. During their evacuation, one of their crew is killed and they are forced to leave his body behind as they blast off for Earth. It’s hard not to know the setup of The Martian by now, but if you haven’t read it, it’s set in a near-future Mars mission where the crew abandons their Mars habitat during a severe storm. I’ve gotten my share of one-star reviews from readers expecting lightsabers and dogfights who were unhappy with chapters on planetary science and alien biology. ![]() ![]() As a hard science fiction writer myself, I can sympathize with this problem. Either people enjoyed the MacGyver-like survival science or they disliked a science lesson wrapped in a story. Based upon the reviews, it was a very polarizing story. I stumbled upon The Martian on Goodreads. As it turns out, many people really enjoyed The Martian, and, next thing you know, Matt Damon is playing his main character in a blockbuster. He originally planned to give it away, but Amazon requires you to sell ebooks for a minimum of 99 cents, so that’s what he did. His friends really enjoyed it, but some found it hard to read on their computer screens and asked that he publish it on Kindle. When he originally wrote The Martian, he published it one chapter at a time on his blog for his friends to read. ![]()
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