Timothy Rice


The Martian

I guess you could call it a 'failure', but I prefer the term 'learning experience'.

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Rating: 4/5 – A love letter to engineers everywhere.

The Maritan is the hardest “Hardness” in science fiction is a measure of how much the story relies on real science as a narrative device. of all science fiction, and the better for it. A glorious ode to human ingenuity and perseverance, it is a rare story where sound engineering is the hero.

My opinion of the book has slid just a bit since my initial read a decade ago – while it’s still very fun, the characters seem a little flatter to me now. But it’s still a very good book!

The engineering is even better than I remembered it, especially all the parts about Mark fanatically testing his ideas to find flaws in them. It’s wild that a book about the exhaustive trial and error process is so successful.

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