The Martian (Weir novel)

The Martian is a science fiction novel by Andy Weir about an astronaut left alone on Mars. Weir began writing it in 2009 and posted it free on his website, one chapter at a time. At readers' request he released it as a Kindle edition in 2011, and Crown published a print edition on February 11, 2014. A film directed by Ridley Scott and starring Matt Damon followed in 2015.^[1]

Six sols into the Ares 3 mission, a dust storm forces the six-person crew to leave Acidalia Planitia early. An antenna strikes the botanist and mechanical engineer Mark Watney, and the others, believing him dead, take off without him. He is alive and alone in the habitat. He grows potatoes there and makes water by burning hydrogen from hydrazine with oxygen from the habitat, and NASA spots him in satellite photographs. To get home he has to drive a rover to Schiaparelli crater, where the ascent vehicle of the next mission, Ares 4, is waiting, and the rescue also needs the spacecraft Hermes to swing past Earth in a slingshot. The story is set in the 2030s.^[1]

Watney writes it all as log entries, and he meets each crisis by trying to "work the problem".^[1]

Readers of the serial asked for an e-book, and Weir released a Kindle edition at 99 cents. It reached the top of Amazon's science fiction bestseller list and sold 35,000 copies in three months. Podium Publishing bought the audiobook rights in January 2013, and Crown bought the print rights two months later for more than $100,000. The Crown edition has less profanity than the original, fixes errors and omits a 263-word epilogue; a later classroom edition made more corrections.^[1]

Weir kept a mailing list of readers with scientific training, and they caught mistakes in the serial: a chemist, he said, would write to tell him he had "got that wrong". After one of them pointed out that gases spread evenly through a habitat, he rewrote a passage about a layer of hydrogen. He did most of his research with Google searches and had no contacts in the aerospace industry when he wrote the book.^[2] In 2016 Weir received the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

Publishers Weekly gave the book a starred review, and The Wall Street Journal called it "the best pure sci-fi novel in years". The Crown hardcover entered the fiction list of The New York Times on March 2, 2014, at number 12, and the trade paperback reached number one for 19 of its 76 weeks on the list. The audiobook won an Audie Award in 2014.^[1]

Twentieth Century Fox optioned the rights in March 2013 and hired Drew Goddard to write the screenplay. Ridley Scott directed, with Matt Damon as Watney and Jessica Chastain as the Ares 3 commander. The film opened on October 2, 2015, ranked tenth at the box office for the year, and won a 2016 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form.^[1]

Epic Quest Bio had a Scientist class that was first called Sciencer, and the name comes from the film. In the essay that introduces the game, Kent Kemmish reaches for "an obscure rhetorical term called 'anthimeria'" and takes as its example the stranded astronaut who resolves to "science" his way out of trouble. "The character class name 'Sciencer' anthimeriates 'science' full circle, from noun to verb and back to noun. In Epic Quest Bio™, Sciencers science."^[3] The device has an article of its own, Anthimeria.

Sciencer was the first of the eight classes in the essay, which is signed Kemmishtree. When the company redrew the classes as painted posters in June 2026 it renamed this one Scientist, and there are now nine character classes.^[4]

• Ideas and influences of Molecular Reality Corporation
• List of works that inspired Molecular Reality Corporation