Chapter Summary: The Martian By Andy Weir

1.) Andy Weir is the author of the novel, The Martian, a story about a man that gets stuck on mars, and his journey for survival. Andy weir began his career at the age of 15 when he became a programmer for a national laboratory. Most of his life he has been a software engineer, The Martian is his first novel. The book is based around a plot where the main character, Mark Watney, is isolated from all of humanity after being abandoned on Mars and presumed dead. This theme of isolation could relate to the way the author, Andy Weir, started his long term career unusually young, could have led to social isolation. His background in engineering could also help explain the very thought out and technology-aware aspects of this story. He has called himself a complete “space nerd” which explains the detailed subject matter of space travel. This book was published in 2011, which is part of an era where NASA, and other space exploration organizations, were trying to develop practical ways for humans to travel to Mars (still are). The variety of references to real modern technology in this book display how essential the time period was to the writing of this book. There would be a huge amount of guessing when it comes to the technology needed to live on mars if this

The authors concept was to set a futuristic setting, but not too futuristic. The limitations of space travel, including factors like weight and time, were very important to the story due to the whole book being about the difficulties of retrieving a stranded astronaut from Mars. The chapters are not very long, with the novel being made from twenty-six chapters. These short chapters reflect how the story is composed of many different small issues that are needed to be fixed by Mark and NASA, creating many sections of the book being about a variety of different problem solving