THE MARTIAN, Week One

Weekly Questions: 

1. General impressions of the book 

I read The Martian a couple of years ago. It was the first book that I read first before I saw its movie adaptation; up till then, it had always been the other around, like "this movie/TV show (I'm talking about GoT of course) is amazing. It's based on a book/a series of books? I should totally read that. Anyway, when I once again started flipping through the pages, or more precisely, swiping the screens, it brought back some memories. 

The first thing that still impresses me is how detailed the descriptions are, from how those space expeditions work, to different chemical reactions. As a person who has limited and/or faded knowledge in regard to these, I find them rather enlightening. For example, a manned trip to Mars involves multiple  preparation trips. And what was, and still is, unbelievable is that the writer describe such information without making it feel too technical, and hence boring. (I can't exclude the possibility that it does seem boring to some people. Anyway, it has worked perfectly for me.) 

It also reminds me of the challenging part. One benefit of seeing the movie adaptation, sci-fi movies in particular, is that everything is presented with clear and specific images, for example, depicting a machine. However, when I was reading, the release date of the movie was about two or three weeks away. As a result, I had no visual reference, and therefore must rely on my imagination to outline what everything looked like based on Mark Watney's descriptions. It could be difficult at times.  

2. A lot of details have been put into the book, especially in terms of how everything works. In Chapter 1, for example, Mark describes the entire route of the Mars expedition. Now this is going to be very unorthodox, but could you DRAW this route? (Since most of you, or all, are reading on a digital device, and in order not to mess with your reading progress, one of these questions will suffice. For now.) 

3. Every entry of Mark's is labeled with "SOL". Have you ever wondered what is means? 

I did some digging actually. When I was reading it for the first time, my thought was it meant "solar day", which turns out be correct. On Mars, one solar day is about 24 hours, 39 minutes, very close to the length of a day on earth. However, because Mars has a larger orbit around the sun than earth, a solar year is nearly twice as long. I guess this is why Mark Watney uses SOL XX to keep track of his log entries rather something like May 20th, as people tend to use when writing their diaries.