Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Two major issues with this book: Poorly written and terrible science. Writing is primarily composed of unoriginal with repetitive juvenile and flippant language and slogans shared by both the narrator and other characters in the book. Both the main character and others share a limited and very juvenile vocabulary in the dialog, so it's not just the main character's "child like personality". Example: Two characters, completely isolated form each other use terms like "butt-load" within a few pages of each other. This happens more than once, it's so obvious the author has used a very limited vocabulary, which every character in the book shares. NASA must pull most employees from the "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" language school. It's a painful read. Characters don't speak naturally in this book at all, and it's like movie actors talking into the screen at the viewer. For instance, one experience NASA employee to another, in referring to a big NASA Saturn probe program "The EagleEye 3 Saturn Probe". Now only the reader, who doesn't know that "EagleEye 3 is a Saturn probe, would need that qualifier. Can you imagine Tiger Woods asking his caddy for the "#9 iron golf club". Only if he was intending this for someone that knew nothing little about golf would we need so say that. Also characters in the book often say things, with the only purpose of which is to inform the reader of some fact or background information, often times unnecessary and actually condescending to the reader. So unnatural... the entire book is riddled with these "Hey audience, we're saying these things just so you can figure it out, just in case you didn't know this fact.". A good writer knows how to introduce important facts, and fill the gaps, without explicitly forcing characters to explain to the reader why they are saying what they are saying. It gets even worse, in the main character's "Log Entries", which are intended to be his logs to be used by NASA to document each day, yet he is explaining basic science facts to... to who? Well, the reader obviously... so painfully obvious. For instance, in Sol 97 Log Entry, he has to explain what ASCII characters are: "So I'll have to use ASII. That's how computers manage characters, Each character has a numeric code between 0 and 255..." OK, this is a log entry to NASA?! That's a painful NO. In fact, the log entries never read like log entries anyway, they in now way resemble log entries at the slightest (not that I would want to be reading log entries). He often asks rhetorical questions in the log and then says "No wait, don't answer, this is what I did." Why did he bother calling these log entries, just label the chapters "Sol 7", "Sol 8", etc... Didn't anyone edit this book and say "Hey, these aren't log entries and they shouldn't be, they are just a first person narrative, with the narrator directly addressing a reader like a drunk guy in a bar spinning a yarn for a stranger. "Hey, you know ASII, right? It's how computers store test and stuff...." In addition to the poor writing is the terrible science. The author description notes that he is a "lifelong space nerd". Well, unfortunately, being a nerd apparently doesn't mean you are any good at facts or constructing a logical flow of events. Let me point out just three examples: Mars dust storm: The entire premise of the book is that the mission was aborted because a strong dust storm with very strong winds threatened the mission. The winds were at 150 kph to 175 kph. This is about 90 to 105 miles per hour respectively. That sounds pretty strong right? Well, maybe until you realize that the Martian atmosphere is about 160 times thinner than earths (0.6% of earth's). The force of a 90 to 105 mph windstorm on mars would exert the same force as 17 to 20 mph wind on earth. Even with the lower gravity on mars, this is a mouse fart of a storm. In fact, the winds on mars are so weak, that the dust that blows around, has the particle size of cigarette smoke. It's some smoke blowing in a 17 to 20 mph breeze. Yet this breeze does massive damage with metal radio and radar dishes and equipment flying through the air. Growing potatoes: And big element of the book is that this guys finds a way to grow potatoes on mars. The potatoes were so the crew could have mashed potatoes for one meal during Thanksgiving. He author notes he has several potatoes and he cuts them before planting so there are two eyes per cut to maximize the chance each one grows. So how many potato plants do you think we created, for a first crop from this? 12, 20, 30 plans? He grew 450 plants and 2000 lbs of potatoes in under 60 days. He managed to get about, 50-100 plants per potato. But wait, there's more, those were fast growing plants: He did this growing them indoors, under normal office lighting! Bright office lighting is less than 1/50th the strength of direct sunlight on earth. It may be hard to believe, but our eyes adjust to this huge range, but office lighting is about 320-1000 lux while direct sunlight is about 50,000-100,000 lux. At lower lighting conditions (<1/2 full strength sunlight), plant growth and respiration is roughly linear with light strength, so half the light, half the plant growth rate. So at normal office lighting, these plants would grow at only a small fraction of the normal rate: Potato plants simply wouldn't grow much at all unless he took all the lights and concentrated them into a tiny space, which he didn't do. These are just a few of the glaring errors in this book riddled with fundamental gaps and poor science. I know this book has garnered many good reviews, so if people are entertained so be it.... I guess this is the Kim Kardashian of sci-fi books: Popular even though it's underserving.