Book Review: "The Martian" by Andy Weir

It's not often a book comes along with a character like Mark Watney. The main protagonist of Andy Weir's The Martian is an astronaut with a background in botany and mechanical engineering that is unfortunately presumed dead and stranded by his crew on Mars. If you read that sentence and came away with the taste of science on your tongue, you aren't far off the mark. This is definitely a science heavy story, but it's the character of Mark Watney that makes this journey worth reading.

Mark Watney is a perpetual smart ass. His humor never fails to pierce the severity of his life or death situation and lighten the tone of the story. After being left behind by his crew during a bad storm on Mars, Mark has to figure out how to create water, grow food, and somehow communicate with NASA. The problems he faces are unrelenting, and as a reader I agreed with Mark that it seemed like the inhospitable planet was trying to kill him. Mars is definitely the antagonist of the story just due to its very nature. It becomes coldly clear that Mars is no friend to mankind, and this hits upon a reoccurring theme in the story that Earth is the hub of humanity and all of the things that make humanity worth saving is embodied by this lone man stranded on a planet far from home. 

Book Review: "Ready Player One" by Ernest Cline

In times of national economic upheaval the public seeks escapism. Some have credited Shirley Temple films with helping pull the nation's mood up out of the Great Depression. In this day and age we are no strangers to the economic chaos that surrounds us and the faceless corporations that seem to be gaining more and giving less. Ernest Cline's Ready Player One is strangely visionary in that it provides us with a foreboding future in which nearly all of humanity is destitute and starving. Their only escape is an immersive virtual world called the OASIS, but now even that is at risk of being taken over by a corporation that wants to make the OASIS exclusive and expensive.

The OASIS was developed by a brilliant billionaire with Asperger's by the name of James Halliday. Halliday invents the OASIS as a place where people can go and interact and learn under assumed identities using Avatars. The OASIS grows, spawning worlds full of games and challenges, but it also has its practical uses for business, news, and education. The most important thing to the protagonist of the story, Wade Watts, is that education in the simulated world is free. Not just free of cost, but free of bullies that made his real-life schooling experience a nightmare. 

What sets this story into motion is the death of James Halliday. For it us upon this fateful day that Halliday's avatar Anorak, announces to the world that he has arranged a contest open to everyone within the OASIS to uncover the Easter Egg that is the key to his fortune and power over the OASIS. Halliday programs three keys to three gates within the expansive universe of the OASIS, and he provides the public with the first clue to find the first key. And thus the race for the Egg begins. 

Book Review: "Oryx and Crake" by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel Oryx and Crake was published back in 2003. I don't know how I managed to read so much dystopian fiction, including Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and never came across this trilogy. I've remedied that oversight.

Oryx and Crake is set in the future and follows a man who goes by the name of Snowman who may just be be the last human alive. Snowman lives as a kind of guardian of the Crakers, a genetically modified humanoid species that he has liberated from their life in a dwindling habitat under a great dome of biological experimentation. As we follow Snowman's (Jimmy's) depressing daily routine and slow starvation we are introduced to his back story, and hence the back story of this broken world. The structure of the story clips back and forth between the story of Jimmy's childhood and early adulthood and Snowman's journey into wild territory to forage for survival supplies.

Some readers may not like the back and forth structure, but the sections flow seamlessly into one another. The pace is aided by this structure and is relentless in the unfolding of the greater story. Atwood excels in making Jimmy a well realized character with a childhood spent living in corporate science established compounds. These compounds are the gated communities of the elite set apart from the pleeblands where the general population resides. Such social stratification already exists in many ways, so Atwood is merely enhancing the nightmarish possibilities that could emerge from unchecked biological science and corporate influence.