I'm stranded on Mars.
I have no way to communicate with Earth.
I'm in a Habitat designed to last 31 days.
If the Oxygenator breaks down, I'll suffocate. If the Water Reclaimer breaks down, I'll die of thirst. If the Hab breaches, I'll just kind of explode. If none of those things happen, I'll eventually run out of food and starve to death.
So yeah. I'm screwed.
***
We all have our dreams and desires.... or we all had them. How sad!
Andy Weir, at least, did something with his. Fascinated by space exploration from an early age, "like most kids growing up [he] wanted to be an astronaut. Instead, he wrote a book—The Martian—which he self published on Amazon in 2012."
By all accounts, it went down very well, in the wake of which overwhelmingly positive and in all probability profitable response, an assortment of proper publishers came a-calling. The result is a novel with problematic priorities that begs for the suggestions of a determined editor. That it is a gripping and largely satisfying text nevertheless speaks to how marvellous The Martian might have been.
The book is about no more and no less than a man left to die on Mars. Potty-mouthed botanist Mark Watney is far from the first fellow to travel to the red planet — as a crewmember of Ares 3 he's the fourteenth, in fact, to set foot on its soil — but he's certainly the first man to be stranded there, abandoned there. A series of unfortunate events just "six days into what should be the greatest two months of [his] life" (p.1) leave our hero alone in the absolute dark of the stars, and struggling to survive.
After a critical equipment failure and the evident death of one of their number, the other astronauts of Ares 3 have no choice but to hightail it home, unaware that Mark is still alive... however he won't be for long if Mars has its uncaring way. All our man has is two rovers, a prefab hab and a small container of potatoes, plus the promise of Ares 4's arrival in four years or so—assuming the tragedy of his apparent passing hasn't completely derailed NASA's provisional plans for the program.
He doesn't, however, have enough food to last him a single Martian year, far less four, and his existence, in the interim, is entirely dependent on disposable equipment: air regulators and water reclaimers meant to function for a few months at most. He has no conceivable way of communicating with anyone either, and even if he had, help is an impossibly long way away. Mark Watney is on his lonesome, ladies and gentlemen, and he has his work cut out, no doubt.