Description "Not for a single second do I lose faith." The fiercest fight for survival on the best day of a man's life, standing face to face with death Stranded in a place beyond imagination, 225,000,000 km from Earth, Mark Watney is a botanist who joined the Mars exploration mission and safely arrived on Mars aboard the Ares 3 spacecraft after a journey of about 1,000 days. On the sixth day of the planned expedition, an unexpected sandstorm strikes, and communication between Watney and his crew is lost. Believing him dead, his terrified teammates return to Earth without him. Waking alone on the dunes with only a handful of potatoes to his name, Watney must survive until the next expedition arrives. Could there be a more dire survival story than this? Yet this brilliant scientist manages to grow Earth crops on Mars, produce water, and cultivate using oxygen and carbon dioxide. Meanwhile, a NASA imaging staff member, expecting to find Watney's body in satellite footage, instead discovers signs of his survival near a cleared-out habitat. The Martian is a work that showcases humanity's ambitious efforts through NASA's Mars exploration program—a story countless people have long awaited but no one had been able to write, until now. Having stayed on bestseller lists for 74 weeks, this book's storytelling power is second to none. With a premise unique enough to captivate readers worldwide, the day-by-day account of the protagonist's survival is both urgent and flawlessly constructed. "A bold and fascinating combination." A fantastic thriller blending story, character, and scientific precision Humanity's journey toward the red planet Mars has been a centuries-long record of longing and challenge. Drawing on NASA's real missions and footage, this book creates the ultimate combination—amplifying the dramatic contrast between despair and triumph so often felt in survival stories, all set against the backdrop of Mars, leaving readers with a deeply resonant impression. Author Andy Weir, often called a "genius writer," worked at a U.S. national laboratory at the age of 15 and later became an accomplished programmer involved in various research and development projects. Thanks to this background, The Martian is praised as a work that fully showcases the author's unique literary sensibility, grounded in rich scientific knowledge. Through this book, as we witness the support and technical assistance from all of humanity to save one man left behind on a distant planet, we are reminded once again of our shared humanity. We cheer for a man we've never met, laughing and crying at his every word. Even the willingness to spend hundreds of millions of dollars or risk leaking national secrets to rescue Watney feels almost impossible in real life—yet it leaves us with an optimistic thought: perhaps, if humanity ever faced such a crisis, we really would try just as hard. The Martian offers readers a unique kind of joy, and there is no doubt it will be remembered as a classic for years to come.