Sci-Fi & Fantasy Girlz discussion

I saw The Martian movie last Thursday and LOVED it. One of the few book-to-movie adaptations that I have loved.

Has anyone else seen it?
I want to read a book similar to The Martian, any recommendations?

Folding laundry and watching The Martian now.

Either that was A LOT of laundry or you just haven't been back to let us know if you liked it... :)

So, what did you think? Or are you still folding laundry?

I watched it, put away some sweaters and went to bed. I'll make some comments in a bit. (I'm all up in The Great Gatsby at the moment....) Suffice to say, I'd give it a good four stars here on Goodreads. It made me want to read the book quite a bit.

It was a great movie -- Robert a. Heinlein would have adored it.

Hokay, I've got a minute, so a few comments:

1. Nice to see Sean Bean play a character who survives a movie.

2. I always like Chiwetel Ejiofor.

3. Digging up Pathfinder was a nice, real world reference. Like a lot of folks, that mission has a particular charm for me, and featuring it in the film was very evocative.

4. I like the almost pathological need the NASA/JPL engineers have to politicize/sell their efforts at every turn. The space program is very much a public relations effort, and that's nearly as annoying as it is necessary.

There's a lot of information in the film that appears to have been glossed over from the book, and in that sense the film was almost tantalizing more than anything else. They necessarily skip over a lot of the math and physics for a film audience, and I suspect the novel is much "harder" than the movie.

Thematically, I think the book is somewhere between The Right Stuff and something by Kim Stanley Robinson. Robinson is "hard science fiction" when it comes to the physics, but I'd suggest kind of outlandish softer sci-fi in a lot of social aspects. This one watched much more like something meant to be "hard" in both senses.

A semi-related note: That the U.S. doesn't have the capacity to get humans into space right now should be seen as a national embarrassment. We should be halfway to Mars by now.

I'm glad you liked the movie. It is one of my favorites, even though they basically threw out the window most of the nerdy parts of the novel, but that's understandable.

I'm surprised you haven't read the novel yet. I'm sure you will enjoy it. It is very geeky, nerdy and funny.

Gary wrote: "A semi-related note: That the U.S. doesn't have the capacity to get humans into space right now should be seen as a national embarrassment. We should be halfway to Mars by now."

I know!
Well apparently the first manned flight tests of the Space X Dragon will start in 2 to 3 years, so maybe soon?

I think 2022 was the earliest they said we could go to Mars.

It's purely driven by money. If we wanted to spend the money on a space program, it could be done.
But we don't. We vote for Congresspersons who are more interested in running our sex lives, or imposing their religious views upon others, or carpet-bombing people we don't know, or staging pointless confrontational votes. This is an election year. Register to vote. If you are already registered to vote, be sure that your registration is good. And then do it, not only in November, but sooner -- in the primaries in your district. It's not going to change, unless we change it.

In a case of life imitating art, NASA, like the fictional botanist Mark Watney, is experimenting with growing Martian potatoes, though so far only in the Mars-like soil of the Peruvian desert. Growing food will be critical to long-term human missions to Mars.

Full article: http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016...

Extended version of The Martian coming out soon and airing on Empire:

This October, it’ll be re-released on DVD and Blu-ray in a new version, with 13 minutes of extra footage. But the first (and possibly only) time you’ll be able to watch it on the big screen, is at Empire Live.

Full article: http://www.empireonline.com/live/mart...

This is good news. I wonder what they cut in the original version. I remember watching Watney's Aquaman joke on one of the promo videos but that didn't make it into the movie.

I haven't watched The Martian again after the theater. As much as I liked the movie I loved the book so much that I haven't been tempted to watch it again. I recently re-watched Interstellar though, that was a damn good movie.

Now Elon Musk is saying we should be able to send people to Mars in 2024.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XXfx...

Apparently, they're adding back 13 minutes of stuff. I still haven't read the book yet. Maybe I should get on that before the re-release at least....

The potato science appears to be ready:

Scientists have successfully grown a potato plant in conditions similar to those found on Mars.

Researchers in Peru created a simulator with below-zero temperatures, high carbon monoxide concentrations and air pressure similar to that found at an altitude of 6,000m (19,700ft).

The results of the experiment at the International Potato Centre in Lima means the vegetables could one day be grown on Mars and benefit crop growth in arid areas on Earth that have been affected by environmental change.

The experiment began in 2016, a year after the Hollywood film The Martian depicted a stranded astronaut surviving by working out how to grow potatoes on Mars.

Full article: https://uk.news.yahoo.com/potatoes-su...

How The Martian was written, with Andy Weir:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXD3b...

Thanks for sharing!

I also watched this one he did on Google a few years ago, this was when the book came out, way before he got the movie deal.

https://youtu.be/gMfuLtjgzA8

He's an entertaining speaker. Not all authors are.