When the odds are stacked and an entire planet is out to get you, would you give up or fight? Throughout the history of literature there have been hundreds of books about human survival, but “The Martian” by Andy Weir puts basic human instinct on a different level.

Thanks to the recent movie trailer, most people know that “The Martian” is the story of an astronaut stranded on Mars, but that is the simplified version of the big picture. After a huge storm causes his crew to evacuate, Mark Watney is left alone on Mars, everyone on Earth thinking him dead. Rather than give up, Watney fights back against the red planet and everything that goes wrong as he struggles for survival.

The most surprising part of this book was the amount of humor that went into Watney’s struggle. Between laughing and all of the science, you really get sucked in. Every second of Watney’s time off Earth is entertaining and utterly nerve racking. You wonder what’s going to kill him, when it’s going to kill him, and then you think of the most random things because he made a stupid joke. The humor isn’t even used to mask the overall problems like some novels have been known to do; in fact, it enhances the experience.

However, all the humor doesn’t cover up all the half-baked sounding ideas that went into this book, either. It’s actually amazing that some of the ideas Watney and NASA came up with didn’t kill him in a second. If you’re going to read this book I think reading it for the sheer insanity is a pretty good reason.

Don’t read this book just to see whether Mark Watney lives or dies. Read this book if you want to see what one person can do when they’re all alone and everything has a 50/50 chance of being the last thing they do. This book wasn’t made into a movie because space is cool or survival stories are popular. This book became a movie because it’s powerful, emotional, and highly entertaining. Andy Weir has given us an amazing story and I cannot wait to see what he brings the world next.