The Martian by Andy Weir almost managed to lose me in the first few pages. Now, that's not so bad as it sounds. As an author who's written a hard-SF novel focused on Mars (Boundary), I came to The Martian with a terrible handicap: I know a lot more about this than probably 99.9% of readers. And one thing that I know very well – that is, in fact, made explicitly clear in one of the scenes of Boundary, in which our intrepid adventurers end up going through a Martian tornado/dust devil which happens to be going at about 180km/hr, faster than [ Continue reading... ]