Specimen FL-01.0005
Six days into the Ares 3 mission, a dust storm forces an emergency evacuation of the landing site. Mark Watney, the crew's botanist and mechanical engineer, is struck by a piece of flying antenna, and his suit stops transmitting vital signs. His commander, out of time and unable to find him, launches without him. He is not dead. He wakes alone on a planet with no one else on it, no way to signal Earth, and food for about a month, while the next mission is four years and thousands of kilometers away. Almost everything that follows is arithmetic. He calculates his calorie deficit and closes it by turning part of the habitat into a potato field, fertilizing Martian soil with the crew's waste and manufacturing water by burning hydrazine from spare rocket fuel. He drives out to recover a probe that stopped working in 1997 and uses it to get a message home. NASA, once it knows he is alive, has to decide what it is prepared to risk to get him back, and so does the crew that left him. The book keeps score in oxygen, calories, water and kilometers, and each solution creates the next problem.
The Fiction Laboratory pairs science fiction novels with structured reading packets for science and English classes. This is the companion page for this title: where to find the book, every source behind its packet with live links, and any correction made since the packet was printed.
Your public library. Search the catalog or ask at the desk. This is one of the most widely held novels of the last decade, so it is almost never a difficult request. If your branch does not hold it, interlibrary loan is free and usually takes about a week.
Libby. libbyapp.com. Library ebooks and audiobooks on a phone or tablet, free with a library card. The audiobook read by R. C. Bray is the one most libraries carry and it is very good, though be aware that hearing the arithmetic is harder than seeing it, and this is a book with a lot of arithmetic.
Your school library. Very likely already there. It is a common choice for high school collections and for summer reading lists.
Not available, and the history here is interesting. Weir originally posted the novel free, one chapter at a time, on his own website, and then sold it for ninety-nine cents when readers asked for an ebook. That free version is gone; the book has been under a publishing contract since 2014 and is in copyright. Anything offering it as a free download now is pirating it.
Bookshop.org. bookshop.org/9780553418026. Orders send the money to independent bookstores rather than to a warehouse. This is the widely stocked paperback. Any edition works: the text has not been revised, so nothing in the packet depends on which printing you hold.
Your local bookshop. Any independent store can order it, usually within a few days, and it is inexpensive in paperback.
The 2015 film is unusually faithful, and that is a problem for a class. Most students who think they have read this book have seen the film, and because it follows the novel closely they will not notice the difference. What the film necessarily loses is the arithmetic: the calorie budgets, the water chemistry worked step by step, the long stretches of Watney simply calculating. That material is most of the novel and all of this packet. If a student is working from the film, they are missing the part being taught.
Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary (2021). The same method with a bigger problem: one man, an impossible situation, and everything solved by working it out. Widely considered his best.
Andy Weir, Artemis (2017). A heist on the Moon. Weaker, and worth mentioning mostly because it shows how much of The Martian was carried by the log format and the voice.
Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (1992). The other great Mars novel, and almost the opposite book. Where Weir asks how one person survives a week, Robinson asks how a hundred people build a society and what they owe the planet they are changing. Longer, slower, and far more political.
Everything in the packet is built on real research, and most of it is free. If a claim sparks a question, go to the source and check it yourself. That is the whole idea.
"The Fact and Fiction of Martian Dust Storms." NASA, 18 Sept. 2015, www.nasa.gov.
NASA answering this novel directly, in public, with the two numbers the first audit rests on: Martian air at one percent of Earth's density, storm winds topping out near sixty miles per hour. Free, and short.
Hecht, M. H., et al. "Detection of Perchlorate and the Soluble Chemistry of Martian Soil at the Phoenix Lander Site." Science, vol. 325, 2009, pp. 64-67.
The paper the novel needed and never saw. Phoenix found perchlorate in Martian soil at roughly half a percent by weight, two years before the book, on the subject its hero is an expert in.
Archer, P. D., Jr., et al. "Perchlorate on Mars: Overview and Implications." NASA Technical Reports Server, document 20190028297, ntrs.nasa.gov.
What a decade of missions did to that finding. No quirk of one landing site: perchlorate appears in every soil sample Curiosity has analyzed, at both Viking sites, from orbit, and in a meteorite. Free.
Hassler, Donald M., et al. "Mars' Surface Radiation Environment Measured with the Mars Science Laboratory's Curiosity Rover." Science, 9 Dec. 2013.
The first radiation measurement from the surface of another planet, two years after the novel. About 0.67 millisieverts a day on the ground, 1.8 in transit. The book's silence here is a gap nobody could have filled.
"NASA's Oxygen-Generating Experiment MOXIE Completes Mars Mission." Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 6 Sept. 2023, jpl.nasa.gov.
Watney's central trick, done for real: an instrument on Perseverance made oxygen from Martian air, 122 grams over sixteen runs. The same idea arriving independently, not something the novel caused.
Byrd, Deborah. "Fact and Fiction of Martian Dust Storms." EarthSky, 21 Sept. 2015, earthsky.org.
Where Weir's admission is on the record. In a Martian dust storm, he says, "you're not even going to feel it," and he kept the storm anyway. The clearest case in this library of an author naming his own cheat.
"Perchlorate on Mars: Implications for Human Exploration and Astrobiology." NASA Ames Research Center, 2015, nasa.gov.
Program and abstracts from a NASA workshop. Worth it for the mechanism in one line: perchlorate "exerts its adverse biological effects by blocking iodide uptake by the thyroid gland." It also treats the salt as a resource, not only a hazard.
Weir, Andy. The Martian. Crown, 2014.
The novel itself, in the edition most libraries hold. First serialized free on the author's website in 2011; the text is unchanged.
Zeitlin, C., et al. "Measurements of Energetic Particle Radiation in Transit to Mars on the Mars Science Laboratory." Science, vol. 340, 2013, pp. 1080-84.
The companion measurement to the surface data on the printed list: what the radiation environment is like on the way to Mars rather than once you arrive. Taken inside the spacecraft during Curiosity's cruise, which makes it the closest thing anyone has to a measurement of what a crew would actually absorb in transit.
"Mars Fact Sheet." NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/marsfact.html.
One page, every number. Surface pressure, atmospheric composition, gravity, day length, distance from the Sun. Free, and the fastest way to check any physical claim in the novel yourself, which is the only reason this list exists.
"Opportunity Rover." NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, mars.nasa.gov.
Mission pages for the rover that a planet-wide dust storm killed in 2018 by blocking the sunlight its solar panels needed. Worth reading beside the novel's opening, because it shows the real hazard the book replaced with a fictional one: Martian dust does destroy machines, just slowly and by darkness rather than by force.
"In-Situ Resource Utilization." NASA, nasa.gov.
The agency's own overview of making fuel, water and oxygen out of what is already on another world instead of carrying it. This is the whole plot of the novel described as an engineering discipline, and it explains why MOXIE was flown.
Weir, Andy. "The Egg." 2009, galactanet.com.
A very short story Weir posted free on the same website that carried The Martian, and the piece that first got him an audience. Two pages, no science, and completely unlike the novel. Included because the site and the free-serial habit are most of what made the novel possible, and this is the easiest way to see what that site was.
Nothing yet. When a link here dies or a finding is superseded, the correction is posted here rather than left wrong in print.
Eight documents as PDFs, in two archives: the complete packet, and a student set holding only the four documents a class should see. Yours to use with every class you teach, this year and every year after. No subscription and no account.
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Last reviewed 2026-08-26 · Specimen FL-01.0005