187

Announcer: The Incomparable, number 187, March 2014

Jason Snell: Welcome back to The Incomparable. I’m your host Jason Snell. We are reconvening our Book Club. Our ever-shifting membership of the Book Club, the only person who is always with me for the Book Club, is Scott McNulty. Hi Scott.

Scott McNulty: [sarcastically] Sorry, I couldn’t make it today Jason.

Scott: [laughs] No! [laughter]

Jason: Is this a ghost of Scott McNulty…?

Scott: It is.

Jason: …who doesn’t read books?

Scott: I don’t.

Jason: [jokingly] That’s a shame. [jokingly] Thank you for dropping in to say you won’t be here.

John: His life model duplicate.

Jason: That voice you heard is John Moltz too. Has been voicing our radio dramas, but hasn’t been on because usually he’s not available when we record, but he’s here.

John Moltz: [sarcastically] I can’t read.

Jason: [laughs] You can’t read? Choosing a Book Club episode to appear on was the worst choice you could possibly have made. [laughter]

John: Is that what this is?

Jason: Yeah. Also here, he reads and appears occasionally appears on a Book Club, especially if it’s about the end of the world. It’s Lex Friedman. Hi, Lex.

Lex Friedman: Hi, how are you?

Jason: It’s good to have you here. I’m doing fine. Better now that you’re here.

Lex: I’ll be on any podcast that features John Moltz.

John: [laughs]

Jason: We should say you fellows have a podcast of your own.

John: That’s correct; “Turning This Car Around.”

Jason: It’s about driving?

John: It’s about driving when you’re a dad and how you’re constantly threatening to turn the car around.

Jason: All right, that’s good. I like that.

Lisa Schmeiser: Is there an intro that starts?

John: [laughing] The minute they can talk, I think.

Jason: The minute they have desire to go somewhere else! That voice you heard was Lisa Schmeiser by the way. Hi Lisa?

Lisa: Hi, it’s a pleasure to be here.

Jason: It’s good to have you. They don’t really understand what you’re saying until after they get back from college. If then, frankly. 30-32.

Jason: We are all here to talk about a relatively new book, although it has a little bit of a history. It was posted on a website, chapter by chapter, and then the author did a Kindle edition and that became very successful. Then it got an audio edition, and a movie deal, and a book deal, and just recently came out as an “officially published by a big publishing company” book. I feel bad I should have my finger on the pulse of this stuff and have read it two years ago and be able to scoff, and say “Bah, I read that when…”, but no. I just heard about it a couple weeks ago. It’s called “The Martian” by a guy named Andy Weir who has a computer science background. Has also liked to write like, technology. Technology geek and amateur writer who has become now the author of this widely published, widely successful novel, The Martian.

Lex: Yeah. He maybe fabulously wealthy now but his name still sounds a little bit like underwear so how about that? [laughter]

Jason: Yes. Sorry Andy Weir. It’s a cross you have to bear. You should have chosen a pen name.

Lex: This is the pen name [laughs].

Jason: Might I suggest…

John: Lex Friedman [laughs]?

Jason: Might I suggest DVD, “Fruit if the Lomb?” [laughter]

Jason: Just a suggestion.

Lex: I love his work.

Jason: He is “Fruit of the Lomb” man. That guy can write.

Lisa: See now you have me wondering if he actually made more money self-publishing than he would have made through a publishing house because you cannot accept getting published by a mainstream publisher. Much difference than when you do it yourself.

Jason: Yeah, but he was selling it for like, 99 cents. Like I said, I never heard of it and then the…

Lisa: To be fair, there’s like a huge flood of a self-published Sci-Fi out there. Unless you literally spend all day doing nothing but checking the blog posts and reading through the stuff, you would have known.

Lex: He did get a six-figure deal plus the movie deal, so I think he probably made the right decision overall, but you’re right that it’s not a slam-dunk on the economic question.

Lisa: Yeah. I think the movie is going to kickass frankly.

John: I would hope so. I think so. It would be great.

Jason: Having enjoyed “Gravity,” I was sitting reading the book, thinking. I assume this has already been optioned for a movie because whoever has got this…I mean the pitch is simple. It’s like, “You’re looking for the next Gravity?” I got it for you right here. I don’t know why they have that accent. I think they are from New York. [laughter]

Lisa: Plus “Mission to Mars” was so bad.

Jason: Yeah, and in “Red Planet.” [laughs] We threw that in there too.

John: That was the dark time in our nation’s history.

Lisa: Yeah, because you guys have all seen “Mission to Mars”, right?

Jason: Yep.

John: Yes.

Lisa: We’re done. Don Cheadle gets stranded on Mars.

Lex: I haven’t seen it.

Lisa: There’s a long and stupid sequence of events involving Jerry O’Connell and Van Halen. OK. Long story short, long and steep sequence of events that lead to Jerry O’ Connell dance around to Van Halen zero-g and then somehow Don Cheadle ends up stranded on Mars and grows up a righteous Afro in a greenhouse. That’s pretty much what I remember from the movie.

Lex: [laughs].

Jason: Yes. That’s pretty much it.

Scott: Andy Weir was at the authors at Google. He gave a talk there about his book. He talked about how he just wanted to give the book away for free and so it was on his website. People kept annoying him that they wanted under Kindle. It’s like, “All right. I’ll put it up in Kindle.” Amazon wouldn’t let him give it away for free so he had to charge 99 cents. That’s the only reason he charged for it at all. [laughter]

Jason: I wish I had this problem. I wish had the problem of people banging down my door in order to pay for my content.

Lisa: Well, maybe if you read an awesome book about people getting stranded on the Mars.

Jason: Yeah, like that’s going to happen [laughs].

Lisa: That this is model improvement. It’s a proven winner. [laughter]

Jason: This is an interesting book, I was trying to describe to somebody and I mean the elevator pitch obviously is Apollo 13 meets Castaway, right? It reads like Apollo 13 and that it is a fact based, except it’s made up, but a fact based approach to a mission to Mars.

Lex: Future historical fiction.

Jason: Well, it’s right…He tries to get the science right. This book apparently came out of him noodling on ideas about what the science would be for a mission to Mars. You can tell it’s a very tactically oriented approach. It’s the details of how this would have worked and where they put the refueling ships and the return vessel and how whole thing is going to work. I thought that was really interesting, that he tries to take that approach and then the Castaway example is that he has a volleyball…No, that’s not it. [chuckles]

Jason: That he gets stranded and that’s the plot of the book, is, there’s a dude on Mars and he’s stuck there. His whole team thinks he’s dead, so they leave and he’s all alone on the surface of Mars. How in the world could he survive and he works the problem using science and that, again you’re back to the Apollo 13 kind of thing, where it is really…

Scott: A lot of math.

Jason: Yeah, there is a lot of math.

Scott: He is plucky.

John: He’s also a fortunate combination of skill sets.

Jason: Yeah, that’s what I was going to say, is Mark Watney, this main character…

Lisa: He is literally only person who could have survived [laughs].

John: Exactly. Everybody else on the team would be dead.

Jason: He is a botanist engineer and pretty much when you’re stranded on Mars, it would be good to be able to know how to try and grow some food, so you can survive and you have to be an electrical engineer, who can wire things and fix things.

Lisa: Yeah, he’s a mechanical engineer.

Lex: You don’t write books about other people who are stranded on Mars because they just die right away. That’s boring.

Lisa: Well, there are combination blogger nutritionist. [laughter]

Lisa: I mean, I spend my time thinking of like the most useless combinations you want sent into outer space. [laughs] I do appreciate that almost everybody on his crew had some sort of heavy engineering or computer science background, because it does make a lot of sense that you have to somebody who can keep a really cool head and fix hard mechanical stuff, when there is no IT department within several hundred thousand miles.

Scott: Well, they’re astronauts and astronauts are trained to do that.

Jason: They do have to grow things. The skill sets for people living on Mars has to be this dovetailing of being an astronaut and having skills, being a settler kind of and having those skills to.

Lisa: Did anybody have those scholastic magazines in their classroom growing up like [inaudible 08:26]?

Jason: Oh, yeah.

Lisa: Do you remember, I think it was GE who use to do the fantastical ads at the back of them where it was, we’ll have underwater colonies and we’ll be…

Jason: [laughs]

Lisa: No it was like…Yeah. You have this dovetailing with Epcot Center and I discovered hydroponics, like in 5th and 6th grade and for about five or six years, I was hard core set on becoming a space botanist. I was convinced that if I could just study hydroponics and figure out a way to create a self sustaining bio, in the space the size of my room, surely NASA would have to recruit me [laughs]. Reading this book totally brought back a whole flood of space crazy middle school memories, it was nice for the…

John: What was the old show that had a hydroponics garden that was keeping everybody alive? Which one was that? Was that “Space 1999 or something in that era. They were always talking about hydroponics garden, I don’t think they ever showed the hydroponics garden, but the hydroponics garden was keeping the whole crew alive

Lisa: That was like one of the grace notes. Did anyone else here see the movie “Sunshine,” where the premise of the movie is, that they have to go drop a nuke into the to restart it.

Scott: There’s a sun, yeah.

Lisa: The hydroponics garden plays a huge role in that movie too.

Jason: John, Mr. Google tells me that it was indeed “Space 99”.

Lisa: No. Until this day, I still hate gardening in actual soil but you show me a container or a raised bed or a hydroponic system and I’m like, “I can do this [laughs].”

Jason: This is practically a spaceship at that point.

Lisa: Exactly! Yes. It is.

Lex: I’ll tell you one thing, because I was thinking…I mean I don’t know anything about any of the science involved, so I was just willing to take the authors word for it and Mark’s I guess and I started to feel, you see the Apollo 13 connection right away, you see the Castaway connection right away, but the book ended up feeling to me, more than anything else, like the not-great TV-series Prison Break.

Lisa: Oh God. I recapped that for television. I pity and every week Michael Scofield had to jerry-rig some sort of crazy…

Lex: It’s not just the jerry-rig. Michael Scofield is there and he’s solved this seemingly insurmountable problem and now they’re going to be in the clear, but then in the last minute of the episode, “Oh, crap.” Now there’s something even worse, an impossible unsolvable situation, he’s clearly doomed. Then next week he solves it again.

Lisa: That’s the structure of the book. NASA figures out in the first quarter that he’s still alive and then it is like, “Oh, crap. We obviously have to get him home.” It’s not man versus man. It’s your ultimate man versus nature book. Basically those are “Nature has tried to kick my ass, I have barely hung on” and lather, rinse, repeat for the next 20 chapters.

Jason: I used, aside from Apollo 13 and Castaway, the example I gave to several people was it’s kind of a Jack London novel, where instead of the frontier is space, but it’s like you’re in Alaska and the cold is going to make your fingers fall off if you don’t find shelter soon. It’s a little bit like that too; it is man versus nature…

John: …Into The Wild with a happier ending.

Lisa: Oh, God. No, I absolutely disagree with that. [laughter]

Scott: You are wrong.

Lisa: No, I do. I’ve read that book a couple of times; I’m a big Jon Krakauer fan. I kind of go on danders while I read that back to back into thin air. Sounds Krakauer’s fascinated by extreme personalities who take man versus nature to an edge. The point that Krakauer makes over and over and over is that Alexander Supertramp had no F-ing idea what he was doing. He was basically under the impression that he’d tap into some Jungian subconscious that teaches you how to live off the land. Not only did he know nothing about where he was going, he also knew nothing about how to react to adverse circumstances.

Scott: Spoiler alert. [laughter]

Lisa: Whereas what you find out with Mark Watney is that he approaches every problem, “Here’s what I know about my situation, here’s how I can find out more information, here’s how I can respond to it.” Like Watney has a tremendous amount of respect for external authority and for external knowledge.

John: You hear the author say “Here’s all my research that backs it up.”

Scott: I don’t know if I would agree that he has a tremendous respect for external authority.

Jason: It’s also fiction.

Lisa: Not people, but he has it for external knowledge, for people who have done research and run the numbers, you know.

John: Which is one of the great aspects of the book, is like his disrespect for authority is fantastic.

Lex: [laughs]

Jason: “Oh, people are reading this still?” “Oh yeah, were you?”

Scott: P.s. Also their sister’s is my favorite moment of the book.

Lisa: I have to actually make a point in saying it’s probably why he survived. It’s because he’s comfortable being non-authoritarian and he’s comfortable being outside the boundaries of convention anyway. That way he’s not going to fall to pieces the same way that somebody who needs to be told what to do will.

Jason: That’s why when he ignores NASA later in the book and does some things that it doesn’t want him to do, it is good that he does that, right? He gets used to making his own decisions and that is why he survives, is that he’s independent like that, but it’s also funny. You want to have an engaging personality and the fact that this guy is making jokes and he’s a character, that gets you a long way. Because if he was a really boring astronaut who is very serious about his job, that would be a boring read. At the same time you want to believe that this guy is letting it reap because he’s probably going to die anyway and he’s just trying to keep himself sane. There’s a good reason for that.

John: Right. It’s the sort of hook that lets you believe that he’s not completely depressed because he’s spending two years by himself.

Lex: [laughs]

Jason: We’re watching every 70s sitcom ever made and listening to disco…

Lisa: [laughs]

Jason: Which I don’t understand why astronauts 10 years in our future are so obsessed with 70s television. Only one astronaut needed to be, right?

Lisa: This is the same way people get into any weird cultural period and make it their own.

Lex: Scott McNulty loves “Murder, She Wrote”.

Scott: It’s true.

Lex: [laughs]

Lisa: I also think it wasn’t easy…

Jason: Sorry, can we stop the podcast for now? [laughter]

Lisa: It was a quick way to characterize someone. It was just, “Oh, this is the hard-ass military captain who has a secret thing for disco. Wamp-wamp.” Just like, “This is the [inaudible 14:54] of computer scientist who may be turned into a cannibal if this mission goes off the hook.” [laughs]

John: It’s also just funny having to deal with someone else’s idea of entertainment for six months or however long you can go through their library.

Lisa: Oh yeah.

John: I have a hard time believing though that this guy…He brought stuff and it was lost or did he just not bring entertainment? Because that was just what baffled me, is why doesn’t he have his own store of entertainment for the flight out and the flight back? Instead he’s left with these scraps.

Lisa: Did they maybe take it back with them, “Mark loved Monty Python, so let’s have 15 minutes of Monty Python every night,” or something, I don’t know.

Scott: They wouldn’t have known that they were losing Mark when they were going, because they were evacuating, right? He got lost on the way to the, whatever, that vehicle, the R…Whatever it’s called.

Lex: I thought that there was some kind of technical issue that lost whatever he had, but I don’t remember it, so I could be wrong.

Jason: Yeah. It ends up being funny that he is miserably powering through every 70s’ sitcom and listening to disco.

Lisa: [laughs]

Jason: I found it perplexing that he didn’t have his own store, but maybe I missed where he said “Well, I had it but I’ve watched it all, and I’m tired of it, I want something new,” or, “I lacked the foresight to pack enough stuff, but she packed every sitcom ever, so I’m going to watch that.” I don’t know.

Lex: My only complaint about the book, because I really liked it, but I did not like the narrative-context switching that happened or I guess the cheating to make the narrative devices work sometime. A lot of it is his own journaling. I’ll accept that he’s got very little to do on Mars when he’s not trying to survive, so he can write in his journal, that’s fine. When he has the really borderline end-of-his-life situation where he’s in the compromised air-lock, trying to live and it’s verbal journals, it’s transcripts of his recordings, that he made, it really took me out the story, to try to imagine. I’m in a situation. I’m going to narrate the whole thing for my future journaling purposes? I didn’t like it. I would have much rather it either context-switched to the third person or that he wrote about it later, because I did not at all buy that he was narrating it.

Jason: That’s a very good logical point, but it never bothered me at all.

Lisa: I tend to narrate to myself if I’m in the middle of doing something unpleasant or…

Lex: He has to conserve oxygen. It’s extremely dangerous for him to keep talking.

John: I’d cry and curl up into a ball. [laughter]

Lisa: That doesn’t really conserve oxygen last.

Jason: That’s the story of how John Moltz died on Mars. [laughter]

John: That’s right. It’s a different book.

Jason: Not as good.

Scott: Very short.

Jason: Not as good. This is the literary equivalent to the found-footage movie. It is essentially an epistolary novel.

Lisa: I love epistolary novels too, Oh my God.

John: It’s a challenge to break out of that, Is it realistic? I thought you were going to go another direction, Lex because that didn’t confuse me or frustrate me at all. The cutaways to Earth, while I appreciate the drama, because you see that they are searching for him and he is searching for a way to reach them and that’s all kind of connected. It’s actually kind of a kick to realize that they’re watching as he does things. They finally spot him. Still it’s cheating because it’s not from his perspective. What’s worse. Am I the only one who thinks this? I thought all the characters on Earth were miserable. They weren’t even human beings because they were kind of like two dimensional characters. They were all jerks, they were all just awful people.

Scott: They were a stock mass of bureaucrats.

John: Yeah, I didn’t feel like they were jerks.

Jason: You didn’t think they were jerks? The PR lady’s a jerk. The manager’s a jerk. The woman who finds him is not a jerk.

Lisa: Maybe it’s just because I deal with a lot of PR people, but to be honest, no. I could totally hear some PR person going…

Jason: She was very sarcastic, but I didn’t think she was a jerk.

Lisa: “OK, this is what I have to give out to the reporters and this is my client that I am protecting,” I absolutely know PR people like her, where the idea that this is a human being trapped on Mars is like, “Yes, I’m very concerned, but what I am more concerned about is, I have this pack of jerkish reporters who need something. Give it to me so I can give it to them,” and that’s how good PR people work.

Scott: I didn’t think that they were necessarily jerks. I did think they were one dimensional characters.

Lisa: I thought the posturing between bureaucrats was a little silly.

Jason: They’re lines. Residents of flat land.

Scott: Yeah. It’s the cliché that the bureaucrat wants to do the thing that’s going to look better as opposed to thing that has a better chance of actually succeeding.

Jason: The whole dynamic and the power relationships and them arguing and the stuff they say. I never felt that they were really characters and I found most of them unpleasant and I thought it was a liability of the book that the people on Earth were all kind of awful and also flat.

Lisa: I was really touched by the Chinese researchers actually because they were like, “Well we had this nationalist goal and fine, fine, we have an astronaut who’s going on a mission but we sacrificed a lot of what could good better on science for this one guy,” and the fact that they point out that there’s a huge price to be paid,” but they’re happy to pay it. I was really glad that it wasn’t just this one dimensional, “At last! The glorious red republic will make it into space,” but rather, it was like, “Look we had all these factors, we made this decision, it cost us a lot.” I thought it was one of the few really poignant moments in the book.

Jason: Still, the government wouldn’t have done it if they didn’t get a man on Mars.

Lisa: Yeah.

Jason: Right, I mean, ultimately that’s what the Chinese government went for, is you’ll put somebody on the next mission.

Lisa: I actually appreciate that the book went into tremendous detail about the horse trading and the pragmatism because it was one thing to say, “Let’s get this guy home,” but you know but you know that everybody at every step of the way is going to be protecting their own theifdom and their own ass, and so they also talked about, here are all the things that had to happen in order for everybody to feel like they were doing the right thing and not risk too much. When you think about it, there was a remarkable lack of risk in getting this guy home. The funding was magically lined up, public opinion was apparently still all, “Oh my god, we got to bring this guy home,” as opposed to the 8,000 blogs that would have sprung up all, “They’re spending this much money on him when you could have spent it on rebuilding Detroit,” or whatever and instead it was…

Lex: That was a really good blogger voice, by the way.

Lisa: Thank you. [laughter]

Jason: They all sound like that.

Lisa: They do. It’s true. I blog. [laughter]

Jason: This would have taken place about the same time Robocop would have taken place so Detroit is probably a good analogy.

Lex: After I read the book, within two weeks or so, [inaudible 21:47] Technical published an article about a hypothetical mission to rescue the astronauts on the Columbia. It was very similar. Based on a project that NASA was tasked with when they were doing their investigation after the Columbia shuttle disaster. They talked about all the things that would have to go right, all the corners that would have had to be cut, the way the rescue mission would have gone. It was very similar. It still didn’t happen, not at all reality, but you can’t even read that article without getting caught up in the dream of, wow maybe they are going to save these people, who you already know have died. Very similar. Just probably worth a show note, Jason.

Jason: I agree, that’s a good piece. That’s the flavor of this. I mean, I think if there’s a criticism to be made of the way this book is written, it is obsessed with technical details. It is the transcript of an engineer on Mars trying to figure out the technical issues that will allow him to stay alive. It is that. This a book that is telling…I mean, it’s more than this, but you can tell that what this book is is about how do you solve the problem of what happens if a guy is trapped on Mars. In a larger standpoint, how would the manned Mars missions be set up? We in great detail because there aren’t sort of hand waving solutions here. All the solutions are based on, “Well, this is how it would work and then this might happen and then how would he deal with that? I guess I liked it, but I also could appreciate the criticism of somebody who says, “I wanted more story and less technical detail about how to fix my spacesuit on Mars, because I am not going to Mars and don’t own a spacesuit.” [laughs]

John: I don’t think it does into annoying detail. The detail is only a couple paragraphs long. My criticism of some other science fiction books is just the, and which this book does not do at all, is the long, boring descriptions of the sweeping majesty of the Martians planes. He does not waste a single word on any of that.

Scott: He does waste a lot of words about stringing together resistors so he can change the ampage of the electricity from the habitat to whatever his drill is using.

Jason: I still think he’s much more compact in his writing and I think that’s why I was able to tear through this book in a couple of days. He will do that for a few paragraphs but I have read other books that go on for pages.

Lex: I felt like it was the right amount, I’m on team Moltz, here. I felt like it was enough to show. You want it to be believable. It felt grounded in reality, whether it was legit or not, I mean, it turns out he did a ton of research.

Jason: All of that stuff is related to the action. It has actual critical input into what is going on, as opposed to, “Mars. For years it has lain undisturbed…”

Lisa: [laughs] Oh that’s great.

Jason: “…the natives called it Marsoom.” [laughter]

Jason: Also good…There are no indigenous Martian life. That’s also a plus.

Lisa: Thank god.

Jason: You get the feeling that it’s real science. I never felt that the technical detail overwhelmed the story where I was tapping my feet and being like, “Come on, come on. Back to the story.” At a few points, I started to wonder, is this too much detail, but then it seemed to be timed fairly well. I think that some people don’t want to read a book with this kind of tactical detail, even at the level that it is. They would, I guess, rather have the majesty of the vistas as he’s traveling. Instead, this is definitely the perspective of this guy and he is very focused on his goals, and we don’t get that. There are a few moments where he says, “I took a moment to appreciate this thing that I saw,” but he’s really focused on staying alive and figuring out what problems he needs to solve to get to his destination.

Lex: The thing that was hardest for me to understand of the science, probably just because I’m stupid, was the big giant sack of nuclear energy that he was toting around every once in a while to stay warm. I didn’t quite understand how that all worked. I was glad that it worked.

Jason: That’s how space probes like the Voyager, a bunch of space probes, stay with their electronics active, is they have got isotopes that decay and emit heat. You wouldn’t want to do that around people necessarily, but it actually does keep things warm, so that’s a real thing.

Lex: Oh, I believed it.

Jason: It was very funny because he was like, “Don’t break, don’t break, don’t break. Well, I’m dead if I can’t use this but also I’m also dead if it breaks. Let’s be careful but, I’m going to use it.” He buries it. It’s funny because he digs it up because they buried it because people shouldn’t be around it. Then he uses it for a little while, then puts it back and buries it again, and then he has to get it out a third time, but that’s a real thing.

Lex: I’m imagining that his overall lifespan is short from his radiation exposure but still, it’s all right.

Jason: [laughs] It’s longer than what it would have been.

Scott: Mars has a thinner atmosphere than Earth does anyway, so he got more doses of radiation anyways.

Jason: Although, it’s further away…

Scott: …That is true.

Jason: …From the sun. We should get Andy Weir in here to calculate out his lifetime radiation exposure.

Scott: I bet he already has.

Jason: There’s probably a blog post somewhere with the details.

John: Andy Weir. I watched this Google talk that he gave where he was demonstrating the application, the program that he wrote, that calculated all the orbits of all of the space craft to make sure that would all work and where Mars would be and when the different things happened on the different days and he knew every day.

Lisa: Oh, dude, he knows Sci-Fi fans. No, he knows Sci-Fi fans because…

Jason: Well, he is one.

Lisa: Yes, because you realize of course, that you can’t write a book like this without having 1,000 space nerds fact checking you, saying, “This doesn’t work because X, Y, Z,” and…

Lex: They sound like bloggers.

Lisa: Yes, they do. [laughter]

Jason: I think they are similar. [crosstalk]

John: They are bloggers.

Lisa: I think this raises a larger issue, which is how much of your fandom comes down to being able to enjoy the idea of something and how much of your fandom comes down to being able to enjoy the accuracy or the verity of it.

Jason: This book obviously came from the facts. I really believe that he didn’t work all the…I mean he may have checked his work at end, but I think most of the work in this book is upfront that he was curious about how it would work and then thought, “I could write this in a story.” I love that. That’s why I love “Apollo 13,” the book that the movie was based on, and the facts that the book that the movie was based. Anyway, I like that. I would probably read a straight up novel about all the technical details and the interpersonal issues of sending people to Mars and back. Even if there was no disaster and somebody wasn’t left behind. I would probably eat that up. Just because I think that’s one of the valuable things that science fiction could do, is make you think what would it be like if we went to Mars. What would the details be, how would the people react to it? You don’t necessarily even need a disaster, but in this case, we get that, but we still get all of those great details and that was fun. I realize that that’s not for everybody. I love being able to imagine, “If we’re going to go to Mars in the next 50 years, how would we do that,” and then tell a story based on that. Which this sort of is.

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Lex: One thing in it I thought it was well done was how it attempted to reflect the tediousness of some things. I think the goal wasn’t trying to make the reading of it boring but to reflect “This is extremely time-consuming.” [laughs] Just the initial way that he starts communicating with NASA and he has to devise other systems on his own, because they can’t send any messages to him at first. I don’t know. I could imagine how painful and slow the correspondence was at first. Rotating the thing, telescope, whatever it was. I appreciated Weir’s skill at doing that. He puts in all the effort to building up his garden, covers the entire thing with soil and then eventually it’s all screwed. I liked that. I liked the suffering alongside him. Jason, 20, 30, 60 hours ago you and I were talking about the context switching. Your big complaint was that the characters on Earth didn’t seem super well-defined and/or they were all jerks. The only time that it really bothered me in that front, because I did want to hear part of the story from Earth and I don’t know how else he could have done it.

Jason: Yeah, I agree. It’s cheating, but I will allow it because it was good.

Lex: The cheat that I did not think added anything to the story and took me out of it even more was the unnecessary back story of the piece of fabric or whatever that ends up failing, that one [inaudible 33:25]

Lisa: Yes.

Lex: I understood what he was going for, but it did not work for me at all.

Lisa: It felt pretty Tom Clancy-ish, to be honest with you where you’re like, “I’ve done the research.”

Jason: [laughs]

Lisa: No, because Tom Clancy’s books are like that, too. In order to find out how some porthole figures, he takes you into the life of the architect and the tensile strength of tungsten infused whatever.

Lex: [laughs]

Lisa: This had a lot of going for it too where it was like, “OK, we get that these parts are made in such and such a way, but if you have to do it for all of them or you kind of have to cut that out and say, “Look, sometimes stuff just happens.” [laughs]

John: In both the Andrew Chaikin book “Man On The Moon,” which is what “From The Earth To The Moon”, the HBO series, was based on, and in the book that “Apollo 13” was based on, there are sections like that. Essentially, here’s what probably happens. Why the explosion happened on Apollo 13 or why the Apollo I deaths happened. Then it’s like there’s this and this, and with Apollo 13, there was a spark and it was probably this thing and it was probably just something wrong here. Like the Challenger’s O-rings, you could actually draw that line back to this tiny, tiny detail that cascades all the way to having this disaster. That’s totally what he was going for and it certainly builds up the tension in a way, where it’s, “Oh boy, something’s bad is going to happen” “Oh Jeez, what’s it going to be?”

Lex: You know another thing is going to fail.

Jason: Right, but it doesn’t happen with any of the other things. [laughs] I agree, it seemed weird and out of place.

John: I was going to say the flipping back and forth I think works in many other instances and in particular I’m thinking when, for comedic effect, when they first realize that he’s still alive. They think “Oh my God, I can only wonder what he’s thinking.” and I don’t want to ruin it, but he’s…

Jason: He’s thinking something absolutely ridiculous.

John: He’s not thinking anything at all about “Oh my god, I can’t believe those jerks left me here.” No, he’s watching “Gilligan’s Island” re-runs.

Lisa: [laughs] That was a great getaway, I loved that. [inaudible 35:35]

Jason: Yeah, it’s funny. I don’t want to make it seem that what we’re talking about is some engineering nerd’s fantasy about a trip to Mars. I mean, it is that, but it’s not just that. It’s not like there are pages of “So, please consult…In the back of the book you’ll find several appendices and some diagrams of how…”

Lex: [laughs]

Jason: It’s not like that. It could be like that, but it’s not. He does show a lot of his work, but it’s funny, the character is very amusing because he says all sorts of crazy stuff. He is entertaining himself and he doesn’t care anymore and that comes out in the voice. It’s strong. I could see how some people might think that it was a little forced, but I enjoyed it. I felt that this guy is just a character. Not only are we lucky that he’s a botanist and an engineer, but we’re also lucky that he’s got a very wacky personality. Because there wouldn’t be much of a book, even if he had the other two things, he could do all of those tasks competently. If he was boring, it wouldn’t be much of a book. Why would you write that book?

Lisa: I think if you’ve got a high-schooler who’s taking either chemistry or physics, lob them this book, because it’s a nice…What struck me was how much of a natural teacher Weir is as a writer and how he walks you through “Thanks to this property, this is how this has to work and so I am counting on XYZ” and all the chemical reactions he details in trying to make water and trying to jerryrig all these different solutions. You could probably sit down with somebody who is trying to grasp basic chemistry or basic physics and go, “Look, this is your real-life example. It’s better than a word problem and this will probably help you grasp it a lot better than sitting in class, reading through your textbook.” It’s one of those books that makes you feel smarter just know like, “Oh yeah, that does make sense. Oh, it is a fact.”

John: Yeah. There’s a crazy number of things that sort of interweave. Some of them are deliberately fortuitous, I’m sure, but I just like the fact that he can make soil because he’s using his own poop. It’s OK to use his own poop as well as the poop of the other astronauts that’s they threw out the door, because all of their bacteria is dead, but it’s still good organic matter that I can use. My bacteria is already in me, so I can eat my own bacteria.

Jason: I happen to have Thanksgiving potatoes.

Lisa: …And beans. The potatoes and beans.

John: Good thing.

Lisa: The fact that he’s revolting against the potatoes is delightful. There was a lot less botany in there compared to the other stuff, but I’m pretty sure it’s because people “I really don’t care about Ipomoea as a genus, so…”

Jason: There was a lot less botany than the other stuff. However, a lot more botany than most books I read. [laughter]

John: A 100 percent more botany.

Jason: This was botany-heavy, I would say.

Lisa: [laughs]

Jason: It was more heavy with electrical engineering and other kinds of engineering, as well as all the astrophysics that goes into it. Anybody else find it hard to believe that CNN would have a lost astronaut today, to show every day, that would be successful in any way?

John: I find it hard to believe that CNN is on in 10 years.

Lisa: Yes, that was the biggest obstacle to believe for me. [laughs] Again, I found it really hard to believe that everyone was uncritically behind this, “Oh, we’ve got to get this stranded astronaut home.” I realize that for the people who were working in NASA, they don’t have time for the haters. I’m certain that the guy who is on Mars, the last thing he is concerned about is public opinion.

John: I don’t know if the Chinese lose their mission, but the people in NASA lose a mission to Mars as a part of this, because they’ve got to send the same team back around again to get them.

Lex: I absolutely believe that the people from NASA would want to get him back, or most of them would. I don’t think that you have to accept that nobody is complaining about the fact that they’re rescuing this mission, but I’m willing to accept that I don’t have to spend any time in the book on them, since I’m also rooting for the guy to live on Mars.

Jason: As somebody who actually loves the movie “Contact,” I will say I was actually grateful that we didn’t have the senator played by Gary Shandling who says… [laughter]

Jason: “We’re spending several billion dollars here on this, it’s just one man, why don’t we just have another mission? One man’s life certainly is worth something, but it’s not worth billions of dollars” and then he has emacinations behind the scenes just to try to get him to cancel the mission and at the last minute somebody has a touching emotional response and realizes “God damn it, we can’t leave that man on Mars” and they decide…I was kind of happy to not have to go through that whole rigmarole.

Lisa: I would have liked to have seen a bit more political or media theater because again we live in such a sharply polarized and oppositional culture that again, the minute that this guy, it’s discovered that he’s stranded on the Moon, you’re going to have a 1,000 people “This is why science doesn’t work.” You’re going to have more people who talk about ethics and everybody is going to take that issue as a cue to mount their own personal hobby-horse and ride your point to the ground.

Jason: Then Matthew McConaughey steps to the side and says, “Let’s talk about the spiritual aspects of this.” “No, you’re in the wrong movie; get back to ‘Contact.’” [laughter]

Lisa: I feel like this nation is at a place that if we’ll receive any message that Matthew McConaughey plays, it must [inaudible 40:42] [laughter]

Jason: It’s true.

Lisa: [laughs]

Lex: The rescue mission to me didn’t feel dissimilar from other movies or books about rescue missions that are more military-focused. Where you don’t usually see “Let’s not go and rescue the…”

Jason: No, it’s “leave no man behind.” Right.

Lex: Exactly. So it felt the same entirely. I mean, if you accept that if CNN is on the air, which I get is probably the biggest science fiction leap in the book, I totally did accept that they would have a daily…I think there should be 24 hours of it. We’re recording this when there’s a plane that is presumed crashed that nobody can find and it’s all that’s on CNN all day.

Jason: I just think people would get tired of him after a while, but…

Lex: I don’t know. I was jealous of him a little bit. Once it seemed that he was going to probably do OK, I was jealous of him for a bit. [laughter]

Jason: Sure. Once all the hard part was done. Although actually no, because he gets to a happy end…We’ve kind of been nice at the spoilers, but I’m going to fire up the spoiler horn now. [horn sound]

Jason: In the end, he has to strip the return vehicle from the next mission; he has to drive all this way and get there. He has to strip it to make it as light as possible and it’s full of holes and he’s going to be… I’m imagining one of the little rocket ship rides at Disneyland where there’s not even a seatbelt and it’s just the centrifugal force that keeps you down and that seems great because physics is on your side, but then you start spinning and you’re, “Oh my God, I’m going to get thrown out, I’m going to die,” or is that just me? [laughter]

Jason: He’s never safe. Even to the end, it’s like, “Here we go again.” Although I didn’t feel like it was episodic, like “Prison Break” where literally every step there would be a new challenge, they were interspersed, at the end it was like, “Oh man, nothing can be easy for this guy at all?” He has a harrowing journey all the way to the last page of this book.

John: Yeah, but they’re spread over 18 months or whatever, I’m not even sure how long it is. It’s spread over a long period of time when you think about it.

Jason: I just think it’s funny that at the end, it’s just one last kick in the pants for this guy. [laughs]

John: Yes, right.

Scott: Plus, he is on an alien planet.

Jason: Yes, this is true, and he’s got a tarp over the top of his rocket ship.

Lisa: When the storm first came up and everyone on Earth who’s monitoring this is, “Oh crap, he’s heading straight into the storm and he has no idea,” I had to go put down the book and take a moment, because I was, “Oh my God, no. Oh no, there’s a storm coming for him.” [laughs]

Jason: How will he know? Will he notice? That effective raw material, there’s a big storm, I hope he notices, we can’t talk to him. Then you’re watching him and you’re “Come on, figure it out, figure it out.”

Scott: I just said, “I’m sure he’ll figure it out some convoluted engineering way to do it.” “Oh, he did.” Now here’s a detailed explanation.

Jason: Well, he drove it in one direction for a while and…

Lisa: I had to be careful when I read this book, because I would just get so tense for him. I was, “It’s going to work out,” because I doubt people will be raving about a book and then he died, 50 yards from that ship that was going to save him.”

Jason: The End.

Lisa: I mean, this isn’t a Cormac McCarthy book, so it’ll be fine.

Lex: I did have this debate over whether I wanted him to live or not.

Lisa: Wow. Oh my gosh. I had a crush on him.

Lex: I mean, I liked him. I wanted him to live in general. I was thinking for the good of the story, it seems to me that he’s clearly going to live, because you don’t write the book and then have the guy die at the end, he’s gone through so much. I don’t know. Jason, you said that you felt that up until the last page things were hard for him, but I felt towards the end suddenly it was surprisingly easy. “Oh Jeez, I think this spaceship is falling apart that I’ve taken all the parts of and I feel that this is never going to work,” but everything kind of goes fine during the rescue. There’s hiccups, but they rescue him. I don’t know. I wanted something bad to happen to him at least that was beyond just “[inaudible 44:44] on Mars”.

Jason: Lose an arm.

Lex: Right. I thought that he should lose an arm, that’s exactly what it is. I thought that when he…

Jason: Wear an eye-patch.

Lex: I thought the arm on the spacesuit incident should have been foreshadow and that he was going to end up losing an arm or something. I felt like he should have some long-lasting visible scar from his journey.

Jason: See, Lex, I didn’t think he was going to die at the end. I did wonder at one point if he was going to die in the middle and then we were going to have many chapters detailing what happens to a dead body at a spacesuit on Mars. [laughter]

Jason: Then the eyes began to cave in on themselves. The bacteria in his gut in incredible technical detail. Scott, I’m sensing from you a little bit of hostility toward…

Scott: No hostility.

Jason: You seem skeptical about the use of all the technical detail. You are not as enthusiastic about it as some.

Scott: I will say that I read the book in like three hours. It was certainly… [laughter]

Scott: This is not showing off. I know how to read. It is a very quick book. [laughter]

Jason: Unlike me. Which is fair. I admitted that, early on. Do you read diagonally, Scott?

Scott: I do not read diagonally. It’s very fast-paced.

Jason: It is.

Scott: The story is obviously man versus Mars, it’s very engaging, but without that tension, I feel like the technical detail is almost to the point where it overwhelms the entire story. There is almost no characterization in this book, other than the main character, Mark, and even he is kind of a cartoon. The astronauts that are on the rest of his team are certainly cartoons. The NASA people aren’t even cartoons. I think the biggest character in the book is probably the ingenuity of Mark as opposed to his actual characterization. Is that a problem with the book? No, I liked it, but I didn’t think it was mind-blowingly great. As I was reading it, I thought, “This will be a much better movie, I think, than a book that I’m reading,” which is not a problem, obviously. People like the book, that’s fine. They’re just wrong. [laughter]

Jason: I would say it was super-fun as opposed to mind-blowingly great.

Scott: It was fun.

Jason: I completely agree. This is one of my points about him. I think anybody who is by themselves for that period of time is going to fall into a deep, deep depression and he does not show any signs. At one point, you’d think he says that he misses talking to people when the communications break down, but he doesn’t really show that in his words, because he’s constantly cracking jokes. That does not ring true to me, as far as real people go.

Scott: I know, it’s a lot of fun. It started off as kind of a serialized story and I think that comes through. I’m certain that the publisher has done a great job of editing it again, but I did feel a little repetition about “Hey, remember that thing I did four pages ago?” which would make sense if it were a serial, but it is in fact a novel that I’m reading… [laughter]

Scott: …I don’t need to be reminded of what you’ve just told me.

Jason: I agree. I had fun reading it and we’ll talk about this when we shift over to what are we reading, I read another book after this that I thought was a much better book, but that book was much more of a struggle to get through and I can only read so much of it at a time. This, I absolutely inhaled it. It was super fast and fun and there’s a place for that in books. Every so often, especially if you’re on a beach or something, you want those books that are just fast and enjoyable and they pull you through the story and it’s a fun ride. This was that. I did, Scott, have those feelings that I have from time to time when I’m reading a book where I’m like, I can practically start casting the movie. It’s a fun book, but it will make a good movie, or it should.

Scott: Exactly. I think there are different reasons to read different things and this is a fine book to read. It’s not a work of literature or a staggering. It hasn’t changed my life in any way, but it was a lot of fun.

Lisa: Yeah.

Scott: Could I have lived not reading it? Probably. Am I glad I did? Sure.

Jason: There was a small chance that you couldn’t have lived if you hadn’t read it.

Scott: If I become stranded on Mars, I will probably still just die immediately. [laughter]

Scott: There’s no way I’m surviving that.

Jason: Sam Rockwell?

Lisa: No.

Scott: He was on the moon, wasn’t he?

Jason: Yeah, he was on the moon.

Lisa: He’s already been on a spaceship movie.

Jason: He’s not allowed on another one?

Scott: No.

Lex: This has to be Bruce Willis or nobody.

Lisa: I think the casting roles, if you’ve already made one shitty space movie then you’re not allowed to be in a new one. [laughter]

Jason: It would be Bradley Cooper.

Scott: Oh my God, we going to…

Lisa: Jeez, if it’s Bradley Cooper I’m going to root for him to go. Oh my God.

Jason: [laughs] So we disagree on the casting. [laughter]

Lex: I’m hearing a lot of bad-mouthing of the characterizations of many of the non-lead characters, non-Mark characters. I was impressed and surprised by how funny at least one of his crewmates was when they make contact and then one of the women from the crew in theory is IM-ing him or emailing him that when he gets to the ship she’s going to ravish him and make passionate love to him. Then she’s, of course “No, I didn’t type that, it was one of the other crewmates instead.” I thought that that crewmate who typed that on behalf of the woman, I thought that was pretty funny.

Lisa: Yeah. It’s nice that they had some rapport. [laughter]

Lex: No, it is. It shows that NASA is full of hilarious people who go to outer space.

Jason: Botanist-astronaut jokesters. Does anybody really believe that NASA is full of really hilarious people? [laughter]

Lisa: I do, actually. I used to babysit for a physicist who worked in NASA, Langley, and he was one of the funniest guys I ever knew.

Jason: Oh, OK.

Lisa: This is back in the ’80s and he and his wife were big in to yoga and he played the trombone as a hobby, she was a theoretical mathematician… [laughter]

John: They’re never letting him on a long-duration spaceflight.

Jason: His name was Reiker. [laughter]

Lisa: No. I was 14 and he handed me his collection of Kurt Vonnegut. He was like, “Here, read this, you’ll really enjoy this.” He was a really funny guy, he used to do voices. To be honest, my impression was that NASA…

Jason: Did he do a blogger voice [inaudible 51:23] [laughter]

Lisa: No, my impression was like NASA was a laugh riot with slide rules; it could be for all I know.

Scott: Probably isn’t.

Jason: That is a mixture of comedy and tragedy if there are slide rules involved. Many of them in the book are misanthropes. That didn’t seem out of character or unlikely.

Lisa: I can’t remember the name of the mathematician who was asked to calculate one route, and he was, “No wait, I think I’ll do something completely different.” It was the guy…

Scott: You know why you can’t remember his name…

Lisa: No, and he…

Scott: …And the character.

Lisa: Because his basic function was “I am a math nerd, and I’m going to nerd on some math now,” and that was pretty much…

Scott: That was every character. [laughter]

Jason: He’s the author essentially. I like the astronauts who had left him behind, in that we got a little bit more idea of what their dynamic was. I wanted a little more of how miserable it would be to be shut up in a ship like that with those people for so long, but there was some of that. The NASA people are the ones who bothered me because I found them kind of unpleasant. That’s fine. I felt the book was much stronger when it was in space. [laughs] What more should we say before we move on to what are we reading? Does anybody else have anything they want to bring up about The Martian before we move on?

Scott: Just that it’s an incredibly quick read. I guess we’ve said that several times, but if your on the fence it’s not like your making a big commitment. [laughter]

Jason: No.

Lisa: It’s a great airplane book.

Jason: Oh my god yeah. Short flight, too.

Lisa: I knocked it off in about five hours. Yeah. Yeah, as long as your OK with…

Lex: It’s not just that you can read it quickly but your motivated to. You want to know what’s going to happen.

Lisa: You don’t have to spend a lot of time puzzling up people’s motives.

Lex: Frankly, if you’re on the fence and you’ve listened to this part of the podcast, you’re a jerk and you don’t deserve to be [inaudible 53:14] [laughter]

Jason8: You’ve already spent about half the book. [laughter]

Lex: You know what’s going to happen now, don’t bother reading it. In fact, don’t. Don’t read it. If you haven’t read it and you’re this far just don’t. Forget it. You lose.

Lisa: You don’t deserve to. [laughter]

Lex: You don’t deserve The Martian. [laughter]

Lisa: A thousand bloggers rise up in opposition, “I think this podcast is so unfair!” [laughs]

Jason: Lex and I both suggested “You Don’t Deserve The Martian’” as the title. [laughter]

Jason: Let me have this one Lex.

Lex: It’s yours. [laughter]

Jason: Clinton followed right after. All right let’s move on then. We all liked it enough to say, other than having listened this far to the spoiler horn, and Lex says if you listened this far and you haven’t read it, you’re a terrible person and you shouldn’t, but generally we would say you should read it. It was fun. Life doesn’t depend on it, as Scott quite really pointed at. You will not die a lesser person if you don’t read it, but it’s fun. It’s a lot of fun. I love space stuff. If you like space stuff, it’s fantastic for that. It’s a lot of fun. It is quick. You’re not going to labor reading it. It’s quick and fun. Sounds about right?

John: Yes.

Lex: Yes.

Jason: Scott, [inaudible 54:37]

Scott: I agree. Very well. It was fun. I’m just saying.

Jason: It’s not a fantastically moving work of literature.

Scott: It doesn’t stand up to a lot of scrutiny; it’s all I’m saying. The technical facts do but the craftsmanship of the book itself does not.

Jason: Blog post from an astronaut. A fake, fictional astronaut. All right let’s move on to what I like to do at the end of a Book Club which is ask what we’re reading or have read recently. This is always good to see what other things people are reading rather than just talk about the book. What are we reading? Lex are you reading anything else, or is this your book for the year?

Lex: I don’t watch movies, but I read a lot of books. I read a book every night. I mean I don’t finish the book.

Jason: That’s wow. [laughter]

Lisa: Wow.

Lex: I do like reading at night before I go to sleep. Some nights it’s two pages at a time because then I fall asleep, but The Martian was one that bucked that trend. The book I read before the The Martian that I enjoyed, it’s from 2007 by Laura Lippman, called “What The Dead Know.” It’s actually a very compellingly written mystery. You have a woman who claims to be the long lost abducted girl from abduction of young sisters from many years ago in Baltimore. She says that she’s one of the sister and that she watched her other sister get murdered, and explains where she’s been the whole time and people have to try to figure out if she is who she says she is. It was really good. The book that I’m in right now, “You Can Date Boys When You’re 40. Dave Barry On Parenting and Other Topics He Knows Very Little About” by Dave Barry. It’s really good. I woke up my wife laughing out loud to the book and that’s always a good sign.

Jason1: Wow, Dave Barry. Not cutting edge funny. You have any Garfield treasuries that you’re also reading. [laughter]

Lex: This is a brand new book. It just came out. This book, “You Can Date Boys When You’re 40”, was released on March 4th.

Lisa: Well because Dave Barry had a daughter with his second wife.

Lex: No it’s like his fourth wife, but yes. [laughter]

Lisa: Seriously? He moved on again?

Lex: Don’t marry Dave Barry. Yeah. This is his… [crosstalk].

Lex: Dave Barry is the person who made me want to be a writer so I read all of his books when they come out. He’s funny.

John: “Don’t marry Dave Barry,” a guide to marriage with Dave Barry. [laughter].

Lex: I can’t believe you gave me the “Garfield [inaudible 57:03].” It’s a brand new book.

Jason: I had to.

Lex: Gene Shalit also has a new book out. You should also [inaudible 57:09]. [laughter].

Lex: No, that’s a lie.

Jason: If you like writing, it’s the right choice. [laughter]

Jason: Gene Shalit, that’s all I got. [laughter].

Jason: That’s good, Lex, thank you. John Moltz, what are you reading?

John: I’m in the middle of two books right now. One is “The Kassa Gambit” by M. C. Planck which is a science fiction book which I’m enjoying. I don’t think there is a book that’s easier to plow through than the book that we just talked about. It’s not as easy to plow through as that book. It’s enjoyable. The other book I’m reading is, I have a thing about the Black Death that I like. I’m reading a book called “Black Death” by Robert S. Gottfried. This is only the second book about the Black Death that I’ve written. [laughter]

John: No, that’s later.

Lisa: [inaudible 58:09]

John: This is a more scientific — spoiler alert — the rats. The rats did it explanation of what happens during the Black Death. Have you read “Doomsday” book?

Jason: No. I’m writing it down.

John: Doomsday book by Connie Willis. It’s about time-travelers who go back to the time of the Black Death.

Jason: Oh my God.

John: It’s a good one. Lex, you’d like it. It’s really depressing like those books that we read in the Apocalypse Book Club,.

Lex: I did not.

John: Because it is of a kind in that it is about an Apocalypse that really happened. Well, the black death was not exactly the feel good event of the middle ages. [laughter].

Lisa: There’s a really funny Connie Willis book you should recall “Bellwether” which actually I have found very useful working online. I would recommend that one too.

Jason: Also writing that down. All right, Lisa, what are you reading?

Lisa: I just ripped through two books by Ben H. Winters. The first is called “The Last Policeman.” The second one is called “Countdown City.” They are part of a planned trilogy that focuses on life in New England in the final three months leading up to the date when a comet is expected to slam into the earth. They are fantastic. He goes into the economic and social and commercial implications of what happens when you actually do have a big blinking end date on when everything as you know will end. They talk about when newspapers stop publishing. They talk about what happens with currency, radical laws that get passed with regard to hoarding and guns and things like that. Through all of this, a lot of towns have just decided “Screw it. We’re throwing it on police work because why bother.” There’s one guy who doggedly persists in being a detective and trying to find missing people and solve homicides and take care of missing children while this is all going on. I’ve already pre-ordered book number three because I enjoyed books one and two so much. The only thing that has me worried is this guy also has a little sister who’s involved in some fringe science group that thinks it has a way to divert the comet. I kind of worry that the author is not going to have the balls to pull the trigger and have the comet slam into the earth and kill everybody that we’ve come to know and love. I really hope that happens. As opposed to “And then the comet was diverted. Hooray, we’re rebuilding.” I’m still going to read book number three because I love the guys tone. It’s very dry. It’s very funny. He does a good job of cataloging the loss. The fact that it’s the erosion of daily rituals and daily things you take for granted that he thinks are actually more devastating than the fact that a comet is going to plow into Indonesia and kick up a huge extinction. I read those. It reminded me of another series that I’m about to dive into. There’s a young adult series called “The Last Survivor” series by Susan Beth Pfeffer. The first book is called “Life As We Knew It,” “The Dead and the Gone,” “The World We Live In.” Book number four which I’m just about to start is “The Shade Of The Moon.” The premise to this series is a comet slams into the moon, knocks it out of orbit, activates the caldera below Yellowstone Park. Tides go crazy. You’ve got massive volcanic eruption. There’s a huge fog and cloud and it’s told from the perspective of a couple siblings who are in their teens with their mom and basically what happens as literally every form of government commerce, everything falls down. How do you fend for yourself? How do you survive? What are human relationships like? The first book is a rural book. The second book takes place in New York City with a different family and talks about the horror of being trapped in an urban environment when you basically have no way to live off the land when you live in a six floor walk-up. I’m really looking forward to seeing how this works out.

Scott: More apocalypses for Lisa.

Lisa: I like the pre-…You know there’s apocalyptic fiction. The thing I really liked about The Last Policeman series is it’s pre-apocalyptic and it points out pretty much that disaster is as much, if not more, a state of mind than it is actual circumstances. Disasters and how human beings respond to circumstances and treat each other subsequently. I think that’s a really rich area to mine.

Jaosn: Speaking as disaster as a state of mind, Scott McNulty, what are you reading?

Scott: Well, I will point out that in the uncomfortable number 155, I mention the last Policeman as something I was reading, so good choice, Lisa. I will take credit for it even though I’m sure you were reading it for some other reason.

Jason: Did you like The Last Policeman? Do you remember that far back?

Scott: I liked both of them. I’ve read them both and they are very good, so check them out. I second Lisa’s recommendation. I just finished today “Blue Remembered Earth” by Alastoair Reynolds who is a science fiction author who writes these big sweeping space opera books. This is the first in a trilogy although I didn’t know it was the first in a trilogy until I started reading it.

Jason: Does it not have an ending? It is one of those “No, it’s [inaudible 63:19]”

Scott: No it ends, but it’s one of those books that you could look at is as a self-contained story, or if you know there’s a trilogy coming, it basically just sets up the second book. It was all right. I was OK with that. Especially since the second book is coming out soon. I’m excited. It’s basically set in 2160’s and humanity has colonized the solar system, still takes a long time to get places. There are ecological disaster has happened on Earth and we fixed it and the world has changed, everyone’s being watched over by this system of checks and balances that doesn’t allow you to break the law. People like it and they have given up their privacy because there’s no war anymore and it follows this family of people who have this large kind of multi-planetary company that provides “space goods”, I guess. It’s better than the way I’m describing it.

John: Space Wal-Mart.

Jason: Space goods like astronaut ice cream?

Scott: Astronaut ice cream and SPAM.

Jason: Martian and astronaut SPAM?

Scott: Yes, and it has some very interesting uses of technology to solve the problem of if…Humanity has spread across the solar system, but they haven’t broken the speed of light, so communication lags between the different planets and it’s difficult to hold a conversation when it may take ten hours to go back and forth between when you’re talking. They’ve come up with these concepts of basically telepresence robots that you can jack in to and kind of give autonomy to and then it will act as you and then update you later.

Jason: On what you said.

Scott: On what you said, exactly. It acts like it think you would act, so it’s interesting.

Jason: All right, you totally told your mom off, man. “Oh it was so cool.” “I told you you’re not supposed to…” “Well, no, actually yeah.

Scott: All those years you had that pent up inside and you finally let go. Problem solved. Jason, are you reading anything of interest?

Jason: Why thank you for asking, Scott. I am. I finished…The book that I alluded to earlier that I consider much better than The Martian but also was much harder to read is “Use of Weapons” by Ian M. Banks.

Scott: Oh, that is much better to read than The Martian.

Jason: The third is the third in his Culture series which is set in a shared universe. There is very little crossover between characters, although I understand there’s some. It’s a story about a guy who is kind of a mercenary and he’s kind of an assassin. He’s deployed by the culture on various planets in order to usually tip the balance of a war one way or another. Sometimes they deploy him and expect him to lose and that can become a problem if he’s so good that he makes the wrong side win. That’s his story and there’s a particular deployment of his that we see and that that’s told as the book goes forward. It’s interleaved with chapters and those chapters are numbered. It’s interleaved with chapters that are numbered by roman numerals and start with a large number and go backward in time. You’ll have 13 and then 12. Sorry “XIII” and then so on. Those are going backward in his life and alluding to things in his past that explain something about what he’s doing now and also set up some mysteries about why he behaves the way he does. He’s a very interesting character and the other characters who manipulate him from the culture are also very interesting. His story is actually kind of shocking and emotional. It has a great ending that I didn’t see coming. “Use of Weapons,” there’s that moment where the title gets dropped in the story which, I read it on the Kindle and it made me laugh cause the sentence where the phrase “Use of Weapons” is used has been highlighted by like everybody who read the book. It’s like “80,000 people highlighted this passage”. It’s like “yeah, you found the title! Good job! Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding!”

Scott: I can’t believe that you leave those highlights on. My brain is exploding. I hate the highlights.

Jason: I do. I’m fascinated by them and they don’t bother me that much. I’m fascinated to see what people highlight. I love it. It’s like getting a used book in a college bookstore and you’re like, “What are they highlighting? What does this note mean?” It’s kind of fun and you can turn it off.

Scott: One time, I think I got bermed and the fact the thing had been highlighted so much proved to be a giant spoiler. Like it was like, “Don’t miss this thing” so then I turned it off and never looked back.

Jason: Yeah. “He felt fine. Oh no, what is that?!”

Scott: He sure didn’t die in seven pages.

Jason: The current [inaudible 68:26] novel where characters gets an asterisk to their name when they’re going to die in the next 20 pages to keep you from being too disturbed and it’s so disturbing when you get the asterisk and you’re like “No, they’re going to die.” Anyway, the “Use of Weapons,” it is a meaningful phrase, though, because that’s what this guy does. His living is the expertise in the deployment of weapons and the cost that it has. It was a very well-written, very thoughtful kind of amazing book and I would say this is a piece of literature that said I didn’t rip through it in a couple of days. It took a long time to get through it. Not because it was hard to read the words or anything, but it was weighty and I didn’t feel like I could… I’d read a chapter and I’d be like, “OK I’m going to stop and read the next chapter tomorrow.” I liked it a lot. Thank you Scott for being one of the people recommending culture books. I’ve heard a lot of people say they think this is the best one. What do you think?

Scott: It is very good. I like all of his culture books. I have read everything.

Jason: All of them are the best one?

Scott: All of them are the best. “The Use of Weapons” is an amazing book so…

Jason: Yeah. It’s good, so I recommend that. I am now reading “The Golem and the Jinni”, which was recommended by Scott on perhaps our last Book Club. I’m like, “I’m not a lot and it’s cover a little of the, I don’t know.” It’s reminding me of a bunch of different books. It reminds me of a, not the magicians. Of the…What’s the book with the…?

Scott: “The Night Circus”?

Jason: Yeah. It reminds me a little bit of “The Night Circus” and a little bit of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” and a little bit of Michael Cheval kind of stuff. It’s a lot of fun. There’s a golem you see and there’s a jinni.

Lex: JINNI? Interesting.

Jason: Jinni. Yeah.

Lex: Tell me more.

Jason: So, you know. Golem. Jinni. It is “The Golem and the Jinni”. It was debated in the last Book Club, that we were, “The Jinni and the Golem.”

Lex: I could remember.

Scott: Basically, it’s a ’70s sitcom set to the novel [inaudible 70:32] [singing] [laughter]

Jason: Well, he’s made of fire. She’s made of clay. Will he glaze her into a pot or some sort of pottery? [laughter]

Jason: A pottery woman? I am in the middle. I don’t know. This is the internal tension. Anyway, I am enjoying that a lot too. That’s what I am reading. If it were a wizard ‘70 sitcom, it would be that guy, “TV on Mars.”

John: Don’t give away the ending.

Lisa: [laughs]

Lex: Way to bring it back.

Jason: It’s all of them. Right there.

Scott: If I could highlight that, I would.

Jason: Thank you. [laughter].

Jason: All right. Well then that wraps it up. We have come to the end of our Book Club. I want to thank my guess for sharing this time talking about The Martian, which will take you longer to read in this podcast. Maybe not as much, but a little bit. John Molts, thanks for being on. Our real episode, we’ll have to do this when there’s light out in the sky a little bit so that you can do it again sometime.

John: Just barely.

Jason: Right. That’s good. Good promise. Thank you. Lex Friedman, great to have you back again.

Lex: Always a pleasure, Jason. Thank you.

Jason: Thanks for reading a book that we want to talk about. Maybe we’ll do a Dave Barry. No. That’s not going to happen. Sorry. [laughter].

Lex: I’m doing it on my own podcast.

Jason: All right. Good.

Lisa: [laughs] Are you doing your dadcast?

Jason: Oh, dadcasters.

Lex: Any of my mini-podcast [laughs].

Jason: Just don’t redo the chapters on your daily, Lex.

Lex: Yeah. I guess I am. I already have to do that with him.

Jason: Oh, chapter 18. Let me tell you about it. Lisa Schmeiser, thank you for being here.

Lisa: Oh, it was fun. Thank you.

Jason: Yeah. This was a lot of fun and as always, Scott McNulty. I saved you for last.

Scott: Thank you.

Jason: Thank you for being here.

Scott: You’re welcome. [laughter]

Jason: I don’t want to bug you down until this technical detail because I know you don’t like that.

Scott: It’s true. I like technical detail when it’s used judiciously. [background music]

Jason: Fair enough. Your opinion has been noted. I see where are you coming from. It didn’t bother me but there was a lot of it. There’s no doubt.

Scott: In his Google Talk, he was like, ” I really had to resist trying to show all my work.” I was like, “Well, you failed.” [laughter]

Lex: You did have to but you did not.

Scott: He did a lot of more work I guess.

Jason: That’s staggering amount of work. All right. Well, that is it for the Incomparable. Thanks to everybody out there for listening. See you next time. [music]