“The Martian,” both the book and the film, has always been generously praised for its realism. The Wall Street Journal noted that the novel “read like a detailed survival manual,” and Jim Green, NASA’s director of planetary sciences, told CBS earlier this month that the film “is as close to science fact, as any science fiction I have seen in going to Mars.”
Scientific accuracy runs in the blood of the novel’s author, Andy Weir, who was the child of a particle physicist and an electrical engineer. Weir had no intentions of writing a best-seller at the start, and instead concentrated on getting the details right.
