"The Martian" by Andy Weir. A story about a stranded astronaut surviving on Mars, with very realistic problems and scientifically sound solutions. Anyone who enjoyed watching movies like Apollo 13 should enjoy this book. In fact, this book is much better.
The technical aspects are definitely very interesting, especially to anyone with engineering background. While all characters demonstrates their resourcefulness in solving life or death problems, they are also demonstrating many engineering best practices in the details. I like how most plans are tested and practiced before going the full distance, and any untested part will be the part with the most spectacular failure. I especially like how one engineer took vacation from work to avoid distractions and work on really important problems (totally true with software engineers, I speak from experience). The science aspects might still be slightly out in the future, but the attitude of the engineers very much matches the engineers today.
There were not as much non-technical bits, although those parts were also fairly well done. The portrayal of government agencies in this book are supposedly as accurate as the science parts, and it was very entertaining to imagine how NASA staff really talked to each other outside of press release rooms. These were good interludes to balance out the hardcore science, and gave this book a much more human feel than it might not otherwise have. The latter half of the book is especially heartwarming, to see people across the world unite for the goal of saving one astronaut. It's an attempt to capture the sentiment during the golden age of space exploration when the whole world watched Apollo, and it has done fairly well.
As I read along, I was thinking how this story might have been any different if the adventure started with different initial conditions. For example, suppose if two people were stranded on Mars instead of one. I thought: surely they would just kill each other. Later in the book, the scenario where there might be more survivors than resources can afford actually came up, and indeed there was a corresponding worst-case scenario plan. The author seemed fairly diligent in considering all possibilities and details, including all orbits. He gave a bit more details on this in this talk (warning: includes a fair bit of spoilers):
Andy Weir: "The Martian" | Talks at Google
Overall, this book has been very rewarding and entertaining to read, very much exceeded my expectations.
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