Space Opera: The Martian

Having seen the movie before reading the book, I was surprised to find that the movie was pretty faithful to the reading. The book has more details, including specific scientific facts, but otherwise, it’s faithful. 

It’s funny how close we are as a society to this scenario becoming possible. There’s already plans in motion to put people on the Mars, though I don’t know how many years that’ll actually take. This novel illustrates what a worst case scenario would look like. In this novel, even though a lot goes wrong, I feel there are a lot of little minor miracles that happen in order to achieve getting Mark home. If we did actually did leave a man on Mar, I’d hope we’d learn from this novel to make sure there’s a plenty of options to continue surviving on Mars. Especially with Mars’ wind storms being so brutal, we’d have to have build something that’s super durable and doesn’t fall apart. 


When I think Space Opera, I didn’t believe this would fall under this genre. By definition, of course it would. But I saw Space Opera as this genre full of epic space stories and gigantic space stations. I.e. Star Wars. That a simple story in space can be considered a space opera, meaning we could possibly write a space opera that’s a nonfiction piece. Even though we’ve been in space for decades now (and probably already have nonfiction space stories), it still amazes me. 

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