The Use Of Suspense In The Martian By Andy Weir

Andy Weir’s The Martian portrays the highly deadly and dangerous life on Mars. Mark Watney is on the planet Mars on a NASA mission with other astronauts, but like any good book, something unexpected happens. Mark is stranded on Mars with no crew and no communication. He’s alone. Well, he has the HAB of course. The HAB is like a house on Mars; it’s where the astronauts stay when they are not out exploring the surface.

Andy Weir is an amazing artist of a writer who paints a picture in the reader’s mind and whose background greatly affected the way he writes. The Martian contains a large amount of suspense and science fiction which make it an exciting read.

Weir’s background and other interests had an enormous effect on his book.

“Andy Weir was

As the Ares 3 Crew is about to make the Purnell maneuver (a risky turn of the spacecraft the crew is flying on), Andy Weir does an amazing job with suspense. “In Trafalgar Square and Tiananmen Square and Times Square, they watched on giant screens. In offices, they huddled around computer monitors. In bars, they stared silently at the TV in the corner. In homes, they sat breathlessly on their couches, their eyes glued to the story playing out” (Weir, 342). Here, the Purnell maneuver is about to be made, and everyone on Earth, and in space, knows that it is the last hope to save Mark before he dies on the red planet. The reader can really feel the tension and suspense in this passage. Earlier in the novel, Watney finds out that Pathfinder (the thing that will help him communicate with NASA) is dead. “Then, one by one, the horrible realities of Mars came into play. The wire wouldn’t be burned or singed. That’s a result of oxidation. And there’s no oxygen in the air. There was likely a short afterall. But with the positive lead being unaffected, the power must have come from somewhere else. . . .” (Weir, 227). Weir makes the reader wait and wait to find out if Mark is going to die because of his communication being dead. As the reader can see, Weir is great at using