OK, this is gonna piss off a lot of people...

This book is hugely over-rated; there are flaws in the structure, spelling (!) and science, it's nowhere near as funny as the hype suggested and the whole idea is entirely unoriginal. It also suffers from NASA-respect overdose; NASA is the organisation that killed a shuttle-ful of astronauts because they thought a known catastrophic-failure risk was worth taking in order to avoid a mildly embarrassing launch delay. (See [b:What Do You Care What Other People Think?|5548|What Do You Care What Other People Think?|Richard Feynman|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1297913068s/5548.jpg|54737].)

Admittedly humour is subjective, but I found most of the humour in the book unsubtle and unfunny.

I was shocked to discover that our hero managed get himself impaled by part of an insect that was being used to communicate with a satellite in Mars orbit. What were insects doing on Mars? How do you use them for communications? Are they supposed to fly in to orbit or what? And how are you going to get impaled by antennae, whilst wearing a space-suit, anyway? They break far more easily than space-suits, or bare human skin for that matter.

No, no, you're saying, it was part of a radio communications rig, not part of an insect! Well, those are antennas not antennae, as any competent astronaut or engineer should know and moreover, any competent author or editor should know, too.

Then, apparently, explosive decompression means your body "kind of explodes." Bollocks, does it! You might rupture skin surface capillaries but that's as far as that goes; in space you'd asphyxiate to death. On Mars you'd freeze a lot faster than in space but the asphyxiation would probably still get you first.

Structural flaws? Well there are several passages detailing the history of a piece of cloth involved in a crisis that are entirely redundant because the whole thing is explained by one line of dialogue later. This type of thing goes on through-out.

Unoriginal? Well, to be fair, whilst there have been numerous "Robinson Crusoe on Mars" type stories (e.g. [b:Welcome to Mars|1407404|Welcome to Mars|James Blish|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1387739337s/1407404.jpg|1397662]), the study of Mars moves on a-pace and a new one every generation, taking account of current knowledge isn't such a bad idea.

All that said, this is not a bad first novel, or the worst SF novel for egregious scientific errors, either. Really, it would have been better as a novella told entirely from the perspective of our stranded hero, though.